Week 12: Thinking and Reasoning Flashcards
Representations that describe, explain or predict how things work are called…
Mental models
An abstraction across many instances of a category is a…
Prototype
How do people construct a prototype in their minds?
They extract the most common important features of the object in a category (eg. ‘bird’ is an airbrushed photograph, rather than a specific type).
According to neuroimaging studies, categorising at a superordinate (more abstract) level uses what part of the brain?
left, prefrontal cortex
What part of the bran is activated when categorising at a subordinate level?
Right, prefrontal cortex and visual attentional circuits
What must we do before we can think about an object?
We must classify it (know what it is and what it does).
How do people typically classify objects?
By judging their similarity to prototypes (abstract representations of a category)
_____________ involve groupings based on common properties.
Categories
A ___________ is a mental representation of a category
concept
At what level do people categorise more rapidly?
The basic level
How is the expected utility value computed?
By combining the weighted utility value (usefulness) and the expected probability of obtaining an outcome (likelihood).
What are heuristics?
Cognitive shortcuts for quickly selecting from alternatives.
What do heuristics (cognitive shortcuts) allow people to do?
Make rapid, efficient, but sometimes irrational judgements.
Thought processes in the brain are thought by psychologists to be…
Both distributed through large networks and localised to particular brain units.
One level more abstract that the basic level is the…
superordinate level, where objects share few common features.
What are cross-cultural universals?
People everywhere group things together because that is the nature of humans.
In addition to categorisation being cross-cultural, the way we categorise helps us to…
solve problems
How can mental simulations be successful?
By visualising the steps involved in detail to achieve a successful outcome
Mental simulation is a…
problem solving strategy
Connectionism asserts that cognitive processes work…
simultaneously, through multiple activated networks
What role do motivation and emotion play in risk assessment?
They highlight the ambiguity surrounding risks (what is risky to someone seem to be as risky to another)
Why can people read handwriting rapidly and correctly?
Because of connectionism - simultaneous cognitive processes are occuring using multiple neural networks.
What is constraint satisfaction?
as many constraints are satisfied as possible to achieve the best fit to the data.
People are better off making decisions based on…
the bounds imposed by their environment, goals and abilities.
