unit 1 day 1

Metacognition

"thinking about thinking" the ability to select effective strategies and solutions for problems

Dunning Kruger Effect

a cognitive bias in which people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area or subject (a lack of self-awareness)

Cognition

Mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating information

Concepts

Mental groupings of similar objects, events, ideas, and people

Prototypes

a mental image or best example of a category

Schemas

concepts or mental molds into which we pour our experiences

Assimilation

interpretation of new experiences in terms of current understandings/schemas

Accomodation

adjusting schemas to incorporate information provided by new experiences during interaction with the world

Algorithms

step by step procedures that guarantee a solution

Heuristics

simpler thinking strategies (instead of having a humongous brain)

Insight

sudden realization of a problem's solution

Cognitive Bias

systematic error in thinking that occurs when people process and interpret information in their surroundings, influencing their decisions and judgements

Confirmation Bias

eagerly seeking out and favoring our own ideas rather than refuting them (supporting prior knowledge instead of contradictory evidence)

Mental set

tendency to approach a problem with the mindset of what has worked previously

Intuition

fast, automatic, unreasoned feelings and thoughts (an immediate reaction/thought of something)

Representativeness heuristic

judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes

Availability heuristic

estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory

Overconfidence

tendency to overestimate the accuracy of knowledge and judgements

Belief perseverance

clinging to one's initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited

Framing

the way an issue is posed; significantly affects decisions and judgements

Anchoring bias

a cognitive bias that causes people to rely heavily on the first piece of information given about a topic

Gambler's fallacy

a mistaken belief that if an event occurred more frequently than expected in the past then its less likely to occur in the future (if i won a game two times in a row it is less likely for me to win again the third round)

sunk cost fallacy

a cognitive bias that makes you feel as if you should continue pouring money, time, or effort into a situation since you've already "sunk" s much into it already

Executive functions

the management system of the brain, helping us organize and manage the many tasks in our life

Attentional Control

ability to focus on something in the environment

Cognitive Flexibility

ability to switch from one mental task to another or to multitask

cognitive inhibition

ability to tune out of irrelevant information

inhibitory control

ability to inhibit desires for beneficial behaviors

working memory

"temporary storage system" in the brain that holds several facts or thoughts while solving a problem

Hindsight bias

tendency to view events as more predictable than they really are (to assume that you know the outcome after it has already been determined "i knew all along")

Creativity

ability to produce novel and valuable ideas

Convergent thinking

Narrows the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution

Divergent thinking

expands the number of possible solutions (creative thinking that diverges in different directions)

Functional Fixedness

a cognitive bias that limits a person to use an object only in the way it is traditionally used

flow

a state of focus in which a person is completely absorbed and engrossed in their work