Chapter 4: Problem Solving & Intelligence

Intelligence

Cognitive ability of an individual to to learn from experience, reason well, remember important information, and cope with the demands of daily living

Deductive Reasoning (Generating a Hypothesis)

Person works with ideas and general information to arrive at specific conclusions

From THEORY → FACT

Inductive Reasoning (Interpreting Data)

moving form specific facts or observations to generalizations of ideas

From FACT → THEORY

Functional Fixedness

our difficulty seeing alternatives for common objects

Reliability of a Test

Consistency in results when tested multiple times

Validity

a valid test actually measures the trait it is supposed to measure

IQ Test (Intelligence Quotient)

based on the results of the large sample of individuals taking the intelligence using a normal distribution graph with a standard deviation of 15 that shows IQ relative to mean and to the performance of the rest of the population

8 Different types of intelligence

1. Verbal

2. Mathematical

3. Musical

4. Spatial

5. Kinesthetic

6. Interpersonal

7. Intrapersonal

8. Naturalistic

The Flynn Effect

Mean score of intelligence has been rising since it was last measured in 1932 - IQ is standardized to 100 but the raw score has been on the rise

Piaget’s Finding on intellectual Development

children are active learners and learn from their environment by manipulating and exploring

Schema

Mental framework for interpreting the world around us

A schema allows you to make inferences about the behaviours of others around you.

Assimilation

Incorporating new information into existing schemas

Accomodation

Modifying existing schemas to fit incompatible information

Piaget’s 4 Stages of Cognitive Development

1. Sensorimotor Stage

2. Preoperational Stage

3. Concrete Operational Stage

4. Formal Operational Stage

Sensorimotor Stage (until Age 2)

Child recognizes that they can effect change in environment by manipulating objects - Milestone = object permanence (if his parents leave a room, they continue to exist and don’t magically disappear)

Preoperational Stage (2-7)

egocentrism, seriation, reversible relationships, and conservation

notably egocentric so cannot understand the world from any other perspective except his

difficulty with seriation tasks: logically order a series of objects (cannot place sticks from longest to shortest)

Struggle with reversing relations (if asked about having brother = YES, if asked if brother has sister, might be confused or say NO

Conservation tasks (child see 2 glasses of milk and identifies they have the same volume of liquid, but if one glass is poured into taller and narrower bottle, child wants the larger cup thinking there’s more milk in there)

Concrete Operational Stage (7-12)

child in these stage struggles to think in abstracts ways, work with hypothesis, and like to stick to their known schemas

Formal Operational Stage (12+)

Mastery of abstract thinking and reasoning, working with hypothesis, and do everything that makes up the range of adult cognitive ability

interest in games, books, shows involving fantasy and role plays develops in children at this age

Limitations of Piage’s theories:

some children develop some skills out of the order he created (Decalage)

Paige’s theories rely on the child’s language abilities too because the child may not fully and properly understand the statement

Confirmation BIas

Our tendency to seek out information that supports our hypothesis

Heuristic

A Mental Shortcut that is used to solve a problem reducing effort and using simple descision making

Availability Heuristic

Our tendency to make decisions based on information that is most quickly available to us

Representativeness Heuristic

Our tendency to assume what we are seeing is representative of the large prototype that we have in our minds

Benefits of the Availability Heuristic

• judge frequency of event occurrence

• rely on how easily examples come to mind

• errors can error because many factors effect how readily examples come to mind

Benefits of the Representativeness Heuristic

• judge the probability that an event belongs to a larger category

• resemblance between events and other events in the category

• error is that not all category members are the same