Unit 7 Thinking, Decision-Making, and Reasoning

What is a Mental Representation?

• structure in the mind— an idea, or image that stands for something else (external object)

• not about things we are sensing, but rather about things we sensed in the past

• allow us to think about and remember things from the past and imagine things in the future

• allows us to think about abstract ideas (includes love, truth, beauty, and justice)

What can Mental Representations be?

• Verbal (Concepts or Categories)

• Visual (Imagery)

Concept

• abstract representation, description, or definition that designates a class or category of things

• our brain organizes concepts by classifying them by shared similarities

• Ex. Dog may be described as a “small, four-footed with fur that wags its tail and barks”

Category

refers to a set of entities group based on features, groups objects by similarities

Concepts specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for a Category

• A necessary condition is something that must be true of an object in order for it to belong in a category

Ex. It is necessary for a dog to be a mammal

• A sufficient condition, is something that, if it is true of the object, proves that it belongs to the category

• Ex. German shepherd is a sufficient condition for membership in the category dog

Prototype Theory

classifying new objects by comparing them to the “best” or “most typical” member of a category

Exemplar Theory

making category judgments by comparing a new instance with stored memories for other cases of the category

Ex. Categorizing an animal as a bird, if it's similar enough to some of the stored bird exemplars

The property “is a mammal” is _______ for the category “dog,” but it is not ________, because many other animals are also mammals.

necessary; sufficient

Family Resemblance view

members of a category might share some core features, but not all members have to have all these features

If we adopt the family resemblance approach to categorization, how would we determine if something should be a member of a category?

If it has most of the features that are shared by other members of the category.

_____ natural categories ______ be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.

Most; cannot

Are living things and human-made objects present in the same brain areas?

No; they are in different brain areas

Brain Areas for Protypes and Exemplars

Prototypes: activity is present in left hemisphere, visual cortex involved in forming prototypes

Exemplars: right hemisphere is active, prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia involved in learning exemplars

Conclusion: Prototype information involves image processing, whereas Exemplar-based learning involves analysis and decision making

Category-Specific Deficit

an inability to recognize objects that belong to a particular category, although the ability to recognize objects outside the category is undisturbed

Category-Specific Deficit Brain Activity

• damage to the front part of the left temporal lobe results in difficulty identifying humans

• damage to the lower left temporal lobe results in difficulty identifying animals

• damage to the region where the temporal lobe meets the occipital and parietal lobes impairs the ability to retrieve names of tools

Aphantasia

• condition where a person lacks mental imagery

People with aphantasia _________.

• can solve problems that require most people to mentally rotate objects in their minds

• are bright people who enter careers in a wide variety of fields including biology, computer programming, engineering, and art.

Spatial Skills and Gender

• differences in experience account for the gender difference in spatial skills

• giving all children access to the same resources and teaching spatial skills may cause gender difference to disappear

The Rational Choice Theory

suggests that we make decisions by determining how likely something is to happen and judging the value of the outcome, and then multiplying the two

Ex. X = Getting a six; Y = Getting anything else.

• The probability of X is 1/6, and the value of X is $4.

• The probability of Y is 5/6, and the value of Y is $-1.

• The "utility" of this choice is: [(1/6) $4] + [(5/6) $-1] = (0.68 + -0.83) = -0.15 

• Because the utility is negative, we shouldn't take the bet. 

Judging Frequencies and Probabilities

• Humans can decipher frequences (occurrence/fractional amount) better than probabilities (percent)

Define Heuristics

a fast and efficient strategy that may facilitate decision making but does not guarantee that a solution will be reached

System 1:

• are fast, automatic, unconscious strategies that facilitate decision-making

• keeps us from overthinking and being overwhelmed by irrelevant information

Careful Decision Making/System 2

System 2:

• used for making important decisions that require conscious, careful decision-making

• Ex. Trying to figure out which graduate degree programs you'll submit applications to

Algorithms: is an example of decision making that are well-defined sequences of procedures or rules that guarantee a solution to a problem.

• Ex. If you're using Qualtrics software to conduct an online survey and need to download your survey data, following the step-by-step instructions provided by Qualtrics will allow you to download your data

Availability Heuristic

items that are more readily available in memory are judged as having occurred more frequently

• memory strength and frequency of occurrence are directly related

Representativeness Heuristic

people seem to ignore information about base rate, or the existing probability of an event, basing their judgments on similarities to categories

• Thus, the probability judgments were skewed toward a person’s prototypes

The Conjunction Fallacy

people think that two events are more likely to occur together than either individual event

• always more probable that any one state of affairs is true rather than a set of events simultaneously

Framing Effects

people give different answers to the same problem depending on how the problem is framed, which can influence its value

Ex. People being persuaded with a drug that has a 70% effectiveness rate, but being dissuaded with the same drug that has a 30% failure rate

Sunk-Cost Fallacy -related to framing

a framing effect in which people make decisions about a current situation on the basis of what they have previously invested in the situation

Ex. Imagine waiting in line for 3 hours, paying $100 for a ticket to a Concert to see a favorite band, and wake up on the day of the outdoor concert to find that it’s bitterly cold and rainy. If you go, you’ll feel miserable. But you go anyway, reasoning that the $100 you paid for the ticket and the time you spent in line will have been wasted if you stay home.

Optimism Bias

people believe that, compared with other individuals, they are more likely to experience positive events than negative events in the future

Prospect Theory

claims people make decisions based on potential losses and gains rather than actual outcomes

Decision process takes place in two phases:

• (1) people simplify available information due to too many factors to compare

• (2) people choose the prospect that offers the best value

• people also compare choices to a reference point

• people are willing to take risks to avoid losses than achieve gains

• Certainty Effect: when making decisions, people give greater weight to outcomes that are a sure thing

What area in the brain is activated when making risky decisions?

(Card Deck Example with person with brain damage and healthy people)

• People with damage in the prefrontal cortex have the tendency to pick riskier cards when choosing to pick out of 4 stacks of cards that include healthy or risky cards (didn’t show anticipatory feelings)

• The healthy participants began to show anticipatory emotional reactions when they even considered choosing a card from the risky deck

• Participants with prefrontal cortex damage did not have emotional reactions, which did not guide their thinking, thus leading to their risky decisions

Well-Defined Problems

have a clear starting point and goal; you'll know when it's been solved

• can take algorithmic approach to produce exact steps for solution

Ex. Includes Algebra problems, puzzles, and games like tic-tac-toe or checkers (Most real-life situations aren't so tidy)

Ill-Defined Problems

have unclear starting points and goals; may be hard to tell when the solution is reached

• can adopt problem-solving technique strategy or technique which allows you to mentally manage the process of finding a solution

Means-End Analysis: Problem-Solving Approach

searches for the steps (or the "means") to reduce differences between the current situation and the desired goal

Process:

1. Analyze the goal state (i.e., the desired outcome you want to attain).

2. Analyze the current state (i.e., your starting point, or the current situation).

3. List the differences between the current state and the goal state.

4. Reduce the list of differences by Direct means

• (a procedure that solves the problem without intermediate steps).

• b) Generating a subgoal (an intermediate step on the way to solving the problem).

• c) Finding a similar problem that has a known solution.

Analogical Problem Solving

involves finding a similar problem with a known solution and applying that solution to the current problem

Ex. Students adopting study habits that have working in the past for a new course

Insight in the Brain

a sudden and dramatic burst of high-frequency electrical activity (40 cycles per second) was present for problems solved via insight, but not for problems solved via analytic strategies

• this activity was centered over the front part of the right temporal lobe, slightly above the right ear

Before a problem was solved with an insight solution, there was increased activity deep in the frontal lobes, in a part of the brain known as the anterior cingulate, which controls cognitive processes

• suggests that increased activity in the anterior cingulate enabled participants to attend to and detect associations that were only weakly activated, at a subconscious level, facilitating sudden insight

Functional Fixedness

the tendency to perceive the functions of objects and information in fixed ways

• failure to restructure the way you think about elements in a problem

Research on the incubation effect suggests that insightful solutions _________.

actually are the result of incremental unconscious processes