Cognition, Problem Solving, and Decision Making

Flashcards exploring cognition, metacognition, concepts, problem-solving techniques, cognitive heuristics, reasoning biases, and intuition.

How is cognition defined in psychology?

Cognition refers to all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating information.

What is metacognition, and how does it affect academic performance?

Metacognition is "cognition about our cognition" or thinking about our thinking—specifically planning, monitoring, and evaluating our mental processes and performance. Students who use metacognition perform better academically.

What is a concept, and what function does it serve in thinking?

A concept is a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people. Concepts simplify thinking by giving us significant amounts of information with little cognitive effort.

What is a prototype in cognitive psychology?

A prototype is a mental image or best example of a category. Matching new items to a prototype provides a quick, easy method for sorting items into categories.

What did Olivier Corneille and colleagues (2004) demonstrate about prototypes using this facial continuum?

When participants viewed a blended face that was 70 percent White and 30 percent Asian, they categorized it as White, and their memory shifted toward their prototype, leading them to misremember the face as being 80 percent White.

How does moving away from a prototype affect categorization and decision making?

Category boundaries blur and recognition slows. For example, people are slower to recognize a whale as a mammal, slower to perceive a heart attack when symptoms (such as dull weight or exhaustion) do not match the sharp-chest-pain prototype, and less likely to detect prejudice that does not fit standard discrimination prototypes.

What is a schema according to Jean Piaget?

A schema is a concept or mental framework that organizes and interprets information.

What is the difference between assimilation and accommodation?

Assimilation involves interpreting new experiences in terms of existing schemas, whereas accommodation involves adapting or modifying current schemas to incorporate new information.

How is creativity defined?

Creativity is the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas.

How do convergent thinking and divergent thinking differ?

Convergent thinking narrows available problem solutions to determine a single correct answer (required by aptitude tests such as the SAT). Divergent thinking expands the number of possible solutions by considering multiple options and thinking in novel ways (required by creativity tests).

What is functional fixedness?

Functional fixedness occurs when prior experiences inhibit the ability to find creative solutions, such as when someone only perceives an object (like a brick) in terms of its customary function.

What are the five components of creativity identified by Robert Sternberg and colleagues?

The five components are: 1. Expertise, 2. Imaginative thinking skills, 3. A venturesome personality, 4. Intrinsic motivation, and 5. A creative environment.

What are four research-backed strategies to boost the creative process?

1. Develop your expertise; 2. Allow time for incubation ("sleeping on it"); 3. Set aside time for the mind to roam freely (defocused attention); 4. Experience other cultures and ways of thinking.

What are executive functions?

Executive functions are high-level cognitive abilities and skills that work together, enabling individuals to generate, organize, plan, and implement goal-directed behavior.

What is the difference between an algorithm and a heuristic?

An algorithm is a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees a solution but requires substantial time and effort. A heuristic is a simple thinking strategy or mental shortcut that solves problems efficiently and speedily, but is more error-prone.

What is insight, and what neural pattern characterizes it?

Insight is a sudden realization of a problem's solution (an Aha! moment). Frontal lobes are active prior to the insight during focused attention, followed by a sudden burst of activity in the right temporal lobe (just above the ear) at the instant of discovery.

How did Wolfgang Köhler demonstrate insight in animals?

Köhler placed fruit and a long stick outside the cage of a chimpanzee named Sultan, and a short stick inside. After failed attempts to reach the fruit with the short stick, Sultan suddenly grabbed the short stick to pull in the longer stick, which he then used to retrieve the fruit.

What is confirmation bias?

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence.

What did Peter Wason's (1960) 2-4-6 task demonstrate?

It demonstrated confirmation bias: students convinced that the rule was "counting by twos" repeatedly tested only confirming sequences (such as 6-8-10) rather than attempting to test disconfirming sequences to find the actual rule (any three ascending numbers).

What is fixation, and what is a prime example of it?

Fixation is the inability to see a problem from a new perspective. A prime example is mental set, the tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, usually one that has worked in the past.

What is intuition?

Intuition is an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning.

What is the representativeness heuristic, and what statistical reality does it cause people to overlook?

It is judging the likelihood of events in terms of how well they match a particular prototype. It frequently leads people to ignore base rates (such as assuming a poetry lover is an Ivy League English professor rather than a truck driver, ignoring that truck drivers vastly outnumber professors).

What is the gambler's fallacy, and which heuristic underlies it?

The gambler's fallacy is the belief that a streak of random outcomes (such as a coin landing on heads eight times) makes the opposite outcome more likely next. It stems from the representativeness heuristic.

What is the availability heuristic?

The availability heuristic is estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory; if instances come readily to mind (due to vividness, recency, or distinctiveness), we presume such events are common.

How does the availability heuristic distort human risk perception?

Vivid, emotionally charged, or highly memorable events (such as terrorist beheadings, airplane crashes, or personal anecdotes about vaccines) disproportionately dominate memory, causing people to fear rare hazards over more probable risks.

What is overconfidence?

Overconfidence is the tendency to be more confident than correct—to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs, knowledge, and judgments.

What are the planning fallacy and the sunk-cost fallacy?

The planning fallacy is the tendency to overestimate future leisure time and income, expecting projects to take less time than they actually do (projects often take twice the predicted time). The sunk-cost fallacy is sticking to an original plan simply because of resources already invested.

What is belief perseverance, and how does it relate to motivated reasoning?

Belief perseverance is the persistence of initial conceptions even after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited. It drives motivated reasoning, where individuals use their preexisting conclusions to judge the validity of evidence rather than using evidence to draw conclusions.

What simple remedy effectively reins in belief perseverance?

Considering the opposite: explicitly asking oneself whether one would have made the same evaluations had the research produced findings on the opposite side of the issue.

What is framing?

Framing is the way an issue is posed or presented, which can significantly affect decisions, judgments, and attitudes.

What is a "nudge" in behavioral economics?

A nudge is framing choices in a way that subtly encourages people to make beneficial decisions without restricting their freedom of choice.

How does the default option illustrate the power of framing in organ donation?

In countries where the default option is set to "Yes" (opt-out), nearly 100 percent of people agree to be organ donors; in countries where the default option is "No" (opt-in), far fewer people register as donors.

What are three major strengths of human intuition?

1. It is recognition born of experience (implicit knowledge); 2. It is usually adaptive, guiding survival and social interactions; 3. It leverages unconscious processing, allowing complex information to incubate.

In the bat-and-ball problem, why is deliberate thinking necessary over instant intuition?

If a bat and a ball together cost $110\text{ cents}$ and the bat costs $100\text{ cents}$ more than the ball, intuition suggests the ball costs $10\text{ cents}$, but deliberate calculation reveals the correct answer is $5\text{ cents}$ ($105\text{ cents} + 5\text{ cents} = 110\text{ cents}$).