Ap Psych- Cognition and Problem Solving

Intuition

Often times we are following our intuition, a quick, automatic feeling or thought that occurs without analytical reasoning.

Gut instinct

Your intuition is a subconscious way of knowing something without explicit reasoning, often based on past experiences, often identified as your gut instinct. 

Weakness of Intuition

It can lead to biases, errors in judgment, and overconfidence in decision-making without sufficient evidence. Not always 100% accurate.

Mental Set

Using past experiences, habits, or strategies that have been successful to try and solve a problem.

Attention in mental set

May focus on attention on areas of a problem that aren’t as significant. This limits creativity or creating new strategies and using alternative ones.

Priming

The process by which exposure to certain stimuli influences reactions to subsequent stimuli, often without conscious awareness. Priming can enhance or inhibit the recall of information.

Framing

The way information is presented or "framed" can significantly affect decision-making and judgment, often leading to different interpretations of the same information.

Wording Affect

The concept that the way information is phrased or presented can influence people's perceptions and decisions. This can lead to differing outcomes based on how choices are framed.

Cognitive Biases

Systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. They can affect perceptions, decisions, and problem-solving.

Gamblers Fallacy

The belief that future probabilities are altered by past events in random processes, leading individuals to think that a certain outcome is 'due' after a series of opposite outcomes.

Sunk-Cost Fallacy

A cognitive bias in which individuals continue a behavior or endeavor as a result of previously invested resources (time, money, effort), even when it is not beneficial to do so.

Hindsight Bias

A cognitive bias that occurs when individuals see events as having been predictable after they have already occurred, often leading to overconfidence in their ability to predict outcomes.

Overconfidence

A cognitive bias where individuals have an excessive belief in their own abilities to predict or control outcomes, often resulting in inaccurate assessments of their skills or knowledge.

Confirmation Bias

A cognitive bias that involves favoring information that confirms one’s existing beliefs or hypotheses while disregarding contradictory evidence, leading to skewed thinking and decision-making.

Belief Perseverance

The tendency to maintain a belief even in the face of contradictory evidence. This can lead individuals to hold onto their beliefs stubbornly despite clear evidence that challenges those beliefs.

Fixation

A cognitive bias that prevents individuals from seeing a problem from a fresh perspective, hindering problem-solving and creativity.

Mental Set

A tendency to approach problems in a habitual way, relying on past strategies that may not be effective for new situations.

Functional Fixedness

A cognitive bias that limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used, hindering problem-solving and creativity. Makes you believe that an object cannot be used for anything except what it’s made to be used to as.

Creativity

The ability to produce original and valuable ideas or solutions, often involving thinking outside conventional boundaries.

Divergent Thinking 

A thought process that generates multiple solutions to a problem, emphasizing creativity and open-mindedness rather than searching for a single correct answer.

Mnemonic

A memory aid that uses associations, patterns, or acronyms to help retain information more easily and improve recall.

Convergent Thinking

A cognitive process that narrows down multiple ideas and solutions into one best answer, focusing on logically finding the single correct solution to a problem.

Mnemonic examples

include acronyms like "ROYGIBIV" for colors of the rainbow, or phrases like "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Noodles" for planet order.