Unit 2.2 - Cognition

Cognition

All the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating

Forming concepts

A mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people

Forming schemas

A concept or framework that organizes and interprets information

Forming prototypes

A mental image or best example of a category which provides a quick and easy method for sorting items into categories and can help organize unfamiliar items by finding an appropriate category

Assimilation

Trying to find a place for something in your schema

Accommodation

Altering your schema to include new information

Algorithm

A methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees a solution to a problem

Heuristic

A simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgements and solve problems efficiently, but does not guarantee a solution

Insight

Provides instant realization of solution

Intuition

An effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought with explicit conscious reasoning to make decisions

Representative Heuristic

Estimating the likelihood of events in reference to how closely they resemble a particular prototype

Availability Heuristic

Estimating the likelihood of events on how readily they come to mind

Priming

A phenomenon in which exposure to one stimulus influenced how a person responds to a subsequent, related stimulus

Perceptual set

A mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another

Framing

The way an issue is presented or worded can impact how people respond

Confirmation Bias

A tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence

Overconfidence

The tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgements

Fixation

The inability to see a problem from a nee perspective

Mental set

Tendency to persist in using the same problem-solving strategy that have worked in the past

A type of fixation

Functional fixedness

The inability to recognize novel uses for an item and only see it for its most common purpose

A type of fixation

Belief perseverance

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

Sunk cost fallacy

A cognitive bias that makes you stay in a situation despite losing resources or benefits

Gambler’s fallacy

A cognitive bias that adheres to the ideas that if something hasn’t happened recently it soon will

Executive functions

Mental skills that help us learn, work, and manage daily life, including working memory, flexible thinking, and self-control

Examples of executive functions

Impulse control, emotional control, flexible thinking, working memory, self-monitoring, planning and prioritizing, task initiation, and organization

Creativity

The ability to produce ideas that are both novel and valuable

Requires divergent thinking

Robert Sternberg’s Five components of creativity

Expertise, Imagination, A venturesome personality, Intrinsic motivation, and A creative environment

Divergent thinking

Expanding the number of possible problem solutions

Convergent thinking

Narrows down the solutions to the single best option