Unit 1: Cognition and Memory

Metacognition

Thinking about Thinking

EX:

• How are you thinking about thinking?

• Are you planning for how you are studying?

• Take physical and mental notes of what to study

Dunning-Kruger effect

WHAT IT ISN'T:

• Low confidence, low compitence → you think you know everything, but you don't

It is:

• When you are low in confidence, you think you do better than you really do.

  • Bad drivers don't know how bad they are.

Cognition

The mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering and communicating information.

Concepts

Mental groupings of similar objects events, ideas, and people.

Prototypes

A mental representation of the most typical and characterizatic example of a category.

Schema

A concept or framework that organizes and interprests information.

Assimilation

Interpreting our new experiences in terms of our existing schema.

Accommodation

Adapting out current understandings (schemas) to incorporate new information.

Algorithms

A methodical logical rule or procedue that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrasts with the usual speedier— but also more error prone— use od heuristics.

Heuristics

A simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgements and solve problem. usually speedier but also more error prone than algorithims.

Insight

A sudden realization of problems's solution; contrasts with strategy based solutions.

Cognitive bias

Is a systematic error in thinking that occurs when people process and interpret information in their surroundings, influencing their decisions and judgments.

Confirmation bias

If you believe something is true, you will looks for evidence to support it.

• You are more likely to accept information if it appears to support what you already believe or expect

• To combat, you need to falsify and not look for things to prove your belief right

• EVERYONE HAS THIS BIAS

  • It limits the minds attention

Mind set

a tendency to apprach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been sucessful in the past.

Intuition

An effortless and immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, concious reasoning.

Representative Heuristic

When estimating probabilities → how likely a certain event is by saying or comparing it to an existing mental prototype.

Avaliability Heuristic

what comes to mind and that instant is deemed significant— sometimes incorrect.

Overconfidence

The tendency to more confident than correct-- to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgements.

Belief perseverance

clinging to ones initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discreditied.

Framing

how we present an issue that affects out decisions and judgements.

Anchoring bias

A form of conforming bias that makes us use the first piece of information on a subject as a reference for newer information about a topic.

Gamblers Fallacy

if an event occurred more frequently than expected in the past then it’s less likely to occur in the future (and vice versa), in a situation where these occurrences are independent of one another.

Sunk-cost Fallacy

“This movie sucks but I bought the tickets so minus well see it”

This is an economic term for any past expenses that can no longer be recovered.

Executive functions

as the management of system of the brain, these mental functions help us organize and manage the many tasks in our daily life.

Hindsight bias

The tendency of people to view events as more predictable than they really are. Before an event takes place, while you might be able to offer a guess as to the outcome, there is really no way to actually know what's going to happen.

Creativity

The ability to produce ideas that are both novel and valuable.

Divergent thinking

Expanding the number of possible solutions

Convergent thinking

the ability to determine the best solution

Functional fixedness

A cognitive bias that negatively affects a person's ability to problem-solve and innovate. The bias causes a person to look at a problem in only one specidic way and it can prevent them from developing effective solutions to their challenge.

Flow

A state of mind in which a person becomes fully immersed in an activity.

Encoding

Translating information for our brains to eventually use to store.

storage

storing that information

retrieval

being able to acess that memory (ies).

there are 3 types:

• recall: fast retrieval of info that is not in your conciousness.

• recognition: identifying things that you learned

• relearning: easier to learn again because you “know it"

short term memory

ACTIVATED MEMORY that holds up to 7 +/-2 digits. ← however rehearsal is needed

working memory

newer definition: its the concious active processing of sensory information and the information from the LTM.

memory consolidation

process in the brain: short term →long term memory

central executive

the boss in the brain that controls images, attention, thinking, etc.

phonological loop

processes auditory information → 2 parts

1. phonoogical store: where the auditory info is stored.

2. articulatory control: controls speech (practicing and rehearsing)

Visuospatial sketchpad

Processes visual stimuli and spatial awareness

Sensory memory