Cognition Flashcards

The Basics of Thinking: Conceptual Hierarchies

• Thoughts and Mental Representations:

  • Mental representations are the fundamental building blocks of thought.
  • These representations combine to form concepts, which are mental categories or groupings of things.

• Concepts and Prototypes:

  • A concept is a mental category or group.
  • A prototypical concept is the most typical or average example of a concept.
  • Fodor's Language of Thought (LoT) theory (Fodor, 1975; Fodor, 2008) is related to this.

• Conceptual Hierarchies:

  • Conceptual hierarchies are organized levels of concepts.
    • Superordinate Level: The most general level (e.g., "animal").
    • Basic Level: An intermediate, commonly used level (e.g., "dog").
    • Subordinate Level: The most specific level (e.g., "poodle").

Problem Solving & Decision Making

• Problem Solving Approaches:
  • Algorithm: A step-by-step procedure that guarantees a solution if followed correctly.
    • Maze Algorithm: An example is following a single wall to solve a maze.
    • Rubik's Cube Algorithms: Step-by-step guides to solve a Rubik's Cube can be considered an algorithm.
  • Insight: A sudden, conscious realization or understanding of a problem; an "a-ha" moment.
  • Heuristic: A mental shortcut that is quick, requires little effort, and is intuitive.

Heuristics

• Representativeness Heuristic:

  • Definition: A shortcut for judging the likelihood of outcomes based on how representative or prototypical an outcome is of a category (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982).
  • Example: Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy and was involved in social justice issues and anti-nuclear demonstrations. Is it more likely that Linda is a bank teller or a bank teller and a democrat? Many people choose the latter, even though it is statistically less likely, because it is more representative of their idea of someone fitting Linda's description.

• Availability Heuristic:

  • Definition: A strategy for deciding how likely something is based on how quickly it comes to mind.
  • Example: If a random word is taken from an English dictionary, is it more likely that the word starts with 'K' or that 'K' is the third letter? Many people think it's more likely that the word starts with 'K' because it's easier to think of words that start with 'K'. In reality, there are about three times as many English words whose third letter is 'K' than there are words that start with 'K'.

Cognitive Biases

• Overconfidence Bias:

  • Definition: The tendency to be more confident in our abilities than is objectively reasonable.
  • Rozenblit & Keil (2002) referred to this as "The illusion of explanatory depth", illustrating that we often think we know more than we actually do.

• Hindsight Bias:

  • Definition: The tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that one would have foreseen it.
  • Example: During the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, many people wore gloves but not masks to the grocery store. Judging this as "silly" or "irrational" is an example of hindsight bias: assuming you would have known something before it became common knowledge or scientifically confirmed.

• Confirmation Bias:

  • Definition: The tendency to seek out and overweight evidence that confirms our pre-existing beliefs.
  • Belief Perseverance: People tend to hold on to their beliefs (or even strengthen them) in the face of disconfirming evidence (Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979).

Concepts to Review

• Mental Representations
• Prototypes
• Conceptual Hierarchies
  • Superordinate concept
  • Basic Concept
  • Subordinate concept
• Problem solving approaches
  • Algorithm
  • Insight
  • Functional fixedness
• Heuristics
  • Representative Heuristic
  • Availability Heuristic
• Cognitive biases
  • Overconfidence bias
  • Hindsight bias
  • Confirmation bias & belief perseverance