Unit 7 Cognition - Testing

• Around of age of five, free play and creativity is discouraged in school and therefore declines every year until it plateaus at teen years
• Society and our brain starts to place unnecessary restrictions and guidelines that we are convinced we can’t function without

Problem-Solving

Types of Problems

• Note: Most real world problems are multiple kinds of these distinctions
• The three types are inducing structure, arrangement, and transformation

Problems of Inducing Structure

• <<Understanding the relationship of different parts to understand the whole<<
• Example: Cat to feline, dog to _____
    * Canine
• Sequencing: A B M C D M __
    * E F M
• There is outside information you need to know to complete these context-based problems
• Picking a gift is much easier if you know the person and details about their likes/dislikes, etc.
• Planning a trip and the people that come, the place you’re going, the things you’re planning to do, do you have the time to do it, etc.

Problems of Arrangement

• <<Requires rearranging/organizing a problem to satisfy a criterion<<
• Often trial and error, but not always!
• Often needs a burst of insight
• Going through a maze
• Schedule conflicts, resolved by moving the event to another time or day
• Trying to fit things in a suitcase
• Putting books on shelves
    * This one isn’t trial and error, since you know how you’re going to put them up before doing it, but it was still rearranged
• You can get this on the first try, but things have to be arranged in some way

Problems of Transformation

• <<Requires a sequence of steps to achieve goal<<
• Something does have to change
• Tower of Hanoi
    * Like the kids toy with the rings you move from one side to the other, but only smaller rings can be put on top of a larger one
    * The tower is changed in the process of moving

Well-defined problems

• The initial state and goal state are explicitly and completely specified
• Math, school

Ill-defined problems

• Any or all of the problem features are vaguely specified, or not specified at all
• Multiple right answers
• Can be a clear goal but not always a clear way to get there
• Moral/ethical questions, policy

Obstacles to Problem-Solving

Irrelevant Information

• Sometimes our natural inclinations to solve backfire and hide logic
    * We like logic so much that we ignore common sense

Functional Fixedness

• The idea that an object has one single use and cannot be used in any other way
• We fixate on the one purpose of an object and ignore others

Mental Set

• Using an approach that has worked in the past
• Once a method works, we assume its the only possible way to complete a goal
• If that method doesn’t work, we can struggle to find a new solution

Unnecessary Constraints

• Assumptions we make about a problem that may put arbitrary constraints upon our ability to solve
• Stems from a desire to be “right”

Bias

• There are many kinds of bias
• Bias is a preference or inclination that may inhibit judgment
• Anchoring bias
    * If we are predisposed to an idea that turns out to be inaccurate, it will still pull our judgment in its direction
    * Many school and social examples
• Framing
    * Like wording effect but outside survey context
    * A knife vs THE knife
    * 25% X or 75% Y? Which is a more accurate representation?
    * Advertisement and persuasion uses this bias a lot
• Overconfidence bias
    * The tendency to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs and judgment
    * Inaccuracy in eyewitness accounts often occurs due to people’s tendency to be overconfident about the reliability of memory
    * This affects not only memory but also your effort and result
• Hindsight bias
    * Thinking you knew it all along once the right answer is revealed
    * Will impair future preparation
• Confirmation bias
    * Believing so strongly in a predisposition that you ignore information that disproves it
    * This can lead to stereotypes
    * Always looking for proof of your own idea and not opposing opinions

Methods of Problem-Solving

Algorithms

• All the possible paths to solve a problem, guaranteeing a solution
• Step-by-step, well-defined problem
• A fool-proof, logical path to solving a problem
• Legos, baking, following directions

Heuristics

• Shortcuts, “rules of thumb"
• Used by humans
• Brute-forcing, simple solution

Availability Heuristics

• Problem-solving based on the quickest and most accessible information in your mind
• Estimating the likelihood of events based on availability in memory
• What comes to your mind first, can be very incorrect

Representativeness Heuristics

• We align options with prototypes of our concept of a feature
• We assume a Harvard professor is smarter than a bar bouncer
    * The Harvard professor is very close to our prototype of the concept of smart
    * The bouncer is not close to that prototype
    * This assumption can be incorrect
• Judging likelihoods based on how something best illustrates your existing prototypes

Intelligence

• Intelligence is the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use our knowledge to adapt to new situations
• More often than not, the operation definition for intelligence is extremely focused on school-smarts

Theories of Intelligence

Charles Spearman - General Intelligence

• Focuses on school smarts
• Black and white, you’re either smart or not
• Factor analysis
    * Factors are like categories on a test (reading comprehension, word problems, number problems, etc.)
    * Sees the score on each category, then compiles into a total score
    * People either did poorly or really well across the board
      * This leads to the conclusion that smart people are smart in every part of life
• Dominant until the ‘80s

Robert Sternberg - Multiple Intelligences (3)

• Creativity is it’s own intelligence
• Creativity tests
    * Remote Associates Test

Howard Gardner - Multiple intelligences (8)

• Doesn’t care how you test it, just wanted to identify how the brain works and what intelligence is
• Cognitive or mental processes - how the mind is working, not the skill

IQ

• IQ = (mental age / chronological age) x 100
    * Supposed to indicate “how smart” you are
• Sometimes interpreted as ‘potential’
• But this mathematical count doesn’t take that into account… its completely school-smart based
• Alfred Binet
    * Designed the first intelligence test in France, commissioned by the government to find our why some kids were thriving and who were not
    * Wanted to find who needed extra help
• Terman adapts Binet’s test for American school system and names the revision the Standford-Binet Test / IQ Test
    * Used it for eugenics, segregation, categorizing on race
    * “Improving the human race,” promotes ‘superior’ traits
    * NOT the good reason that Binet had
    * We hate Terman
    * Dominant IQ test for a long time, still used today sometimes but not alone
• David Wechsler designs the most modern test
    * Wechsler adult intelligence scale (WAIS) and Wechsler intelligence scale for children (WISC)
    * Still book smarts, but also performance (street smarts, open ended problems)

EQ

• Understanding your own emotions, others emotions, and reacting properly

Test Construction and Criteria

• The mean for the IQ tests (Weschler and Binet) is 100
• 68% are 85 to 115, 95% are 70 to 130

Reliability

• Ability to get consistency in testing results
• Split-half
    * Random halves should look the same when visualized into data
• Test-retest
    * Similar groups get similar scores/score distributions

Validity

• Content validity
    * Is it measuring what it intends to?
• Predictive validity
    * See if future matches the prediction
    * SAT struggles

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