Module 34-  Thinking, Concepts, and Creativity

• Concepts

  • Cognition - all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating

  • Concepts - a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people

    • Ex: the concept of chair has many different objects - dentist chair, high chair, reclining chair, etc.

  • Prototypes - mental images or best examples of a category

    • Matching new items to a prototype provides a quick and easy method for sorting items into categories

    • Ex: comparing feathered creatures to a robin - a prototypical bird

      • A bluebird resembles the prototype of a bird more than a penguin does

• Thinking Creatively

  • What’s your favorite idea? Mine is being creative

  • Creativity - the ability to produce new and valuable ideas

  • Aptitude - ability to learn

  • Convergent thinking - narrowing the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution

    • Ex: POE on SAT tests

  • Divergent thinking - expanding the number of possible problem solutions

    • Creative thinking that diverges in different directions

    • Used in creativity tests

  • Robert Sternberg’s five components of creativity:

    • Expertise - well-developed knowledge

      • The more you know, the more ideas you can come up with

    • Imaginative thinking skills - the ability to see things in novel ways, recognize patterns, and make connections

    • A venturesome personality - someone who seeks new experiences, tolerates ambiguity, and perseveres in overcoming obstacles

    • Intrinsic motivation - being driven more by interest, satisfaction, and challenge than external pressures

    • A creative environment - an environment that helps spark, support, and refine creative ideas

• Multiple Choice Answers

  • A 

  • D 

  • E

  • A

  • C

Module 35 - Solving Problems and Making Decisions

• Problem Solving: Strategies and Obstacles

  • Algorithms - a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem

    • Contrasts with the speedier but more error-prone heuristics

  • Heuristics - a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently

    • Speedier but more error-prone than an algorithm

  • Insight - a sudden realization of a problem’s solution

    • Contrasts with strategy-based solution

  • Confirmation bias - a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence

  • Fixation - the inability to see a problem from a new perspective

    • An obstacle of problem-solving

  • Mental Set - a tendency to approach  problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past

• Forming Good (And Bad) Decisions and Judgments

  • Intuition - an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning

  • Representativeness heuristic - estimating the likelihood of events in terms of how well they seem to represent or match particular prototypes

    • May lead us to ignore other relevant information

• The Availability Heuristic

  • Estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory

    • If instances come readily to mind, we presume such events are common

    • More vivid events are more easily remembered 

  • We often fear the wrong things due to this

  • Seeing one vivid, graphic image of something can shape an impression of an entire group

  • When there is more information available, people are more worried

• The Fear Factor

  • Why do we fear the wrong things?

    • Ancestral history - snakes, lizards, spiders have killed ancestors, but rarely kill people anymore

    • Lack of control - you cannot control flying a plane but can control driving a car, and people are more afraid of planes than cars, yet there are far more car accidents

    • Immediacy - dangers are more apparent when they are sudden, not drawn out

    • Availability heuristic - vivid images of horrifying events come to memory rapidly

      • Ex: achilles tendon video

• Overconfidence

  • The tendency to be more confident than correct

    • To overestimate the accuracy of our own beliefs and judgments

  • Planning fallacy- overestimating our future leisure time and income

    • Me with my math journal

• Belief Perseverance

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

  • Ex: people claiming inflation increased under Reagan administration, when it in fact did not

• The Effects of Framing

  • Framing- the way an issue is posed

    • How an issue is worded can significantly affect decisions and judgments

    • Ex: people are more approving of “gun safety” over “gun control”

  • Framing nudges attitude and decisions

• The Perils and Powers of Intuition

  • Intuition is recognition born of experience

    • It is implicit knowledge

  • Intuition is usually adaptive, enabling quick reactions

    • Ex: gut feelings

  • Intuition is huge

• Multiple Choice Answers

  • B

  • A

  • D

  • C

  • E 

• Extra:

  • Schemas: forming concepts through experiences that organize and interpret unfamiliar information

  • Gambler’s fallacy - a failure to recognize the independence of chance events, leading to the mistaken belief that one can predict the outcome of a chance event on the basis of the outcomes of past chance events. 

    • Ex: a person might think that the more often a tossed coin comes up heads, the more likely it is to come up tails in subsequent tosses, although each coin toss is independent of any other and the true probability of the outcome of any toss is still just 0.5

  • Sunk-cost fallacy- a cognitive bias that makes you feel as if you should continue pouring money, time, or effort into a situation since you’ve already “sunk” so much into it already. This perceived sunk cost makes it difficult to walk away from the situation since you don’t want to see your resources wasted

  • Executive functions - higher level cognitive processes of planning, decision making, problem solving, action sequencing, task assignment and organization, effortful and persistent goal pursuit, inhibition of competing impulses, flexibility in goal selection, and goal-conflict resolution

    • Ex: language, judgment, logic, decision making

    • Associated with the frontal lobe and prefrontal cortex

  • Functional Fixedness - the tendency to perceive an object only in terms of its most common use

    • Ex: people only see cardboard boxes as only a container and not something else

  • Priming - recent experience of a stimulus facilitates or inhibits later processing of the same or a similar stimulus

    • Repetition priming - presentation of a particular sensory stimulus increases the likelihood that participants will identify the same or a similar stimulus later in the test

    • Semantic priming - presentation of a word or sign influences the way in which participants interpret a subsequent word or sign