Thinking

Cognitive Revolution

• Cognitive psychology was born from the fallout of behaviorism

• Cognition: The way in which information is processed and manipulated in remembering, thinking, and knowing

• Cognitive psychology: the study of mental processes

Three Aspects of Cognition

Thinking

• The manipulation of information via:

  • Concepts: mental categories used to group events, stimuli, and experiences

  • Natural concepts from experience

    • Direct experiences

    • Indirect experiences

  • Artificial concepts: from a specific set of characteristics

  • Prototype: best representation of a concept

    • New objects most similar to the prototype are easier to recognize

    • Concepts are based on prototypes, not always accurate

  • Schema: mental cluster or collection of related concepts

    • Role Schema: assumption of how people act in specific roles

    • Event Schema: a set of routine behaviors

Problem Solving

• Plan of action used to find a solution

  • Identify the problem or goal

  • Come up with a strategy or subgoals

  • Evaluate solutions

• Problem-Solving Strategies

  • Algorithm: step-by-step strategy

  • Heuristic: general solutions

  • Trial and Error: trying different things

• Obstacles to problem solving

  • Mental set: persisting with a solution that is not working

  • Functional Fixedness: Inability to see new functions

• Decision Making: Evaluating the alternatives and choosing them

• Normative approach: outcome of the choice

• Naturalistic approach: Process of the choice

• Bias in Problem Solving

  • Base-Rate neglect: Ignore info about general principles

  • Confirmation Bias: Focus on information that supports beliefs

  • Hindsight bias: Things happened as you expected

  • Representative bias: Judgements based on stereotypes

  • Availability heuristic: Probability based on personal experience or readily available information

Intelligence

• Ability to do well on cognitive tasks, solve problems, and learn from experience

• Good IQ tests are valid, reliable, and standardized

• Creativity: the ability to generate, create, or discover new ideas and possibilities

Cartell’s Theory

• Crystalized Intelligence: acquired knowledge and the ability to retrieve it, increases with age

• Fluid Intelligence: the ability to see complex relationships and solve problems, decreases with age after mid-adulthood

Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory

• Analytic intelligence: the ability to analyze and evaluate

• Creative intelligence: the ability to develop new ideas

• Practical intelligence: the ability to use personal experience

Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences

• Bodily-Kinesthetic: coordinating your mind with your body

• Interpersonal: sensing people’s feelings and motives

• Intrapersonal: understanding yourself, what you feel, and what you want

• Linguistic: finding the right words to express what you mean

• Logical-mathematical: quantifying things, making hypotheses, and proving them

• Musical: discerning sounds, their pitch, tone, rhythm, and timbre

• Naturalistic: understanding living things and reading nature

• Spatial: visualizing the world in 3D

Cultural Bias In IQ Tests

• Historically used as a justification for eugenics, forced sterilization, and the general oppression of racial/ethnic minorities

Language

• A communication system that involves using words to transmit information from one individual to another.

  • Lexicon: A language’s vocabulary

  • Grammar: A set of rules that are used to convey meaning through the use of the lexicon

  • Phonology: the study of phonemes in a language and the rules for their combination

  • Syntax: The study of how we arrange words and phrases to form sentences

  • Semantics: how a language conveys meaning.

  • Pragmatics: the ways people achieve their goals using language.