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28 Cards in this Set

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Cognitive Psychology
is the study of the mental processes by which the information we recieve from the enviroment is modified, stored, retrieved, used, and communicated to others.
Basic Functions of Thought
The five core functions of thought are describe, elaborate, decide, plan, and guide action.
common since
The Circle of Thought
Many psychologists think of the components of the circle of thought as constituting an information-processing system that recieves, represents, transforms, and acts on incoming stimuli. Thinking, then is defined as the manipulation of mental representions by this system.
info-processing system and thinking
Measuring Information Processing
The time elasped between the presentation of stimulus and an overt response to it is the reaction time.Amon the factors affectin reaction times are the complexcity of the choice of a resoonse, stimulus-response compability, expectancy , and the tradeoff btween speed and accuracy. Uing methods such as measure of EEG and nueroimaging techniques, psychologists can als measure mental events as reflected in evoked brain potentials and other brain activites.
reaction times and evoked brain potentials
Mental Reprensentations:The Ingredients of Thought.
Mentsl representaations take form of concepts, propositions, schemas, scripts, mental models, images,and cognitive maps.
Concpts are categories of objects ,events, or ideas with common properties. Formal concepts are defined asny the presence or abscense of certain features.Natural concepts are fuzzy; no fixed set of defining properties determines membership in natural concept. A member olf a natural concept that displays all or most of its characteristics features is called prototype.
Concepts, natural or formal concepts, and prototype.
Propositions are assertions that state how concepts are related.Can be true or false.
Can be true or false.
are sets of propositions that serve as generalized mental representations of conceps andalso generate expectations about them.
are schemas of familiar activites that help people to think about those activities and to interpret new events.
Mental Models
are clusters of propositions that represent physical objects and processes, as well as guide our thinking about those things. Mental models may be accurate or inaccurate.
Images and Cognitive Maps
Information can be represented as images and can be mentally rotated, inspected, and otherwised manipulated. Cognitive maps are mental representations of the spatial arrangements in familiar parts of the world.
Thinking Stratagies
By combining and transforming mental rrpresentations, our information orocessinf system makes it possible for us to reason , solve problems, and make decisions. Reasining is the process through which people generate and evaluate arguments, as well as reach conclusions about them.
combining and reasoning
Formal Reasoning
Formal reasoning seeks valid conclisions through the application of rigurous procedures. The procedures include formulas, or algorithms, which are guranteed to produce correct solutions if they exists, and the rules of logic, which are useful in evaluating sets of premises and conclusions called syllogisms. To reach a sound conclusion, we must consider both the truth or falsity of the premises and thr logic of the argument itself. People are prone to logical errors; their beleiefs in a conclusions is cinsistent with their attitudes,as well as by other factors, inclusing confirmation bias and limits on working memory.
evaluating conclusions
Informal Reasoning
People use informal reasoning to asses the believability of a conclusion baed on the evidence for it. Errors in formal reasonig often stem from the misuse of hueristics, or mental shortcuts.Three important heuristics are the anchoring, the representativeness, and the availability heuristics.
beliviability of conclusions
Anchoring, represenativeness, and availability heuretics.
anchoring- estimating the probability of awn event by adjusting a starting value
Representiveness- categorizing an event by how representative it is of a category. A
Availability- etimating probability by how avaiable an event is in memory.
Problem Solving
Steps in problem Solving include diagnosing the problem and then planning, executing, and evaluating a solution.
Statagies for Problem Solving
Especially when solutions are not obvious, problem solving can be aided by the use of stratagies such as incubations, means end analysis, weorking backward, and using analogies.
Obstacles to problem Solving
Many of the difficulties that people experience is dealing with hypothesis. Because of mental sets, people may stick to to a particular hypothesis even when not succesful, through functional fixedness, may tend to miss oportunities to use familiar objects in unusual ways.Confirmation bias may lead opeople to be reluctant to revise or abandon hypothesis, especially cherised ones, on the basis of new evidence, an they may fail to use the absence of information as evidence in solving problems.
Building Problem-Solving Skills
Experts are usually superior to begginers in problem solving because of their knowledge and experience. They can draw on knowledge of similar problems, visualize related components of a problem as a single chunk, and percieve relations among problems in terms of underlying principles rather than the surface features. Extensive knowledge is the ain component of expertise. Yet expertise itself can prevent the expert fromseeing problems in a new way.
Problem Solving by Computer
Some spoecific problems can be solved by computer programs known as expert systems. THes systems are one application of artificial intelligence. One approach to AI focuses on programming computers to imitate the logic al manipulations of symbols that occur in human thought. Another approach attemps to imitate the connections amiong nuerons in the human brain. Current problem-solving computer systems deal most successfuly with specific domains. Often, the best outcomes ocur whn humans and computers work togeathr.
Evaluating Options
Decisions are sometimes difficult because there are too many alternatives and too many attributes of each alternative to consider at the sasme time. Furthermore, decisions often involve comparisons of subjective utility, not objective value. Decisions making is also complicated by the fact that the world is unpreictable, whic makes decisions risky. In risky decision making, the best decision is onr theat maximixess the expectd value.
Biases and Flaws in Decision Making
People oftenfail to maximize expected value in their decisions from gains of equaslsize. Second, people tend to overestimate the probability of unlikely events, to underestimate the probability of likely events, and t fell overconfident in the accuracy of their forecasts. The Gamblers fallacy leads people to believe that the future events in a random process is effected by orevious events. People dometimes make decisions aimed at goal other than maximizing expected value. These goals may be determined by personal and cultural factors.
Natural Decision Making
Many real world circumstances require naturalistic decisions making,in which prior experiences are used to develop mental representations of how orginizational systems really work.
The Elements of Language
Language consists of symbils such as words and rules for their combination - grammer. Spoken words are made up of phonems, which are combinrd to make morphenes. Combinations of words must both have synta(grammer) and semantics(meaning).Behind the wordd strings, or surface structure, is awn underying representation, or deep structure, that expresses the relationship among the ideas in a sentence. Ambiguous sentences occcur when one surface structure reflects two or more deep structures.
Understanding Speech
When people listen to speech in a familiar language, their perceptual system allows them to percieve gaps between words,even when those gaps are not phisically present. To understand language generally,and conversations in particular, people use their knowledge of the context and of the world. In addition, understanding is guided by nonverbal cues.
The Development of Language
Children develop grammer according to an orderly pattern. Babblings and the one-word stage of speech come first, then telegraphic two- word sentences.Next comes three word sentences and certain grammatical forms that appear in a somewhat predictable order. Once children learn certain regular verbforms and plural endingd, they may ovrgeneralize rules. Children acquire most of the syntax of their native language by the time they are five years old.
How is Language Acquired?
Conditioning and imitation both play a role in a child's acquisition of language, but neither can provide a complete explanation of how children acquire syntax. Humans may be biological programmed to learn language. In any event,iy appears that the language must be learned during a certain critical period if normal language is to occur. The critical-period notionis supported ny research on second- language acquisiton.
Culture Language and Thought
Research across cultures, and within North American culture, suggests that altough language does not determine what we can think, it does influence how we think, solve problems,and make decisions