Cognitive Final Chapters: 11 and onward

If there's rain, then people will carry umbrellas. Which of the following are logically VALID deductions?

There's rain today; therefore people will carry umbrellas. People aren't carrying umbrellas; therefore it isn't raining today.

If people had an emotional connection to climate change, they would be more likely to prioritize it.

True

We are better at correctly interpreting valid deductions rather than invalid

True

In a conditional syllogism, all that deduction tells you is what follows from ____________.

What

Premise

What you know to be true or false

Choose the item that you think would most likely cause a belief bias.

Working too quickly through a syllogism

Reasoning begins with ______________, which can be thought of as statements that can be true or false and can refer to properties of the external world.

Propositions

According to Kahneman, there are two reasoning systems: a ________ system that engages in the serial, analytical processing of information and a ________system that relies on heuristics.

1. Slow 2. Fast

When evaluating syllogisms, people are generally ____________ at correctly identifying a syllogism as invalid and ____________ at establishing that they are valid, which demonstrates a type of confirmation bias.

1. Worse 2. Better

Using the example presented above, you should turn over the card with the 'E' and the ------ to determine whether the rule was true or not.

7

Visual Search

Ability detecting relevant information from a visual array decreases Less able to ignore irrelevant information Each sign should convert unique meaning

visual acuity

Ability to detect details decreases with age Fix: Avoid using complicated letters

Prospective Memory

Ability to remember to do things in future decreases E.g., remembering to pick up the milk on my way home

Temporal Resolution

Ability to track changes in stimuli decrease over time (Older adults mat see flashing light as continuous instead) Fix: Slow flashing

If there's rain, then people will wear rain boots. Choose the conclusion that applies modus ponens:

Affirming the Antecendant

Which of the following are logically invalid deductions? (Select all that apply)

Affirming the consequent Denying the antecedent

This occurs when people rate a conclusion as true as long as the qualifying words in the premises match those in the conclusions.

Atmospheric Effect

We are more likely to believe the conclusion if the argument is phrased using the same language. This refers to:

Atmospheric Effect "all" in the premise and conclusion

Heuristics: Major Examples

Availability Representativeness Affect Anchoring and adjustment

When TV announcers say something like, "How much would you pay? $200...how about $150...if you call now, we'll give it to you for the amazing price of just....", they are trying to get people to focus and rely on an initial piece of information (i.e., the price being $150-$200). This is related to which heuristic?

Anchoring

Generalizations

Applying observations of individuals to a group Note: strength of generalizations depend on number of observations (sample size) E.g., all of your friends who are millennials are hardworking, therefore, all millennials are likely hardworking.

What type of inference provides a mathematical model for incorporating existing beliefs with new data in order to make an educated guess?

Bayesian

Irrational choices may be produced by:

Biases: under- or over-valuing alternatives Heuristics: low-effort decisions, not analyzing all alternatives

Does clemson have a high staff retention rate?

Clemson has high staff/faculty retention rates, and a diverse student population Many users will be older adults (~65 or older) Yes, so signs must be legible for older adults

Design Project Challenge

Clemson is re-designing their recycling signage. What, specifically, should we change to make the signs more usable for older adults?

What is the term for acquiring and processing information about the world in order to make behavioral decisions?

Cognition

People are generally worse at correctly identifying a syllogism as invalid than they are at establishing that they are valid. This suggests that there is a type of _________________ when evaluating syllogisms.

Confirmation bias

The process of ___ is choosing a specific course of behavioral actions from among many possibilities.

Decision making

Top-down attention allocation

Declines in cognitive processing (e.g., working memory capacity) impair abilities to endogenously task switch. Note: selective attention is not impaired (e.g., attending to one thing, by choice), but divided attention (e.g., attending to two things) is impaired.

Language Comprehension

Decreased ability to process complex (e.g., abstract, implicit) language Note: see next slide (cognitive processing slide) for more info Example Design Recommendations Use simple, explicit text E.g., "Plastic bottles are accepted here" vs "#1 and #2 plastics are accepted in the blue bins, but only if they are not rigid or boxes"

Audition

Decreased sensitive to high frequencies (>4000 Hz) Similar to impaired detection of low-wavelength colors Decreased ability to differentiate among tones Similar to impaired visual contrast sensitivity Decreased ability to differentiate speech from background noise Similar to impaired detection of relevant visual information

Two types of reasonings:

Deduction: directly produces conclusion Induction: generalized to conclusion

The belief bias and atmosphere effect suggest that people:

Do not analyze syllogisms by simply applying the rules of logic

Reasoning

Drawing conclusions from a given set of information (Premise)

It has been found that Jean Piaget was correct in his theory that adults consistently think clearly and logically and rarely make errors in deductive reasoning.

False

In Wason's card task, the key to testing a rule is to check cases that have the potential to _____________ the rule.

Falsify

Denying the antecedent

If the antecedent is not true then the consequent is not true.

Affirming the consequent

If the antecedent is true then the consequent is true.

If you realize your keys are not where you thought they were, you must then use past information to determine the most likely place they could be. This would require what type of reasoning?

Inductive

Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated that people are often predictably

Irrational

Symbol Comprehension

Less able to interpret symbolic information Likely perform better with information (e.g., text and icons) that are (McDougall, Curry, and Bruijn 1999): More familiar (e.g., show icons they've seen before) Have a closer semantic distance (e.g., describe items sold/used/disposed on Clemson's campus) More concrete (e.g., make icons pictures of real -world items, instead of abstract, artistic renderings) Less visual complexity (e.g., minimize amount of information shown, while still given user what they need)

modus ponens (or Affirming the Antecedent)

Observe that the antecedent is true we can conclude that the consequent is true.

Modus tollens or denying the consequent

Observe that the consequent is false and conclude that the antecedent must be false.

Contrast sensitivity:

Older adults are less sensitive to contrast

Children are able to learn language rapidly and correctly using ___________.

One-shot learning

In this conditional syllogism 'IF P THEN Q,' the antecedent is:

P

Loss aversion

People are biased to avoid a loss over not gaining something equal (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). If a coin flip lands on heads, I give you $21. If it lands on tails, you give $20. EUT says "do it!" Since you'll win more than lose, on average, but most people won't. I have to nearly double my offer to $40 for most folks to take it, making the potential reward 2x the potential loss

If there's rain, then people will carry umbrellas. Choose the conclusion that applies modus tollens.

People aren't carrying umbrellas, therefore it isn't raining today.

Why do people rate tornadoes to be a greater cause of death than asthma when, in fact, asthma kills 20 times more people than tornadoes?

People have a tendency to rely on information that quickly comes to mind.

Expected Utility Hypothesis (EUT):

People tend to choose decisions that have the highest expected utility (aka value) Utility is determined by preferences, goals, dispositions, etc. ..but! Choices may be sometimes be suboptimal (not the highest utility) Can be described as "predictably irrational" (Kahneman & Tversky)

Confirmation Bias

People tend to interpret new information as supporting evidence for their existing belief People tend to seek confirmatory evidence

Belief Bias

People tend to judge the strength of an argument by examining likelihood of conclusion •we favor conclusions that align with our beliefs, values, knowledge • increases when decision making time is limited, decreases when time is not

Bottom-up attention capture

Physiological changes to perceptual system (e.g., decreased color discrimination) impairs exogenous attention capture

Inductive reasoning example

Premise: Dan wore several beige hats every class over the last three months. Conclusion: Dan owns only beige hats. Premise: Every time you eat peanuts, you cough. Conclusion: You are allergic to peanuts. Premise: The first, second, and third coin you pull out of your pocket is a penny. Conclusion: Therefore, every coin in your pocket is a penny.

People often do better in a Wason-card-like task if the rule they are checking involve:

Real life experiences

Working Memory

Reduced capacity for actively holding information in memory

What is the most basic form of deductive reasoning which involves drawing conclusions from two or more propositional statements?

Syllogisms

Two cognitive systems of for processing information

System 1: fast, parallel processing, automatic, unconscious (involuntary) System 2: slow, serial processing, effortful, conscious (voluntary)

Below is Griggs & Cox (1982) adapted version of Wason's decision task. Results indicated that participants had much easier time doing Griggs & Cox's version of the study. Why?

The task used more concrete information

Which of the following is known as modus ponens?

affirming the antecedent

Statistical syllogism

applying observations of group to an individual E.g., you meet Bob, and learn that he is a millennial. You assume that Bob is hardworking.

When making decisions, people tend to: (Select all that apply)

avoid a loss over not gaining something equal value what they own more than what they don't

Mental Models

cognitive representations of the real world Used to interpret what observations makes sense •Can be updated and refined Semantic meaning of syllogisms matters to reasoning: not just the logic of the argument

A fundamental distinction between deductive and inductive reasoning is that:

deduction starts with rules and induction infers rules from observations.

Which of the following is known as modus tollens?

denying the consequent

Resource availability

determines how much we rely on biases and heuristics. For example, time pressure: Less time available = more likely to rely on quick, low-effort heuristics More time available = more likely to effortfully evaluate alternatives

Expected Utility Hypothesis (EUT) suggests that people choose decisions that have the [BLANK 1] expected utility. Building on this idea, Kahneman and Tversky suggested that behavior is predictable and [BLANK 2].

highest; irrational

Anchoring Heuristic

initial information determines interpretation of future information.

Confirmation Bias refers to our tendency to:

interpret new info as supporting evidence for existing beliefs

One-shot learning refers to:

learning a concept from a single example.

A --------- model is the generation of visualizations of the sentences in a syllogism in which people mentally explore the sentences to see whether the model breaks down.

mental model

Glare sensitivity

older adults are more sensitive to glare Avoid: high gloss surfaces

Affect Heuristic

overestimate risk for events that produce high emotional reactions Sharks EG

Endowment effect

people are biased to value what they own more than what they don't (Knetsch, 1989) Task: Participants given a) a chocolate bar, b) a mug, or c) nothing. Participants then asked to choose whether they wanted the chocolate bar or a mug

Atmosphere effect

people tend to believe conclusions that matches the praises (language) of the premise Key Words: •Some •All

Argument from analogy

shared characteristics between two groups/things implies additional shared characteristics E.g., Bob has the same views as you on social and political issues. Therefore, it is likely that Bob likely has the same views as you on economic issues.

Color vision

similar cues are more difficult to differentiate Shorter wavelengths especially higher: Blues + Greens Fix: maximize contrast

Availability heuristic

tendency to rely on more readily available information Affects risk perception Participants rate causes of death that are more publicized as more common (e.g., auto accident vs drowning; Lichtenstein et al., 1978) People perceive auto accidents as more common, but drowning is 5x more common People who watch violent media rate violence as more prevalent (Riddle, 2010)

Syllogism

two premises and a conclusion

Representativeness Heuristic

we tend to compare information to a prototype, and ignore information that doesn't support that connection "Like goes with like" Ex: Linda is 31-years-old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations. Is Linda more likely to be a bank teller involved in the Feminist movement or just a bank teller Conjunction fallacy: tendency to underestimate the likelihood for a person to be A AND B, than A OR B Is Linda more likely to be a Bank Teller or a Philosophy Professor? Base-rate fallacy: tendency to underestimate probability of an event in favor of present evidence

To redesign signs we must think:

•How people use them •To determine how its used: consider how people perceive and think