Cognitive Psychology: Exam 4

Highly creative people are...

intelligent, hard working, lucky, ignores criticism, tolerates ambiguity, highly skilled in a specific domain, takes risks, intrinsically motivated, resistant to conformity. "Creativity is just connecting things." -Steve Jobs

Confirmation Bias

we pay attention to and remember information that confirms our beliefs. Tendency to protect our beliefs. Perseverance bias: when disconfirming information is presented and we don't use it.

4 Stages of Creativity

1. preparation: gathers information about problem 2. incubation: sets problem aside as if they're not working on it 3. illumination (aha!): new idea/key insight emerges 4. verification: confirms that the new idea leads to a solution and works out the details Creativity doesn't work in these stages. Stage 3 is a myth because key insights happen throughout mini-insights and involve complex patterns.

Anchoring Heuristic

anchoring our judgments on our previous beliefs/information. When previous judgments affect how much we adjust for new information. e.g. the order of questions can change the answer. "are you dating? how happy are you?" vs. "how happy are you? are you dating?"

Availability Heuristic

assessing frequency in terms of memorability is efficient. What you have available in your memory. Things that are more frequent are easier to remember (more available for your brain). More vivid/detailed statements are easier to remember. Makes people overestimate based on what they hear more often. Availability is substituted for frequency.

Processing fluency

Awareness of processing fluency qualifies as qualia. Noticeable but subtle, and it has a private sensation. Part of our subjective qualitative awareness. The availability heuristic illustrates how we are sensitive to fluency (judgment and decision making).

Attribute Substitution

A strategy of using easily available information that might be a plausible substitution for the information you seek

Word recognition and the unconscious

CQRN vs. CORN. frequent letter combos are more strongly coded than infrequent ones. The visual system makes mistakes but the gains usually outweigh the losses in accuracy. Unaware that their perception is due to unconscious inference based on frequent letter combination and the stimulus that was actually shown.

IQ Tests

Experts explain them to be the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience. Not the same as "book learning" or "test taking smarts". Standard way for defining intelligence.

Fluid vs. Crystalized Intelligence (the 2 different types of intelligence)

Fluid= ability to deal with new or unusual problems. Decreases with age. Crystalized= acquired knowledge; grows with age; includes verbal knowledge and your range of skills. Alcohol, fatigue, and depression have a negative effect on fluid intelligence, and less so with crystalized because with crystalized intelligence you are experienced with your skills because they take time to develop.

Gender differences and Intelligence

Flynn effect: IQ scores have been rising 3 points per decade, worldwide. This change involves fluid intelligence. Mens scores are more variable and men do slightly better at math. Also slightly better with navigation and spatial tasks. Women do better with verbal tasks.

Genetic factors and Intelligence

Identical twins resemble each others IQ, whereas fraternal twins don't resemble each other as much. As genetic similarity drops, intelligence scores also drop. Opportunities increase IQ

Belief Bias (Valid Syllogisms)

If the syllogism matches something people already believe to be true, then they are more likely to judge the conclusion to be true (and vice versa with false information.) If the 2nd statement seems less valid to you, you are being affected by belief bias. "If all good people are religious, that doesn't mean that all religious people are good"

Base Rate

Information about how frequent something happens. Often ignored, which leads to judgment error because the representative heuristic takes over. Base rate could go away if used in terms of frequencies instead of percentages. 12 times every 1000 vs. 1.2% of the time

Visual imagery

It is easy to rely on mental images to solve problems e.g., Bookworm problem (visualize "cover to cover")

Analogies and problem solving

Mapping out and making connections with things we already know. Makes concepts easier to understand. e.g., teaching students about atoms by using the solar system Helpful with deep-structure problems because analogies help get past the surface characteristics. Experts use analogies because of their problem solving abilities that non-experts are unaware of.

Unconsciousness

Mental processes that is inaccessible to consciousness. Influences behavior, feelings and judgments. Automatic, concerned with here and now, multiple systems. A habitual system. Frees you up to do other things, which adds speed to your mental life. You don't need executive control. Downfalls: inflexible, not subject to control, and relies on familiarity and habits.

Consciousness

Mental states/events that involve awareness. The products of mental activities we are not necessarily aware of. Controlled, flexible, slower to develop, sensitive to positive info. Uses executive control because it helps direct your mental processes, goal planning, goal setting, rise above habit, and avoid responding to cues/triggers for habitual responding.

Hill climbing

Moves you toward your goal, but sometimes moving away from the goal is better in this case because it is helping you get closer to the goal. A problem solving heuristic. Hobbit and Orc example

Convergent thinking

Not creative thinking. Takes things that people think are different and brings them together. e.g., "sea, home, stomach= sick"

Why do people's decisions not conform with utility theory, and are affected by framing, and how outcomes are described, e.g., as potential gains or losses

People differ with how they make choices (risk seeker vs. risk averse). But, if problems are framed (worded) differently then they have different outcomes. Frame the question in terms of deaths and people are inconsistent with their choices. The wording changed how people decided. People became risk-seeking when the question was framed in terms of losses but when there are gains people are risk-averse.

Wason 4-card problem

People need to be able to relate it to a real world social problem

Practical and emotional intelligence

Practical: needed for skilled reasoning, used every day. Emotional: the ability to understand your emotions and others emotions, and the ability to control your emotions.

System 1 vs. System 2 (dual process model)

System 1: fast, automatic, uses heuristics (e.g., intuitive-experiential thinking) System 2: slow, effortful thinking that may be more correct (e.g., rational thinking) Triggered by certain cues and is only used if the person is willing to expand the effort and attention on a judgment task.

Why are analogies underused?

They are rarely used because without detailed instruction to draw an analogy, people don't know how to piece it together. People understand more clearly when they are told to understand the underlying dynamic rather than the superficial traits of the problem.

G and working memory

Working memory= ability to control thoughts, coordinate priorities, avoid distractions, override impulses, and proceed in a deliberate manner when making judgments or solving problems- it's linked to G.

Representativeness Heuristic

based on personal views and judgements and not basing judgements on frequent or recent memories. Works best when the category involved has little variability. You can attribute the wrong ideas based on stereotypes. Implies that each sub-set of the category has the same properties of the overall category. e.g. "Man-who" arguments (basing your judgment on a tiny sample)

Environment factors and Intelligence

children adopted from an abusive environment and then put into a better environment showed improvement in their scores.

Means-end analysis

comparing your current state to the goal state. Ask "what means do I have to make the current state and the goal state more alike?" Doing this, breaks the problem down into subsets of problems, making it easier to solve.

Subjective Utility

each choice has a value, and each choice has different weights. Every choice has a benefit, and a downfall.

Affective Forecasting

emotions are involved in making intuitive predictions about the future. People overestimate how much they'll regret making an error, and are more prone to regret avoidance than they should be, so they work to avoid things that will not end up being that bad.

Workspace Neurons

neural connections between different areas of the brain. Example: if you see a moving red ball, it doesn't activate the whole workspace. The brain constructs multiple drafts, and competition is created between different brain processes/activity patterns, and the winner (the most active process) is broadcasted to the other brain areas. Attention helps select what processes win the competition, so, essentially, attention can control the information flow. This integrated activity made possible by the workspace neurons is the basis of consciousness. So, consciousness coordinates and integrates the activity of distinct processing modules into a unitary representation.

Framing and the unconscious

people are unaware of the guiding effect that framing has on decision making. Framing leads people to make inconsistent decisions. The mere wording of the problem can change what choice people make. Asian disease problem: in terms of saving people or people dying, people changed their answer even though the outcome was the same number.

False fame/source confusion and the unconscious

people are unaware that some of the names on the celebrity list were on the first list (fake celebrity experiment with normal people) They also are unaware that their judgments are being influenced by their memory of the pictures, and not the real event (fake criminal experiment with police line-up)

Multiple intelligences

psychometric= linguistic, logical-mathematical, and spatial. Also includes other intelligences like musical, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalistic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal. People like it because it celebrates peoples talents, but intelligence isn't exactly about talent.

Qualia

subjective experiences; arises from stimulation of the senses by phenomena.

Somatic markers

the gut feeling you get when you should avoid a dangerous decision

Misattributing pain and the unconscious

the reasons we give for our behavior are not always right because we are not always aware of the unconscious mental processes that are involved. Our reasoning can be incorrect because we don't have all the information for why we're feeling what we're feeling.

Functional fixedness

the tendency to be rigid in how you think about an objects function. e.g., the box of tacks example, because some people don't think to dump the tacks out of the box and use it as the shelf for the candle.

Problem solving sets

unnoticed assumptions and definitions that guide the search for a solution. e.g., "outside the box" example, because we didn't notice that we could make the lines outside the box to connect the dots because our problem solving set interfered. Beneficial in a sense that they give us an idea of what's plausible, but can also lead to functional fixedness because it blinds us to useless strategies.

Divergent thinking

using something for different purposes. Generates creative ideas by exploring many solutions. Creative thinking

Memory and the Unconscious

when we remember things we weave together genuine memories with other elements that are just inferences or assumptions (Office experiment). We draw on general, schematic knowledge when we are remembering. The "weaving together" CAN be a good thing BUT can also result in error, like in the office experiment. We can't distinguish between memory recall and memory reconstruction.

Illusory Correlation

when we think 2 things are related but they aren't. Can be biased by base rates(info about how frequently something happens in general) e.g., "dishonesty is cross-situational". it isn't. Might cheat in school, won't cheat in sports.

General Intelligence or "g"

would provide an advantage on any mental test. g is just an average of things you're good at and things you're not good at. Support for G: people who do well on intelligence test typically do well on the sub-tests and vice versa. But G is not the only factor because some people have unique profiles and some people may be better at verbal tasks than they are math tasks, or vice versa.