controlled cognition + willpower

effortful disbelief

Believe things by default, need to use controlled cognition to assess whether it is true/false Descartes: 1. Comprehension 2. Disbelief/belief Spinoza: 1: Comprehension = belief 2. Disbelief

action vs. omission

Killing vs Letting Die → action vs. omission Same situations essentially, but different reactions to both: one is illegal, the other is a constitutional right DLPFC: when people read about negation, ppl have to use cognitive control Active killing activates an automatic moral judgment, letting die requires more of an active judgment

Beta-Delta Model

Mixture of the step function that cares about the present, and exponential function that cares about the future - instincts/habits control decisions in the present - controlled cognition controls decisions in the future

controlled cognition

Thinking that occurs in our conscious awareness, deliberately considering an issue or idea.

strategy: change structure of today

Use capacity for planning to reconstruct the environment to remove temptation

push polling

a polling technique in which the questions are designed to shape the respondent's opinion

confirmation bias

a tendency to search for information that confirms one's preconceptions

learning goals

achievements that are motivated by the desire to enhance one's knowledge and skills * success + failure --> approach

strategy: make temptation hurt

bind temptation with negative stimuli; align immediate self interest with long-term interest

delay of gratification

declining a pleasant activity now in order to get greater pleasure later

Stroop Effect

delay in reaction time when color of words on a test and their meaning differ - reliance on habituated word reading routines that we have used for years

affective forecasting

efforts to predict one's emotional reactions to future events

availability heuristic

estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory; taking ease of access as fact of matter - focus on what is available rather than what is harder to retrieve

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

What is controlled cognition good for?

flexibility

performance goals

goals framed in terms of performing well in front of others, being judged favorably, and avoiding criticism * success --> approach * failure --> avoid

temporal discounting

in decision making, the greater weight given to the present over the future * exponential discounting is rational, but humans display hyperbolic discounting * Today we make choices about our lives tomorrow. Tomorrow, we'll have changed our minds

reversal learning

learning that a previously rewarded stimulus or response is no longer rewarded

Control is required for negation, but

most of the world struggles to apply cognitive control when it comes to negation

why is willpower hard?

motivation: opportunity costs

strategy: reshape automatic responses

negation is more difficult -- higher rates of choosing the default option

exogneous

outside of you, dictates response to a stimulus

implementation intentions

people's specific plans about where, when, and how they will fulfill a goal

controlled judgment

processing what didn't happen

automatic judgment

processing what happened

endogenous

produced from within -- inside of you, dictating your behaviors unlike having a stimulus in front of you

u-index

proportion of time an individual spends in an unpleasant state

A-not-B error

tendency of 8- to 12-month-olds to search for a hidden object where they previously found it even after they have seen it moved to a new location - Difference between innate mechanisms and learned mechanisms that require controlled cognition to focus attention on an external stimulus/task

future thinking is driven by

the DLPFC: model-based learning, cognitive control

stimulus response learning

the ability to learn to perform a particular behavior when a particular stimulus is present ex. rote memorization of simple multiplication

cognitive load

the amount of mental activity imposed on working memory * more cognitive load = more aligned with stimulus right in front of you

willpower

the self-control strength used to overcome counterproductive impulses to achieve difficult goals

present thinking is driven by

the ventral striatum: model-free reinforcement learning

dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)

upper portion of the prefrontal cortex thought to be important in cognitive control * Removal of the DLPFC makes monkeys act like infants in the A not B task

conjunction fallacy

when people think that two events are more likely to occur together than either individual event; probability of the conjunction of two events cannot be higher than each event on its own