Cognitive Psychology Exam 4 / Final

a problem space is

all possible states of a problem given the allowed the operators

Wally and Sharon are out on a date. When Sharon asks Wally where they should go for dinner, Wally says "My coworkers keep telling me about that new Japanese place downtown, so it must be a great place to eat." Wally's response illustrates the use of a(n)

availability heuristic

the finding that people tend to incorrectly conclude that more people die from tornadoes than from lightning has been explained in terms of the:

availability heuristic

typical purpose of subgoals is to

bring the problem solver closer and closer to the goal state

expected utility is

expected gain from a decision

Holly was in her mother-in-law's kitchen preparing lunch for the family. When she was ready to dish up the soup, she searched all the cupboards and drawers for a ladle but couldn't find one. She decided to wait until her mother-in-law returned to ask her where the ladle was, leaving the soup in the stove pot. Her mother-in-law later explained that the ladle had been broken, so she told Holly to use a coffee mug to "spoon" the soup into bowls. Holly's ability to solve the "dish up the soup" problem was hindered by which of the following obstacles?

functional fixedness

experts categorize problems based on

general principles that problems share

every morning your mother comes into your room to yell at you to get out of bed. What kind of reasoning do you use to predict that she will probably do this again tomorrow morning?

inductive reasoning

Newell and simon (the information processing approach) called the conditions at the beginning of the problem the

initial state

Actions that take the problem from one state to another are known as

operators

Heuristics are

quick and dirty rules of thumb that usually provide acceptable answers

People are most successful at noticing an analogous relationship between problems if they focus on

structural features

the conjugation rule states that

the probability of two events co-occurring is equal to or less than the probability of either event occurring alone

in the duncker candle problem (affix a candle to a wall given some tacks and a box of matches), which condition produces the highest percent of participants correctly solving the problem

when the box is empty at the beginning of the task

In Kaplan and Simon's experiment, they presented different version of the mutilated checkerboard problem. Participants in the ___ group performed the best

words:bread and butter