COGNITION THOUGHT Introduction What is Cognitive Psychology Cognitive

COGNITION: THOUGHT

Introduction What is Cognitive Psychology?

Cognitive Psychology Assumptions

Concept Formation • Concepts: • Concept Formation:

Concept Formation • Classification: • “fuzzy concepts”

Concept Formation and Stereotyping • Our natural tendency to form concepts and categorize leads to stereotyping • Only solution is to educate

Problem Solving • Problem solving – Confronting and resolving situations that require insight or determination of some unknown elements

How do we solve new Problems? • Learning Theory • Gestalt Theory • Information-Processing Theory

Figure 7. 2 Stages in Problem Solving

Approaches to Problem Solving • Algorithm – Strategy involving applying a set of rules until the problem is solved. – Guarantees a correct solution. – Impractical due to lack of rules in most situations and time demands.

Approaches to Problem Solving • Heuristic – Strategy that involves the use of flexible guidelines (rules of thumb) – Does not guarantee a correct solution – Efficient

Barriers to Problem Solving • Functional Fixedness • Mental Set

Creative Problem Solving • Creativity: – generating ideas that are original, novel, and appropriate. – Original responses: – Novel responses – Appropriate responses

Ways of Thinking Convergent Thinking • Example:

Ways of thinking Divergent thinking • Example:

Reasoning & Decision Making

REASONING • Reasoning = – purposeful process – Allows us to: - Formal vs. informal

REASONING Formal Informal

LOGIC Logic: Tools • Deductive Reasoning • Inductive Reasoning

DECISION MAKING • Decision making: • Trivial or complex

Uncertainty: Estimating Probabilities • Decisions can be based on: (a) formal logic (b) hypothesis, testing (c) an educated guess Educated Guess:

Educated Guess Problems with Estimating Probabilities • Because of their mood or lack of attention, people may act irrationally, ignore key data, and make bad decisions

Barriers to Good Decision Making Gambler’s Fallacy: The belief that an event is more likely to occur if it has not recently occurred

Barriers to Good Decision Making Belief in small numbers Decision based on a small number of observations

Barriers to Good Decision Making Availability heuristic Judging the probability of an event based on how easy it is to think of examples of it

Barriers to Good Decision Making Overconfidence Being so committed to one’s own ideas that one is often more confident than correct

Barriers to Good Decision Making Confirmation bias People cling to beliefs despite contradictory evidence

Barriers to Good Decision Making Fallacy of Composition: Belief that what is true of the parts is also true of the whole

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Artificial Intelligence - definition • Artificial intelligence – a field that draws on concepts from both cognitive psychology and computer science to develop artificial systems that display some aspects of human-like intelligence

Limitations of AI • Well-defined and ill-defined problems • Lack of common sense • Lack of creativity

Neural Networks • Various bits of information are stored in different parts of the brain • A convergence zone

Neural Networks: Hierarchical Network Model • Assumes a hierarchy in which a particular word is stored under the higher order category that subsumes it, which in turn is stored under a yet higher category • EXAMPLE:

Neural Networks: Parallel distributed processing • parallel distributed processing (PDP) • PDP involves many operations taking place at the same time in various parts of the brain