COGNITION: THOUGHT

COGNITION: THOUGHT


Concept Formation

•

Concepts
:


•

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 So
lving

•

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


Approaches to Problem Solving

•

Algori
thm

–

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.


•


•

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 respo
nses


–

Appropriate responses


Ways of Thinking

Convergent Thinking




•

Example:



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 e
vent is more likely to occur if it has not recently occurred



Belief in small numbers


Decision based on a small number of observations




Availability heuristic


Judging the probability of an event based on how easy it is to think of examples of it



Ove
rconfidence



Being so committed to one’s own ideas that one is often more confident than correct



Confirmation bias


People cling to beliefs despite contradictory evidence



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 int
elligence



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 Netw
ork 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 proc
essing

(PDP)

•

PDP involves many operations taking place at the same time in various parts of the
brain