What is Cognition?

1. What is Cognition? • Cognition is our ability to think… • Organize thoughts • Solve problems • Think rationally • Imagine an image in our mind • Construct sentences • Make decisions

2. How are our thoughts organized? • Recall: Schema • Mental framework to help us organize thoughts • Popular Schemas (aka Schemata): • School- What does this include? What is expected of you? How does it look? • Others? • “Concepts” are examples of schemata

3. How are our thoughts organized? • Concepts • Mental categories for classifying specific people, things, or events • Allow us to group new experiences with old ones… Like placing all socks (soccer socks, ankle socks, stockings) into one drawer • Prototypes- a member of a concept with the most typical features • Can help us to make quick decisions about new experiences.. Does it fit into this concept because it resembles the stereotype? • “Protypical” genius… does the jock “align”? • Stereotypes?

4. Concepts and Prototypes • Which do you see as the most “typical” example of the concept dog?

5. Schema: Pets • Includes: • Responsibility, dog, cat, hamster, pet store, walks, feeding, etc. • Based on your experiences as well as understanding you’ve gained from elsewhere (i.e. society) • Concept of “dog” appears in your schema of pet, and functions as a schema of its own.

6. Part 1: Decision Making Journal: • What are some decisions you’ve had to make recently? • How do you go about making decisions? • For example, are you more emotional or rational? Does it depend? What factors influence this? • Are you “good” at making decisions? Example?

7. Decision-Making Activity What factors govern our decision-making and what thoughts accompany these decisions? • BBC: How You Really Make Decisions • NPR: Paralysis by Analysis (Jonah Lehrer) • Ted Talks: The Paradox of Choice (Schwartz) • Ted Talks: Why do we Make Bad Decisions? (Gilbert)

8. BBC: How You Really Make Decisions First, answer these three questions: • (1) A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? _____ cents • (2) If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? _____ minutes • (3) In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake? _____ days

9. BBC: How You Really Make Decisions • Cognitive Reflection Test • How does this test reveal the conflict between System 1 and 2? • Cognitive Bias • There are approximately 150 cognitive biases that affect our ability to make decisions. • Research these biases, select five that are most relevant or interesting to you, and come up with examples.

10. BBC: How You Really Make Decisions • Other points from the documentary: • Loss aversion is a powerful force in determining how we take risks • Inattentional blindness can cause us to miss major events in our environment • Can miss major factors that may influence decision-making • Priming can affect our decision making (ping pong balls) • Negotiating house price? What we are willing to pay for tickets or items?

11. NPR: Paralysis by Analysis (Jonah Lehrer) • Physiological mechanisms: • Dopamine • Where is the reward? Patterns, etc. • Amygdala • Emotion- the “elephant” • Frontal Cortex • Executive Functioning- the “charioteer” • Impulse vs. PFC control- Emotion vs. Rationality? • Overloading working memory and exhausting mental resources • Exhausting our PFC • Limited capacity • Amount of information is overwhelming

12. Ted Talks: The Paradox of Choice (Schwartz) • Choice doesn’t lead to more welfare • Increases: • Dissatisfaction • Counterfactual thinking • Blame/guilt • Expectations, leading to more let-down- • “Everyone needs a fish bowl”

13. Ted Talks: Why do we Make Bad Decisions? (Gilbert) • Errors in decision-making • Over- or under- estimating odds and value • Terrible at assessing value and predicting future pain/pleasure

14. Decision-Making: What factors should we keep in mind in the future? Brainstorm with a partner and answer questions #2 and #3.

15. Decisions-making strategies: Keep these in mind and employ them in *appropriate* scenarios • Compensatory Model • Rational decision-making model in which choices are systematically evaluated on various criteria • i.e. pros and cons, ratings • Deciding on college.. What else? • Non-compensatory • “going with your gut” • Role of emotion/intuition • Not willing to allow one feature your decision “make up for” another, lacking feature of your decision • Deciding on cheeseburger or nachos… what else?

16. Decision-making shortcuts- Beware!!! • Representativeness • A heuristic by which a new situation is judged on the basis of its resemblance to a stereotypical model • Who is sensitive, smart, and creative: football player or stage actor? • Availability (recall: Dr. Gilbert) • A judgment or decision is based on information that is most easily retrieved from memory • How fresh is something in your mind? • Are there more words that start with “r” or have “r” as the third letter? (3:40) • Jackie was cruel to you three weeks ago but did you a favor yesterday… which is more “available”?

17. Other factors that influence our decisions and judgments- Beware! • Confirmation Bias • The tendency to look for evidence in support of a belief and to ignore evidence that would disprove this believe. • “All short people have “Napoleon Complexes” • Other stereotypes?? • Framing • Perspective or phrasing of information that is used to make a decision (how it is presented) “This contraceptive is 90% effective” vs. “You have a 1 in 10 chance of getting pregnant” • You are at risk of losing something vs. have the opportunity to gain something? (i.e. gambling)

18. Decisions Under Pressure • Stress causes decision making to deteriorate • Training under emergency situations is critical to prepare people for efficient and effective decision making in unanticipated situations • Emotion can also hinder decisions • Amygdala is active! It is up to your frontal lobe to calm it down!

19. Explaining Our Decisions... And dealing with the consequences • Hindsight bias: • Tendency to view outcomes as inevitable and predictable after we know the outcome and to believe we could have or did predict what happened • “Hindsight is 20:20” • Counterfactual thinking (recall: Schwartz) • Imagined alternatives… “If only….” • Attempts to reverse a course of events that led to a negative experience; explaining atypical or abnormal events, etc to regain sense of control” • RESIST THE TEMPTATION! It’s natural.

20. What Happens When We Are Wrong? • Overconfidence • we are more confident about our thoughts and our experiences than we should be • Increased by our trust in “intuition”- fast, unreasoned, automatic feeling. We don’t want to doubt our intuition, because what’s the consequence? • Belief perseverance • we cling to what we originally believed and have difficulties accepting opposite truths, even when we are “proven wrong” • Justification (recall: BBC and choice blindness) • Whether it’s conscious or not, we justify our decisions- think back to choice blindness!

21. Part 2: Problem-Solving • How do we solve problems? • How should we solve problems? • Essential steps include: • Interpretation of cause of problem • Strategy to appropriately address the cause with a relevant solution • Evaluation of the solution

22. Interpretation of the Problem • Problem Representation • Step 1: Interpreting or defining the problem • What is the cause of this issue? • I.E. Gun violence in the U.S.; Education inequality; Chronic fatigue • Step 2: Verbal vs. Visual • How can I approach this problem? Should I write it down? Draw a picture? Chart? Graph? Web? • I.E. Identifying correlations between murderers, weapons, SES background, mental health- VISUALLY • Gaining expertise consists of your ability to represent and categorize problems so that they can be solved quickly and effectively • i.e. calling football plays, making chess moves, etc… you can practice!!!

23. Now for the solving: Strategies • Trial and error • Works best when there are a limited amount of choices otherwise it is too time consuming • i.e. trying different keys to open a lock • Information retrieval • recalling how problems were solved in the past.. Can help or hinder! (i.e. “Mental Sets”) • i.e. how do other countries solve violence issues? • **problem: could the issue be the result of something different? Back to problem representation.

24. Strategies (cont.) • Algorithms • guarantees a solution but can be tedious • Heuristics- rules of thumb/ “short-cuts”; no guaranteed solution • Subgoals- break problem into small, more manageable parts • Hill climbing- moving towards goal (process of elimination) • Means-end analysis- looking at the whole picture; more flexible than hill-climbing • Working backward- knowing goal and working backwards from there (i.e. getting somewhere on time)

25. Obstacles to Problem-Solving • Motivation to solve a problem a certain way (or lack of emotion all together) • Emotional Arousal • Mental Set- our tendency to approach a problem in a certain way but that excludes different approaches to a problem • Need flexibility!! • Functional Fixedness- assigned meaning to a problem **Abandoning the problem for a while may lead to insight upon return (i.e. Incubation)

26. Return to your Worksheet! • What problem solving devices did you use? • What obstacles did you encounter? • Other real world examples? • How can you use this to make better decisions in the future?