PSYCHOLOGY

1. PSYCHOLOGY Chapter 8 Thinking and Language

2. Thinking • Cognitive Psychology • the study of these mental activities • concept formation, problem solving • decision making and judgement formation • study of both logical and illogical thinking

3. Thinking • Concept • mental grouping of similar objects, events, or people • address • country, city, street, house • zip codes

4. Concept Formation Write down on your paper every thing that you see.

5. In the picture was there: Yes No An automobile? A man? A woman? A child? An animal? A whip? A sword? A man’s hat? A ball? A fish?

6. Thinking • Prototype • the best example of a category • matching new items to the prototype provides a quick and easy method for including items in a category. Or this?

7. Thinking (Problem Solving) • Algorithm • methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem • contrasts with the usually speedier – but also more error-prone use of heuristics

8. Thinking (Problem Solving) • Heuristic • rule-of-thumb strategy that often allows us to make judgements and solve problems efficiently • usually speedier than algorithms • more error-prone than algorithms • sometimes we’re unaware of using heuristics

9. Thinking (Problem Solving) Unscramble S P L O Y O C H Y G • Algorithm • all 907,208 combinations • Heuristic • throw out all YY combinations

10. Heuristics • Representativeness Heuristic • rule of thumb for judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes • may lead one to ignore other relevant information

11. Representativeness Heuristics A stranger tells you about a person who is short, slim, and likes to read poetry, and then asks you to guess whether this person is more likely to be a professor of classics at an Ivy League university or a truck driver. Which would be the better guess?

12. Heuristics • Availability Heuristic • estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory • if instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), we presume such events are common • Example: airplane crash

13. Availability Heuristics Does the letter K appear more often as the first letter or third letter in English usage? know, kingdom, and kin make, likely, asked, acknowledged

14. Thinking (Problem Solving) Do you see a pattern? 4 9 2 3 5 7 8 1 6 They all add up to 15

15. Thinking (Problem Solving) • Insight • sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem • contrasts strategy-based solutions Wolfgang Kohler’s experiment on insight by a chimpanzee

16. Obstacles to Problem Solving • Confirmation Bias • tendency to search for information that confirms one’s preconceptions

17. Confirmation Bias USC, ASU, PENN STATE, PRINCETON, UCSB, UCR, CSULB, CAL POLY SLO, CSUF, AZUSA PACIFIC, UCSD, UCI, CAL POLY POMONA, NAU, PALOMAR JC, SADDLEBACK JC, IRVINE VALLEY JC, BETHANY, POINT LOMA COLLEGE , EMORY COLLEGE, Mt. SJ JC

18. Obstacles to Problem Solving • Belief Bias • the tendency for one’s preexisting beliefs to distort logical reasoning • sometimes by making invalid conclusions seem valid, or valid conclusions seem invalid

19. Obstacles to Problem Solving • Belief Perseverance • clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited

20. Obstacles to Problem Solving • Overconfidence • tendency to be more confident than correct • tendency to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs and judgements

21. Obstacles to Problem Solving • Mental Set • tendency to approach a problem in a particular way - a way that has been successful in the past but may or may not be helpful in solving a new problem

22. Obstacles to Problem Solving • Fixation • inability to see a problem from a new perspective APPSYCH NOTES

23. The Matchstick Problem • How would you arrange six matches to form four equilateral triangles?

24. The Matchstick Problem Solution to the matchstick problem

25. The Three-Jugs Problem Using jugs A, B, and C with the capacities shown, how would you measure out the volumes indicated?

26. The Three-Jugs Problem Given jugs of these sizes: Measure out this much water: Problem A B C 1 21 127 3 100 2 14 46 5 22 3 18 43 10 5 4 7 42 6 23 5 20 57 4 29 6 23 49 3 20 7 15 39 3 18

27. The Three-Jugs Problem Solution a) All seven problems can be solved by the equation shown in (a): B-A-2C= desired volume. b) But simpler solutions exist for problems 6 and 7, such as A-C for problem 6.

28. Obstacles to Problem Solving • Functional Fixedness • tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions

29. The Candle-Mounting Problem Using these materials, how would you mount the candle on a bulletin board?

30. The Candle-Mounting Problem Solving this problem requires recognizing that a box need not always serve as a container

31. Fun with Problem Solving What number is next? 10, 4, 3, 11, 15,… a. 14 b. 1 c. 17 d. 12 The maker doesn’t want it, the buyer doesn’t use it, and the user doesn’t see it. What is it? What is so unusual about the sentence below? “Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz.” Something extraordinarily unusual happened on May 6, 1978 at 12:34 pm. What was it? What occurs once in every minute, twice in every moment, yet never in a thousand years? Can you translate the following? YYURYYUBICURYY4ME

32. Fun with Problem Solving You are walking in the desert and find a man Lying face down with a pack on his back, dead. How did he die? A man walks into a bar and asks the bartender for a glass of water. The bartender reaches under the bar, pulls out a large pistol, and points it right in the man’s face. The man says “thank you” and turns and walks out of the bar. Why did the man say “thank you”? A man is a work and wants to go home. However, he will not go home because a man wearing a mask is waiting there for him. What does the first man do for a living?

33. Move only one glass to have them arranged so that full and empty glasses alternate.

34. 26=L of the A7 = W of the W1001 = A.N.12 = S. of the Z.54 = C in the D (w/ the J)9 = P. in the S.S.88 = P.K.13 = S. on the A.F.18 = H. on a G.C.4 = Q. in a G.3 = B.M. (S.H.T.R.)24 = H. in a D.57 = H.V.11 = P. on a F.T.1000 = W. that a P. is W.29 = D. in F. in a L.Y.

35. PSYCHOLOGY Chapter 8 Thinking and Language

36. Thinking • Incubation – a period of time during which active searching for a problem’s solution is set aside; sometimes necessary for a successful solution of the problem

37. Thinking • Brainstorming • A group problem-solving technique in which participants generate as many solutions to a problem as possible by building upon others’ ideas and disregarding whether solutions are practical.

38. Thinking • Framing • the way an issue is posed • how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgements • Example: What is the best way to market ground beef - As 25% fat or 75% lean?

39. The Buddhist Monk ProblemExactly at sunrise one morning, a Buddhist monk set out to climb a tall mountain. The narrow path was not more than a foot or two wide, and it wound around the mountain to a beautiful, glittering temple at the mountain peak.The monk climbed the path at varying rates of speed. He stopped many times along the way to rest and to eat the fruit he carried with him. He reached the temple just before sunset. At the temple, he fasted and meditated for several days. Then he began his journey back along the same path, starting at sunrise and walking, as before, at variable speeds with many stops along the way. However, his average speed going down the hill was greater than his average climbing speed. Prove that there must be a spot along the path that the monk will pass on both trips exactly the same time of day.

40. Monk B The Buddhist Monk ProblemMonk “A”, who starts climbing up the mountain in the morning, and Monk “B”, who starts climbing down at the same time, showing that at some point in time they are both at the same place on the mountain, just as the monk, in the “monk and the mountain” problem is, during his ascent and descent. Where Monk A and B pass each other Monk A

41. The Hobbits and the Orcs Problem

42. How about this…Solution to the hobbits-and-orcs problem. Each trip indication on the left (trip 1, trip 2, etc.) indicates the number of hobbits and orcs that remain after the trip. The hobbits and orcs in the next row down indicate how many hobbits and orcs there are each time the boat comes back.

43. There are numerous cognitive barriers to mastering problem-solving. The primary difficulty for many students is the inability to identify and use concepts and procedures in analogous but novel situations. The lack of transfer of structure between problems is a significant cognitive difficulty, not only for inexperienced problem-solvers but also for experts. Successful transfer rests on the ability to recognize analogies, but even when given an analogy, students often fail to see how to employ it. In order to understand this phenomenon more concretely, consider the following problem:

44. The structure of this problem follows the general pattern common to all problems. It has a set of facts (tumor, radiation, tissue) and unknowns (ways to administer radiation), together with relationships between them (radiation destroys tumor and tissue). A patient has a cancerous tumor. Beams of radiation will destroy the tumor, but in high doses will also destroy healthy tissue surrounding the tumor. How can you use radiation to safely eradicate the tumor?

45. A story from a movie just like, but not exactly like, Enchanted… A fortress surrounded by a moat is connected to land by numerous narrow bridges. An attacking army successfully captures the fortress by sending only a few soldiers across each bridge, converging upon it simultaneously.

46. Gick and Holyoak (1983) gave volunteers the story below and then asked them to solve the tumor problem. A fortress surrounded by a moat is connected to land by numerous narrow bridges. An attacking army successfully captures the fortress by sending only a few soldiers across each bridge, converging upon it simultaneously.

47. The story and the problem have exactly the same logical structure, but only a small percentage of subjects were able to solve the tumor problem after being told the story. The solution is to bombard the tumor from different directions with low-intensity radiation so as not to harm healthy tissue. The convergence of the beams at the tumor provides sufficient intensity to destroy it. Only when the subjects were overtly prompted to use the story as an analogy to help them solve the problem were most of them able to solve it. The inability to transfer in the absence of prompting may be one of the greatest hurdles for student and instructor.

48. Language

49. Language • Human Language • our spoken, written, or gestured words and the way we combine them to communicate meaning • by putting together sounds and symbols according to specialized rules, we share ideas, information, and feelings with others

50. Language • Phoneme • in a spoken language, the smallest distinctive sound unit ch – a – t Our English language has some 40 – 50 Phonemes