Cognition

1. Cognition • mental activities associated with thinking, reasoning, knowing, remembering, and communicating

2. Thinking • Occurs on three levels: • conscious processes • thinking we are consciously aware of • sub-conscious processes • thinking which lies just outside of our consciousness • helps prevent overload • non-conscious processes • thinking which occurs outside and is not available to our conscious awareness • why things “pop into our head”

3. Elements of Thinking • Concept • mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people (category) • Prototype • mental image or best example of a concept (category)

4. Types of Thinking • Reasoning • Purposeful mental activity that involves operating on information in order to reach conclusions or problem-solve.

5. Formal Reasoning based on specific knowledge and information with one single best answer algorithm: step by step procedures that guarantee a solution Informal Reasoning possible solutions based on personal experience and things familiar with heuristic: a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgements I before e except after C dialectical reasoning: pros and cons of a situation Types of Reasoning

6. Types of Reasoning • Insight (Intuition) • sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem • Critical Thinking

7. Barriers to Reasoning • Confirmation Bias • tendency to search for information that confirms one’s preconceptions • Fixation • inability to see a problem from a new perspective • Functional Fixedness • tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions

8. Barriers to Reasoning • Exaggerating the Improbable • inclination to exaggerate the probability of very rare events • Hindsight Bias • “I knew it all the time”

9. Barriers to Reasoning • Representativeness Heuristic • judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes

10. Barriers to Reasoning • Availability Heuristic • estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory

11. Barriers to Reasoning • Overconfidence • tendency to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs and judgments • Framing • how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments

12. Barriers to Reasoning • Belief Perseverance • clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited