Psychology Fair Game Final

Thinking and using knowledge

we’re not calculating everything

· We have a vocabulary of shapes o Geometrical “check” list
· Geons: cylinder, cube, funnel, etc à Objects comprised of these Geons: telephone, lamp, etc
· 1: cheese grater, 2: rectangular cube, 3 cylinder, 4 cone with top off, 5: macaroni noodle
· Impossible figures

Many categories are best described by familiar or typical examples
ie. airplane, bus, car

– thinking about one concept will activate, or prime, the concepts linked to it è Related to “priming” – reading or seeing a word makes it easier to think or recognize a related word

– tendency to read the words instead of saying the color of ink o GREEN, WHITE, BLUE

· Viewing a mental image is at least partly like real vision. · Perceiving an object is the same, even if viewed from 2 different perspectives. · If people visualize mental images, then the time it takes them to rotate a mental image should be similar to the time needed to rotate it.

Failure to detect changes in parts of a scene; magicians exploit this

Difficulty to shift attention from one stimulus to another;
Takes time to shift attention from one item to the next

· Some people develop expertise within a given field that enables them to solve problems quickly with a minimum of error, learn to apply appropriate algorithms quickly and recognize which heuristics work in a particular situation and which don’t.
· The people develop skills by practicing certain devices. This requires approx. 10 years of intense practice. Developing expertise expands the axons, dendrites, and probably cell bodies in the brain areas relevant to that skill.
· Practice of any skill improves performance of that skill, but we have no clear evidence that mental exercise improves performance of skills one has not practiced.
· Experts can also look at a pattern and recognize important features quickly.

· Algorithms: a mechanical, repetitive procedure for solving a problem or testing every hypothesis
· Heuristics: strategies for simplifying a problem and generating a satisfactory guess o i.e. when guessing the eldest child, guess the tallest, complicated ingredient is assumed unsafe, city with familiar name considered more populated, etc

· the assumption that an item that resembles members of some category is probably also in that category
· usually correct, except when dealing with unfamiliar categories

· The tendency to assume that if we easily think of examples of a category, then that category must be common. You remember reports of airplane crashes, than car crashes so you think air travel is more dangerous

· how common the two categories are
To decide whether something belongs in one category or another, you should consider the base-rate information—that is how common two categories are.

· Those who are more confident in making predictions/ answers are usually less correct