Unit 7B Flashcards
Creativity
The ability to produce novel and valuable ideas.
Three storage areas of memory
sensory memory, short-term memory, long-term memory
What could keep someone from problem solving? (4 terms)
-Confirmation Bias
-Hindsight Bias
-Belief Perseverance
-Framing
Belief Perseverance
The tendency to maintain ones beliefs even in the face of evidence that contradicts them.
EX: People who are atheists will hold strong to the belief even when evidence of God is clearly presented.
Confirmation Bias
The tendency to only seek out information that supports one position or idea. We will ignore evidence that doesn’t support our beliefs.
Hindsight bias
Our tendency to look back at an event and think it was easily predictable.
EX: after attending a baseball game, you might insist that you knew that the winning team was going to win beforehand.
Framing
The cognitive bias in which people decide between options based on whether they are presented with positive or negative connotations.
EX: People are more likely to pick the yogurt that says 80% fat free then one that says 20% fat even though they are the same.
How does functional fixedness limit ones ability to problem solve?
It causes a person to look at a problem only in a specific way.
Four components of memory
Encoding, consolidation, storage, retrieval
Consolidation
How short term memories turn into long term
Ex. if you repeat something over and over, your more likely to remember it
Sensory memory is the gateway between…
Perception and memory
Echoic Memory
Ability of the ears to store info for 3-4 seconds
Iconic Memory
Ability of the eyes to store info for a few tenths of a second
What is the insight solution to problem solving?
When a “light” turns on and you suddenly know the solution to the problem.
Representativeness Heuristics
A mental shortcut that we use when estimating probabilities
EX: Thinking that someone wearing a suit and carrying a brief case is automatically a lawyer.
George Sperling and his row and columns with letters experiment thingy
Basically, Sperling conducted an experiment in which a screen of letters was flashed for 1/20th of a second
Most could only report back 4 or 5 letters but insisted that they saw all the letters
He then made another experiment where there were three rows of 4 or 5 letters the flash of the screen was followed by a low sound, medium sound, or high sound. If subjects heard the high sound, they were too report the top row, medium sound the medium row and so on.
He found that subjects could recall all the letters only if the sound was made within 1/3 of a second after the flash, longer than 1/3 second = ability to recall declined significantly. Over one second made it virtually impossible to remember the letters.
This proves the sensory memory is itty bitty.
Heuristic
A mental shortcut commonly used to simplify problems and avoid cognitive overload
How do heuristics compare to algorithms?
-Algorithms are step-by-step procedures to solving a problem
-Heuristics are shortcut strategies or rules-of-thumb.
Difference between divergent thinking and convergent thinking.
-Convergent thinking focuses on finding one well-defined solution to a problem.
-Divergent thinking is the opposite and focuses on creativity.
Inductive Reasoning
Inductive reasoning makes a generalization from specific observations and facts.
EX: If you notice that every time you spicy food your stomach hurts you might conclude that spicy food causes stomach aches.
What did Sperling call Iconic Memory in his day?
Quickly fading visual memory. Later, in 1967 Neisser labeled this as iconic memory.
Syllogisms
Arguments that involve drawing conclusions from two premises.
George Miller discovered that…
Mostly acoustically coded information is used for short term memory.
According to Miller, how many items in a list can we store in short term memory?
7 +/- 2
