What is thought?
Thought is the extension of perception and memory.
What is thinking?
Manipulating mental representations for a purpose.
What is a mental image?
Visual representations such as the image of a street or a circle.
What is a mental model?
A representation that describes, explains, or predicts how things work.
What are categories?
Groupings based in common properties.
What is a concept?
A mental representation of a category.
We categorize objects in which two ways?
- Defining features: qualities that are essential for membership of the category
- Prototypes: an abstraction (based on shared features or functions) across many instances of a category. (such as magpies, parrots, sparrows).
What is one main feature of categorization?
It is functional: there are many ways concepts can represent information. Shape, defining features, characteristic features, exemplars.
How do subordinate and superordinate level categories differ?
There are three levels of hierarchical categorization.
- Basic level: The level people generally use to categorize objects.
- Subordinate level: The level of categorization below the basic level in which more specific attributes are shared by members of a category.
- Superordinate level: is an abstract level in which members of a category share few common features.
What is categorization influenced by?
Our culture.
What is reasoning?
The process by which people generate and evaluate arguments and beliefs.
What is inductive reasoning?
Reasoning from a set of observations to general propositions.
Relies on probabilities.
Inferring a conclusion based on a probability rather than a certainty.
We cannot say for certain, there may be other factors.
What is deductive reasoning?
Drawing conclusion from a set of assumptions or premises that are based on the rules of logic.
Deduction is the flip side of induction.
The conclusion is true if the premise is true and reasoning logical.
Whats is a syllogism?
Two premises that lead to a logical conclusion.
What is analogical reasoning?
The process by which people understand a novel situation in terms of a familiar one.
What is the process of problem solving?
- Initial state - (a problem)
- Operators - (Actions performed to solve the problem.)
- Goal state - (No problem)
What is a well defined problem?
Ones where the initial state, goal state, and operators are easily determined.
What is an ill defined problem?
Occur when both the information needed to solve the problem and the criteria for determining when the goal state has been met are vague.
What are subgoals?
Mini goals on the way to achieving the broader goal.
What are problem solving strategies?
Techniques that serve as guides for problem-solving.
What are algorithms?
Systematic procedures that will produce a solution to a simple problem is there is one.
They are guaranteed to find the solution providing that one exists.
What is mental simulation?
The mental rehearsal of the steps needed to solve a problem.
What us Hypothesis testing?
Making an educated guess about a problem and then testing it.
What are three problems with problem solving?
- Functional fixedness - the tendency to fix on a function for an object and to ignore other possible uses.
- Mental set - The tendency to keep using the same problem solving techniques that have been successful in the past.
- Confirmation bias - The process by which an individual weighs the pros and cons of different alternatives in order to make a choice.
