369-376 Critical Thinking Summary

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369-376 * Cognition: mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating * Cognitive psychologists study this * Concepts: mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people * To simplify things, we organize concepts into category hierarchies * We form some concepts by definition * We develop prototypes: a mental image/best example that incorporates all the features we associate with a category * The more closely something matches our prototype of a concept, the more readily we recognize it as an example of the concept * Once we place an item in a category, our memory of it shifts toward the category prototype * Recollect the face as more Caucasian than it was…show more content…
Insight -> frontal lobe activity involved in focusing attention and was accompanied by a burst of activity in the right temporal lobe * When the “eureka moment” hits us, we feel satisfied. OBSTACLES TO PROBLEM SOLVING * Two cognitive tendencies: confirmation bias and fixation- often lead us astray * We seek evidence verifying our ideas more eagerly than we seek evidence that we might refute them-> confirmation bias (major obstacle to problem solving) * 2-4-6 test: formed a wrong idea and searched for a wrong evidence * “ordinary ppl evade facts, become inconsistent, or systematically defend themselves against the threat of new info relevant to the issue”. * Fixation: inability to see a problem from a fresh perspective * Two examples: mental set & functional fixedness * Mental set: predisposes how we think (tendency to approach a problem with the mind-set of what has worked previously for us” * Sometimes, a mental set based on what worked in the past precludes our finding a new solution to a new

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