PSYC-105 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Mental Rotation, Health Psychology, Divergent Thinking

• School: MacEwan University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC-105
• Professor: jessicablake

Document Summary

Thinking and reasoning: thinking is any mental activity or processing of information. Includes fundamental aspects of cognition, such as learning, remembering, perceiving, communicating, believing, and deciding: our brains are cognitive misers (heuristics and such likes to make short cuts) Shortcuts to increase our thinking efficiency, mental shortcuts: e. g. , availability heuristic and confirmation bias. Simplifies what we attend to, minimize the information we need for decision making: cognitive economy can serve us well, but can also lead to faulty conclusions. Includes use of concepts and schemas: we exert less cognitive effort over basic info, frees us up to engage in more complex reasoning. Problem solving approach: generating a cognitive strategy to accomplish a specific goal, ex. Watch and learn (youtube: we often rely on algorithms ( step by step learned procedure used to solve a problem) to solve problems, step by step, replacing the starter on a car, making a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich.