PSYC 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Problem Solving, Linguistic Determinism, Confirmation Bias

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1000
• Professor: Benjamin Giguere

Document Summary

Humans have a natural tendency to try to understand events and people; to explain and solve problems; to think. Overall our thinking is different than a computer"s, it balances the need for speed with quality and accuracy. Suitable for most situations, but can sometimes lead us to be incorrect. Mental activities and processes associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating information. We think about concepts, which are mental groupings of similar objects, events, states, ideas, and/or people. We use these concepts constantly and they are easily activated. Do not derive concepts from a definition that we have learned/memorized. Derive concepts from prototypes mental images of the best example of a concept within a category (how we pull these images up in our minds) Categorization create categories of objects according to a certain set of rules by a specific definition. Category is determined by comparing a target to the prototype of the category.