Psychology 1000 Lecture Notes - Belief Bias, Flowchart, Confirmation Bias

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Terry Biggs

Document Summary

Mental representations: mental representations take variety of forms including: Cognition consists of the re-organization and manipulation of mental representations in a goal directed manner: there are two major forms of reasoning we may employ in this process, 1 deductive. 2 inductive: deductive reasoning, reason from general principles to a conclusion, useful process in forming hypotheses. Inductive reasoning: start with specific facts and try to develop a general principle, stumbling blocks in reasoning, distraction by irrelevant information, failure to apply deductive rules, belief bias, mental set. Spell check: heuristics, mental shortcuts that may or may not provide correct solutions. If the amount of counting required does not affect the time taken to solve the problem then they must be using another process, for example, fact retrieval. Identify differences between present state and goal state. Make changes to reduce the differences: subgoal analysis. Take intermediate steps toward an ultimate solution: representativeness heuristic.