PSY 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Availability Heuristic, Belief Perseverance, Functional Fixedness
Document Summary
Thinking or cognition refers to a process that involves knowing, understanding, remembering, and communicating. The mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people People take what they know about objects and they do interesting things such as: categorization. Mostly we form concepts with mental images or typical examples (prototypes). For example, a robin is a prototype of a bird, but a penguin is not. Problem solving strategies include: trial and error, algorithms, heuristics. Algorithms, which are very time consuming, exhaust all possibilities before arriving at a solution. If we were to unscramble letters to form a word using an algorithmic approach we would get many results. Computers can use exhaustive algorithms because they are fast and they are designed to address exactly this kind of problem. Heuristics are simple thinking strategies that allow us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently. Heuristics are less time consuming, but more error-prone than algorithms.
