PS102 Lecture Notes - Availability Heuristic, Cognitive Dissonance, Flood Insurance
Document Summary
Mental category that group objects, activities or abstractions with common properties. Apples, hamburgers, ice cream are all foods. Having concepts helps us make decisions easier; a new mammal, sport, or food will be easier to understand because of our existing concept. Easier to acquire basic concepts than concepts with few or many instances. Children learn these first, adults use them most because they convey the most information. Different instances of a concept will have different features (not all apples are red, and not all cats have fur) We usually decide whether something is part or a concept based on a prototype. Even (eating and reading) is slower than eating then reading. Multitasking on electronic devices is particularly problematic. Time to do each task increases, more errors, and memory for what you have done suffers. Attention is capacity limited and needed for complex tasks and for encoding. Subconscious thinking can enter consciousness, can think about how we drive" etc.
