Psychology 46-116- Midterm Exam Guide - Comprehensive Notes for the exam ( 315 pages long!)
Document Summary
Thinking and reasoning: thinking: any mental activity or processing of information, including learning, remembering, perceiving, communicating, believing, and deciding, all are fundamental aspects of cognition. Heuristics and biases: double-edged swords: cognitive bias: systematic error in thinking. Representativeness heuristic: representativeness heuristic: involves judging the probability of an event by its superficial similarity to a prototype, ex. Math major), need to consider how similar that person is to other members of the category, but also how prevalent that category is overall. Availability heuristic: availability heuristic: involves estimating the likelihood of an occurrence based on the ease with which it comes to our minds, estimated likelihood of occurrence based on how easily it comes to our minds, ex. Problem solving: accomplishing our goals: problem solving: generating a cognitive strategy to accomplish a goal. Approaches to solving problems: algorithm: step-by-step learned procedure used to solve a problem, more useful when solutions depend on the same basic steps every time the solution is required, ex.
