Psychology 3130A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Satisficing, Tabula Rasa, Cognitive Revolution
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20 Dec 2017
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The Psychology of Thinking
- Thinking has been described as the essence of being
- Descartes I think therefore I am
- Thinking studies within broader field of cognition
- Cognitive psych = defined as study of info processing and behaviour
o Basic attention, perception to memory etc
- Concerned with complex mental behaviours
What is Thinking
Basic Description
• Thinking = mental activity (however not synonymous)
• Is a very specific subset of mental activity that involves working with mental
representations, planning and executing behaviours, and the coordination of cognitive
resources
Different Kinds of thinking
• Can be divided up in many ways, including divisions based on content, effort, desired
outcome, etc
• Theory of mine = being able to consider contents of another perso’s thoughts
o Involved in the game of chess
• E.g. catching fly balls vs solving physics problems
o First behaviour is a conscious and effortful processes whereas the second is an
intuitive and procedural process that defies verbal description
▪ However both rely on some degree of retrieved memories
o While they are different and solve different problems, there are shared
underlying mechanisms (retrieval of prior instances from memory)
Challenges to the thinking process
• Humans are capable of predicting and judging info even in the face of incomplete and
sparse info
• e.g. recent study by Tom Griffiths and Josh Tenenbaum looked at peoples ability to
make quick judgements about things that they were not experts in
o found most people able to make predictions that fell closely inline with statistical
models of optimal outcome
▪ i.e. make good judgements could be bc people are good at using
existing knowledge, memory to make predictions
Multitasking
• brain and mind is designed to be able to divide attention and resources among several
input and output channels
• research suggests there is always a cost
• e.g. Ophir Nass and Wagner created questionnaire that allowed them to measure light,
medium and heavy media multitaskers
o participants asked to engage in number of tasks that required them to switch
quickly b/w responses and to detect targets in the presence of distractors
• eig a heavy edia ultitasker did’t predit etter perforae o ogitive tasks
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