PHL 131 Lecture 21: PHL 131 Lecture 21
26 Sep 2020
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Document Summary
Thinking and mental activity are not synonymous. Conscious and effortful: requires sustained attention, recall and generation of learned facts, conscious application of those facts, and the ability to engage in explicit monitoring of the behavior, solving a physics problem. Intuitive: often defies verbal description and relies on hand-eye coordination routines, catching a fly ball. Theory of mind: being able to consider the contents of another person"s thoughts (chess) Looking over many examples of the types of thinking we start to see commonalities: focusing attention, making judgments about similarity, and considering several ideas simultaneously. People are very efficient at using their existing knowledge, memory, and understanding to fill in gaps and make quick predictions. Despite popular belief there is always a cost to multitasking. Heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task switching ability likely due to their reduced ability to filter out interference from an irrelevant task set: have adopted an attentional style that results in greater distractibility.
