PSY 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Semantic Network, Functional Fixedness, Representativeness Heuristic
22 Oct 2016
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Document Summary
At times, we sometimes seem rational and well-reasoned. Invention of wheel, unlocked mysteries of atom, cracked genetic code, brought people to space. At times, our behavior seem to defy reason. Massacre, wreak havoc on environment, discriminate, throw away money on games of chance, take drugs. Concepts: basic building blocks of abstract thought, mental groupings of similar persons, places, ideas, events, objects. Freedom, happiness, peace: the purpose of concepts is to organize/ simplify all the information that is contained in long-term memory. Without concepts, we would be overwhelmed: semantic networks the way we store concepts in our long-term memory in a hierarchical way built one upon the other, priming concepts. When one concept in a semantic network is primed, other closely related concepts are activated and pop into mind. Participants were faster to determine that both were words when those pair of letter strings were semantically related.
