PSY2012 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Shark Attack, Functional Fixedness, Pliers
Document Summary
Bananas on top of a tall poll and watches apes learn to reach them with cartoons and boxes. Example of mental problem solving, not just learned behavior. Functional fixedness: tend to look at objects as having a particular function, (strings on the wall with pliers on a table) Ignoring base rate information: car accidents vs. shark attack. Conformation bias: we do not treat all information equally. Gamblers fallacy: somehow the ball on a gamble table has its own mind and controls its decisions, flawed logic. Yerkes-dotson law and test anxiety: high stress destroys flexibility of thought, low stress creates low test scores. Communication: other species (dogs bark, bird chirp, eye contact, posture, odor cues, humans. Neurology of language (language: broca"s aphasia (brain damage to lower left portion of the frontal lobe, broken sentence structure, can understand but cannot produce words.
