PSYC 100 Chapter Notes - Chapter 8: Vocal Tract, Cognitive Bias, Availability Heuristic

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Penelope Kostopoulos

Document Summary

Thinking: any mental activity or processing of information including learning, remembering, perceiving, communicating, believing and deciding cognition. Brain uses cognitive misers, economizing mentally to reduce mental effort. Allows us to simplify what we attend to and keep info for decision making to a minimum can lead to faulty conclusions. Refered to ability to extract useful info from small bits of behavior as (cid:498)thin slicing(cid:499) Heuristics and biases cognitive bias: systematic error in thinking representativeness heuristic- judging the probability of an event by its superficial similarity to a prototype base rate- how common a characteristic or behavior is in the general population. Top down processing fill in gaps of missing info using experience and background knowledge (ex: chunking) Most difficult, effortful thinking (cid:498)high order(cid:499) cognition. Uses perception, knowledge, memory, language, reasoning etc. Decision making: the process of selecting among a set of possible alternatives framing: the way a question is formulated that can influence the decisions people make.