PSYC 100 Chapter Notes - Chapter 8: Cognitive Psychology, Functional Fixedness, Intelligence Quotient

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Jens C Pruessner

Document Summary

Cognitive psychology is a subfield of psychology concerned with the study of higher mental processes such as thinking, knowing, and deciding. Cognitive psychologists infer mental processes from observable behaviors of the people they study. E. g. to uncover problem-solving strategies, they may ask people to think out loud as they solve problems (called a verbal protocol) Thinking is the manipulation of information in the form of mental images or concepts. Concepts are mental processes of a class (chairs, dogs, teachers) of thing e. g cabbage, peppers and string beans are common examples of the concept. Concepts reduce the load on memory because we don"t have to remember every instance of an object separately and they enhance our ability to communicate, they also allow us to make predictions about our world. One way we classify something as an example of a concept is to use rules that tell us what is and what isn"t an example of the concept.