PSYC 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Confirmation Bias, Richard Petty, Conjunction Fallacy

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Jill L Atkinson

Document Summary

Week 13: cognitive psychology: differential approach: focuses on understanding and quantifying how individuals differ when it comes to traits such as intelligence, personality, or self-esteem. Sir francis galton: noticed that intelligent people often had intelligent relatives. Started studying for a biological connection to intelligence but could not. Factor analysis: a way to determine associations among individual items on a test: charles spearman: Invented factor analysis: noted a correlation between scores on different types of tests and created a term for general intelligence, g = general intelligence. Focused on children"s intelligence: creation of the binet-simon scale with colleague theodore simon, scale was designed to identify mentally challenged children. Introduced the concept of mental age (compared a child"s real age to the natural age) Iq uses: originally for children to place them properly in schools. Individuals with higher cognitive abilities show more efficient neural processing and thus lower levels of activation in areas of the brain used to perform a particular task.