PSY100H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Piracy In The Caribbean, Scientific Method, Calibration

• School: UTSG
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY100H1
• Professor: John Vervaeke

Document Summary

The design stance: a way to look for a unifying theme. Pretend to make a machine that would do everything your brain could do. There"s an overlap between information that we want (signal) and information that we don"t want (noise: the brain gambles and takes risks. So, we make a lot of false judgements, misconceptions. (horror movies: we do a lot of things that causes us to be adaptive, not accurate, gazelle and bush example. Because the brain must choose between signal and noise, it will sacrifice accuracy to be adaptive. Relative to your goals: even though there"s a lot of information, the information that you actually need is presented partially. There"s no contradiction between too much information and partial information: the brain is always trying to find importance and relevance. They are not part of the physical environment; the brain makes these judgements on the physical environment simultaneously.