Transcript COGNITION VIEWS ON HOW WE THINK AND ACQUIRE KNOWLEDGE What is cognition?  How we think, acquire knowledge, imagine, plan and solve problems.  All.

COGNITION
VIEWS ON HOW WE THINK AND
ACQUIRE KNOWLEDGE
What is cognition?
 How we think, acquire knowledge,
imagine, plan and solve problems.
 All functions of the cerebral cortex.
 An important aspect deals with our
reasoning abilities.
Reasoning
 Drawing conclusions or inferences from
observations, facts, or assumptions
 Crucial to make wise decisions
Formal reasoning
 Factors are well known and clearly
established
 2+2=4
 The capitol of Illinois is Springfield.
 Snakes lack legs.
algorithms
 To solve problems through formal
reasoning, we often use an algorithm
A step-by-step, routine or mechanical
procedure for solving a problem
Exhausting all the possibilities
Connecting the TV to the VCR
A recipe
heuristics
 But sometimes problems are too hard to
pin down or there are too many
competing alternatives
 In these cases, we use heuristics –
intuitive, “rule of thumb” strategies to
simplify a problem or guide an
investigation
heuristics
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What restaurant do we choose?
What’s my next school?
What career is best for me?
Go Fish!
 We use past experiences, advice from
those we respect, “word of mouth”, to
eliminate most possibilities quickly
The Limits of Heuristics
 In many situations heuristics are the only
way to tackle a complex problem
 But they have their shortcomings
 Since they rely on assumptions,
occasionally they lead to bad decisions
and mistakes
Errors in
cognition
 Although essential, heuristics
sometimes lead us astray
Errors
 Confirmation Bias
We make quick or emotional
decisions and then focus only on
evidence which confirms our hunch,
ignoring evidence to the contrary
A defendant’s greatest fear
More errors
 The Availability heuristic
 Strategy of assuming that the number of
memories of an event that are available
indicates how common the event really is
 Leads to illusory correlations
 Must look to systematic data
 One compelling memory jumps to mind
Availability
examples
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Million dollar lawsuits
Treacherous Arab-Americans
Lotto winners
Full moon/bizarre behavior connection
Abductions
Hindsight Bias
 Years later, we claim that we “knew it all
along”.
 We didn’t.
 Bulls 1992 championship
 The White Sox’ magical season
 Can prevent us from carefully
investigating what happened.
Finally ….
 The Sunk Cost Effect
 We will often do stupid, illogical things
because of money or effort already
expended
 Throwing good money after bad
 Animals and kids just walk away
 150,000 soldiers waiting in Kuwait
Why do we gamble?
 After all, we know that the odds (Lotto!)
are stacked against us
 Let us “count the ways” (reasons)
 Over-estimation of control
 we think we can influence the odds if we
have some, or any, control
 But not if they are purely random events
Gambling – why?
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Big numbers – Little risks
We flock to long-shot bets with small risk
Even if the odds are much worse
We don’t appreciate the difference
between 1 in 70,000 and 1 in 7, 000,000
if enough money is dangled in front of us
More on gambling
 The Gambler’s Fallacy
 The sad fact that we’ve always lost does
not mean that someday we’ll win
 The law of averages has little effect on
truly random events
Old favorites (?)
 Intermittent reinforcement – hard to
resist, but no certainty of eventual win
 Vicarious reinforcement – we see big
winners all the time – Why not us?
 Sunk cost – we’ll make up all those
losses