PSY 190: General Psychology Chapter 8: Cognition

1. PSY 190: General Psychology Chapter 8: Cognition

2. How important is attention? • 1987 Northwest Airlines jet from Detroit crashed moments after take-off • 154 passengers and crew, 2 on ground, died

3. Attention • Close or careful observation or mental concentration • A selective narrowing or focusing of consciousness

4. Different Aspects of Attention • Selective Attention • Visual • Auditory

5. Selective Attention • Focusing our awareness on only part of everything we are experiencing • Trying to attend to one task over another

6. Selective Attention: Visual • The Stroop Test (1935) • Names of words cause a competing response • Flanker compatibility task • Task–irrelevant stimuli are extremely powerful

9. Dalrymple-Alford & Budayr (1966): • First to encourage presentation & timing of stimuli individually. This method now dominates. Stroop effect GREEN BLUE

10. interference facilitation GREEN BLUE

11. Selective Attention • Neisser et al. (1979) • In this one minute video, there will be two basketball teams • You task is to count the passes of just one team

12. Selective Attention Simons & Chabris (1999)

13. Attention & Visual Perception Mack & Rock (2000) • Research on a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness suggests that unless we pay close attention, we can miss even the most conspicuous events

14. Sights unseen? • Inattentional Blindness • Participants were asked to focus on a cross • They often failed to notice an unexpected object, even when it had appeared in the center of their field of vision  Mack & Rock (2000)

15. Change Blindness • People fail to detect substantial features of photographs and real world experiences • They seem to lack a precise visual representation of their world from one view to the next Daniel Simons Levin & Simons study (1997)  Levin & Simons study (1998) 

16. Choice Blindness Johansson, Hall, Sikstrom, & Olsson (2005) • Participants failure to detect a mismatch from their original choice to what was later presented to them as their original choice (but was not) Petter Johansson 

17. Selective Attention (Auditory) • Dichotic listening task (Cherry, 1953) • Any task where two streams of auditory information are presented simultaneously, one to each ear (generally over headphones). Subjects are required to attend to one ear only. • Shadowing task -- Two messages played, one to each ear. One message has to be "shadowed" by the subject (repeated back out loud). This is called the “attended” message.

18. In Shadowing Task… • Listeners seldom noticed the unattended message being in a foreign language or in reversed speech • However, they nearly always noticed physical changes in the unattended message • Cherry’s conclusion?  • People can shadow accurately but its not easy  • Unattended auditory information receives very little processing

19. Categorization • Categorization • Process by which things are placed into groups • Concept • Mental groupings of similar objects, events, ideas, and people Knowing about something is in a category gives us a great deal of information about it.

20. Knowledge Can Affect Categorization • Knowledge of the world informs and shapes our predictions about concepts • Features in a complex network of explanatory links indicate • Relative importance of features • Relations among features • Objects classified into concept that best explains the pattern of attributes

21. Do we categorize males as being more angry? Becker et al. (2007) Used gender-neutral faces in attempts to determine this Categorization Heuristics

24. Categorization can lead to errors in stereotyping…

25. Here’s another error…

26. Problem Solving • Mental processes that occur when people work toward determining the solution to a problem • Kahneman (2011) • Two systems appear to be involved • System 1 – used for automatic processing • System 2 – used for effortful processing

27. Availability Heuristics • We use our memory of actual instances for our judgment. So, when we make a judgment, things that are available in our mind determine our judgment. • Example • Think of words that begin with r. • Think of words that have r in the third position? • Which is easier to think of?

28. What’s going on? • The availability heuristic: We base our judgments of the frequency of events on what comes to mind • There are three times as many words with r in the third position (car, park, barren, march)

29. The Availability Heuristic • Which cause of death is more likely? • Homicide or Appendicitis • Auto-train collision or Drowning • Measles or Smallpox • Botulism or Asthma • Asthma or Tornado • Appendicitis or Pregnancy Lichtenstein et al. (1978)

30. Availability: Illusory Correlations • Actual correlations: It’s cloudy and there’s a smell in the air, so it will probably rain • Illusory correlations: We think things are correlated, but they are not • One group and their stereotype

31. The Representativeness Heuristic • Making judgments based on outward appearances only even though the base rate is low • One person represents the larger group • Extrapolate behavior of one person to everyone else

32. The Representativeness Heuristic • Tversky & Kahneman (1974) • These researchers presented this example: • We randomly pick one male from the population of the US. He wears glasses, speaks quietly, and reads a lot. Is it more likely that this male is a librarian or a construction worker? Daniel Kahneman Amos Tversky

33. The feminist bank teller • Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with the issues of discrimination and social justice. Which of the following is more probable? • Linda is a bank teller. • Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. Tversky & Kahneman (1983)

34. The problem of small samples • A certain town has two hospitals. The large hospital has ~45 babies born a day, and the small hospital has ~15 births a day. About 50% of all babies are boys. However, the exact percentage varies by day. For a period of 1 year, each hospital recorded the days on which more than 60% of babies born were boys. Which hospital recorded more of these days? Tversky & Kahneman (1974)

35. The Confirmation Bias • We have a tendency to selectively look for information that conforms to our hypothesis and to overlook information that argues against it.

36. Framing Effect • The way a question is worded can influence how people answer a question • How choices are stated seems to matter • When a problem is framed in terms of gain, we tend to choose sure things (risk-aversion strategy). • When a problem is framed in terms of loss, we tend to choose risky things (risk-taking strategy)

37. Framing Effect • Example: • If you are lucky, you have a chance to win $1000. Which game do you choose? • Game A. a sure gain of $240 • Game B. 25% chance to gain $1000 and 75% chance to gain nothing • Game A  84% • Game B  16%

38. Framing Effect • Example: • You are given $1000, provided that you will play either one of the following games. Which game do you choose? • Game C. a sure loss of $750 • Game D. 75% chance to lose $1000 and 25% chance to lose nothing. • Game C.  13% • Game D.  87%

39. Framing Effect • Sunk Cost Effect • The willingness to do something because of money or effort already spent • This is a special case of the framing effect

40. What Is Expert Cognition? • What makes someone an expert at anything?

41. What Is Expert Cognition? • Reber (1967) • Implicit learning • Learning that appears to occur without awareness or intention to learn and often cannot be described in words what has been learned • “Cognitive unconscious”

42. Implicit Learning: Learning that lacks perception? • Reber (1980) • Too many variables involved – too much to remember • In explicit learning, we consciously select only the key variables • In implicit learning, we are unselective and pay attention to allvariables • Few attentional resources are needed

43. Implicit Learning: Expert Knowledge? • McGeorge & Burton (1990) • Implicit learning allows us to skip steps • Everything becomes automatic • We become experts

44. Implicit Learning: Expert Knowledge? • Examples: • Chess players • Football QB’s • Riding a bike

45. Practice Makes (Nearly) Perfect • Practice is crucial • Motivation is crucial • Expertise can sometimes overcome effects of age, but response time slower

46. Expert Pattern Recognition • Chase & Simon (1973) • Chess master vs. beginners • Memorize chess pieces positioned for a real chess game for 5 seconds • Reproduce the arrangement shortly after

47. Expert Pattern Recognition • Procedure • Participants were given five seconds to memorize board • They were then asked to draw an empty chess board and reproduce the arrangement of pieces Chase & Simon (1973)

48. Actual Game Random Game Chase & Simon (1973)

49. Chase & Simon (1973) (a) The chess master is better at reproducing actual game positions (b) Master’s performance drops to level of beginner when pieces are arranged randomly

50. Chunking Helps • Chase & Simon (1973) • Implication: Chess master did not have a superior STM (as some had suggested); rather he had stored many of the patterns that occur in real chess games in LTM • He saw the layout of chess pieces not in terms of individual pieces but in terms of 4-6 chunks, each made up of a group of pieces that formed familiar, meaningful patterns • The chess master’s advantage vanished when the board was arranged randomly – familiar patterns were destroyed