PSYCHOLOGY 3130 A B FINAL EXAM STUDY GUIDE Q & A 2024.

PSYCHOLOGY 3130 A/B FINAL EXAM STUDY GUIDE Q & A 2024

What is Thinking?
- A subset of mental activity that involves working with mental representations, planning and executing
behaviors, and the coordination of cognitive resources
o Not all mental activity, it’s the kind that you do when making a decision, trying to plan, rationalize,
predict, make infrence etc. (active process)
 Distinguish thinking from non-thinking mental behavior**** how does thinking differ from
cognitive processing in general***
o Can happen actively (actually trying to think) or passively (mind wandering, dreaming)
- Basic visual perception, memory consolidation, and coordination of sensory motor activity are
sophisticated mental activities but are not considered to be thinking.
o Don’t count them as e.g. of thinking
o Lots of memory consolidation goes on during sleep, but we consider it mental activity, not thinking

Different kinds of thinking
- solving an introductory physics problem requires sustained attention, the recall and generation of learned
facts  conscious and effortful process
- Catching a fly ball
o Requires cognition, but doesn’t require reasoning
o does not seem to rely on the recall of facts, but rather on the replay of hand–eye coordination routines.
 Can be a challenge at first, but becomes easy once you know how
o Sensory/motor info, and visual info that you can’t think through in a language based way
 Robots can make the calculations of how to catch it, but humans use heuristics to be able to get to
it correctly
 This is a fast, intuitive kid of thinking
- Chess vs. angry birds
o Angry birds  Can learn how to do it quickly without having the rules  through trial and error 
bc its repetitive
 much less emphasis on rule acquisition and retrieval of rules for memory, and a greater premium
on procedurally learned motor responses.
o Chess requires a sophisticated knowledge of how to play and set up the game
o involves thinking ahead, thinking about what your opponent might do, and developing a strategy for
how to react based on what you think the other player will do
 called Theory of Mind

These are governed by one of 2 systems:
1. Fast system (reactive thought processes)
a. The earlier system, generally thought to reside in evolutionary brain structures
i. E.g. if a remote was being thrown at you, you either catch it or move away, and it doesn’t
really require much thinking
ii. So these are fast intuitive responses
iii. This is also present in non-humans (all animals)
b. E.g. you see someone all the time but don’t say hi, but eventually you just randomly say hi,
you’re not actually thinking about if you should say hi or not, but since you see them so much,
you just say hi
i. In most cases, you are not reasoning and problem solving like in system 2
2. Slower system
a. Takes more time, reason and language based (prefrontal cortex to consider things in slower more
deliberative way)
i. Evolutionarily more resent structures (e.g. prefrontal cortex)

,ii. Present in humans, and usually only humans

, b. Trying to purchase a new vehicle
i. Do a lot of research, think about whether or not it suits your needs, etc.
Types of Thinking
System 1 (FAST) System 2 (SLOW)
 Associative learning  Only present in humans
 Intuitive  Relies on our language ability
 Older of the two systems  Reason based
 Evolutionary primitive brain  Based on language in reason
structures  Evolutionary recent in brain structures
 Present in non-human species  If you doubt your instincts you will begin to use
(i.e. primates) system 2 thinking to find an alternative explanation

Challenges to the Thinking Process
- Humans can judge and predict information even when only given sparse information
o Ex. Study asking people to make judgements on things they are not experts in
 How much money a movie makes a night, persons lifespan given a quick summary, how long it
takes to bake a cake
 People make predictions that are in line with statistical models of optimal outcome
 Make really good judgements and predictions even if they are not exactly sure how or why they
are doing it.
 People use existing knowledge, memory, and understanding to fill in gaps and make predictions

- When trying to use system 2, system 1 gets in the way because its faster
- When concentrating, it implies that you’re focusing on one thing, but also means your attention is not on
other things
o Important but can be risky/problematic because other things can happen around you (evolutionary
perspective)

Multitasking
- Multitasking: being able to do more than one thing at a time (usually there’s a switch between the 2)
o human mind can divide attention and resources to several input and output channels
o people think it is a necessary action and positive skill although it has a cost on behaviour
o there is always a cost which can last beyond the multitasking event
- Smartphones: they take your attention away from other things
o Challenge is system 1 interrupting when you need to use system 2
- Study: Cognitive Control in media multitasking
o Doing 2 things at the same time (e.g. on phone and watching tv at same time)
o Ranked people into “high media multitaskers” – those that do it so much (higher than average), light
media multitaskers – those who don’t like to multitask and find it hard (lower than average)
 Asked them to do a memory task
 Get a cue, and then task, and have to remember the red rectangles (only see for 900ms)
 Can’t use a linguistic approach of explaining the whole thing cause they don’t have time
 Then they get 2 seconds to say if the second pic is the same as the first
 If the person’s attention goes away for a sec, then they’ll miss the task so it involves a lot of
concentration
 They changed the amount of distractors (blue bars)
 The higher the score, the better the person is
 Found: light/medium were not affected by the distractors, whereas the high group
were doing worse when there were more distractors

,  People who multitask often are not good at performing this task
 Short term memory tasks and long-term memory tasks can tested by asking if the object had
changed and if a certain object was present
 For low media multi-taskers their working memory is more superior or works faster
 People who are high media-multitaskers perform worse on these tasks
 There is a convergence when number of distractors increases
o Ex. The smartphone
 You use attention to focus on things (i.e. take notes and check smartphone)
 You also use cognitive resources and energy to consciously ignore those things (e.g. of him trying
so hard not to look at his phone when he got a text, but he couldn’t help it)

- Study: Brain Drain
o 3 conditions:
 1. The other room: subjects asked to leave phone in another room
 2. Desk: seating in front of computer, and asked to turn notifications off and put phone face down
 3. Pocket/bag: in pocket, and notifications off
o do a series of task: operation
 short math problems, and all letters presented in between math problems
 report as many letters
 desk and pocket/bag were more impaired than the other room
 these were enough to occasionally distract you in comparison to the other room condition
o other task: progressive matrices
 basically, same thing
 found that people were only effected if the phone was on the desk

- study: laptop note taking
o the laptop is your working device, but it’s also your recreational device
o study 1:
 pen mightier than keyboard
 asked subjects to watch ted talks and take notes on it
o one group used written note taking, and other typing on laptop (but not connected to
the internet)
 primary learning task: ted talk
 asked them factual (memorizing) and conceptual questions (requires understanding in a
deeper way)
 found: laptop users wrote more, and had a significantly more verbatim overlap, which is basically
writing down everything the person was saying
 on questions that required people to understand concepts, writing on paper people did better,
whereas, if it was just a fact, they did the same
o Even when laptop note takers were told to transcribe less and use their own words
when taking notes, they still did not perform as well as those who wrote the notes by
hand
o study 2:
 classroom setting
 multitasking condition: had questions they had to quickly answer and mimicked student browsing
 no multitasking condition: not asked to look stuff up
 found that those asked to multitask performed less well on a M/C exam
 another manipulation: viewing multitasking, and not viewing multitasking (e.g. seated next to
someone multitasking)
 this also had an effect, they did worse than people not viewing multitasking