Cognition and Consciousness - AP Psychology

A circadian rhythm is any process that abides by a 24-hour rhythm. It is best known for helping to tell our bodies when they need sleep. Having a disrupted circadian rhythm is related to negative health outcomes, including various neurological and cardiological problems.

Sleep occurs in 4 stages, NREM-1, NREM-2, NREM-3, and REM.

It's during the first stage of sleep (NREM-1) that you may experience images that resemble hallucinations. These experiences occur without a sensory stimulation and can sometimes be later incorporated into one's memories.

REM (rapid eye-movement) sleep is the fifth and final stage of sleep during which the body is in it's deepest sleep. Dreaming is most frequent, most vivid, and most memorable during REM sleep; however, other dreaming can occur during the other sleep stages.

Deductive and inductive reasoning differ in the path used to reach their respective conclusions. In deductive reasoning, the researcher starts with a general statement or hypothesis and examines possibilities in order to reach a specific conclusion. On the other hand, in inductive reasoning, the researcher attempts to make generalizations from specific occurrences.

A heuristic is something commonly used in our reasoning as a general "rule of thumb". These are rules that hopefully guide use to the solution we need. For instance, a student taking a test wants to get a good grade. In order to reach that goal, they may follow the general "rule of thumb" (i.e. heuristic) of doing the easy questions first so they can use their focus for the more difficult problems.

Dialectical reasoning involves going back and forth between opposing points of view in order to come up with a satisfactory solution. This involves fully engaging in each side of the problem. This could be as simple as a person making a pros and cons list for what trip they want to take or as complex as a politician considering all positive and negative consequences of a bill being passed.

An efficient way of solving an analogy problem would be forming sub-goals. For instance take the analogy: "a school is to a student as a company is to a                     .” A sub-goal to reaching the end goal of actually solving the problem would be to figure out the relationship between a school and a student. After this sub-goal is reached, it would be easy to infer that the answer is "employee.”

After getting a "hunch" of what we want to say, we create the grammatical structure for our sentence. Once that is constructed, it becomes our so-called "template.” We fill this template with semantically relevant words. These words are as specific to the meaning we want to convey as possible. For instance, if we want the person we are speaking to know that the cat we are talking about is a young cat, then we would use the word "kitten" instead of "cat.”

This is an example of using a similar problem to solve a current one. The woman who owns the dog had a problem getting the dog to "stay" at the park. Her solution to that problem was dangling a treat in front of him. Now she has a problem getting him to sit. She remembers the similar problem of getting him to stay and tries out the same solution.

Using similar problems to solve current ones can often be an effective way of coming up with good solutions.

Researchers have identified several mental obstacles to our problem solving/reasoning processes. Functional fixedness, mental set, and making assumptions, and irrelevant information are just some of many. Although their precise definitions won't be defined here, the commonality they share is a misdirection in focus and to an extent being stuck on what has worked in the past.

Functional fixedness is a tendency to only think of an object's most common use when presented with a problem. For instance, if you are trying to open up an old-fashioned Coke and need a bottle-opener you may be so focused on finding a bottle-opener as opposed to using your keys. Your keys would work just as well, but because you are so focused on using it to open the door you don't think of its alternative use.

A "mental set" is an obstacle to problem solving which involves fixating only on solutions that have worked in the past. For instance, someone who knows that yelling and throwing a fit has gotten them what they wanted might only use this solution to get they want in the present. Instead, it might be more effective to think of a new solution.

When a person is presented with a problem this problem may be presented with irrelevant information. That is, this information will not be useful when coming up with a solution. This is a common device used in riddles. Teasing out irrelevant information entails figuring out what precisely is being asked of you for the solution.

Making assumptions may make us skip over important information we may need to solve a problem. This can happen in a variety of problems, especially when they involve people. We carry around many preconceived notions about how people and our society work. If we have a problem understanding a certain phenomena in society, it may be due to these kinds of assumptions. For instance, patriarchal society once widely assumed that women were destined for housework and many people didn't understand why women were so happy. They attributed it to their "biology". Instead, it's better understood that women desire just as much as men to participate in and feel like they belong in their society.

Decision-making involves weighing alternatives and choosing between them. The other answers are a part of decision making but are too specific to the methods for our decision making processes. For instance, it isn't just risky decisions that involve weighing alternatives and choosing between them, but all decisions. The other answers are strategies for how we weigh the alternatives at hand.

The economist Herbert Simon noted that people very often do not make rational decisions. This is primarily due to the fact that it is difficult to simultaneously evaluate all possible options and so they tend to only focus on a few aspects of the available options. For instance, some people may be overly focused on what they'll lose in a certain options instead of how much they have to gain.

Additive strategies are commonly used when people are making decisions about their preferences. When using an additive strategy, a person lists the traits of each potential choice, weights them according to importance, adds them up, and determines which one is more appealing based on the result. Another common strategy is a strategy of elimination, which will not be discussed in detail here.

This is an elimination strategy. An elimination strategy is a decision making strategy where one sets a certain criteria and any options that do not meet this criteria will be automatically be eliminated. Although John deciding where to eat is certainly a form of judgment and cognition, these answers aren't sufficient because they are not as specific to what this process was. An additive strategy is a different type of process all together.

A representativeness heuristic is the idea that a small sample of known individuals can provide defining characteristics for a larger population. All of the birds that Kevin correctly identified are small and can fly; because the ostrich is large and cannot fly, it does not display the characteristics that Kevin believed all birds must have.