【Psychology and Life】Chapter 08 — Main Points
* All the following abstractions are excerpted from <Psychology and Life>, Richard J. Gerrig & Philip G. Zimbardo, 19th edition
Chapter 08 — Cognitive Process.
— Studying Cognition
Cognitive psychologists study the mental processes and structures that enable you to perceive, use language, reason, solve problems, and make judgments and decisions.
Researchers use reaction time measures to break up complex tasks into underlying mental processes.
— Language Use
Language users both produce and understand language.
Speakers design their utterances to suit particular audiences.
Speech errors reveal many of the processes that go into speech planning.
Much of language understanding consists of using context to resolve ambiguities.
Memory representations of meaning begin with propositions supplemented with inferences.
Studies of language evolution have focused on grammatical structure and audience design.
The language individuals speak may play a role in determining how they think.
— Visual Cognition
Visual representations can be used to supplement propositional representations.
Visual representations allow you to think about visual aspects of your environment.
People form visual representations that combine verbal and visual information.
— Problem Solving and Reasoning
Problem solvers must define initial state, goal state, and the operations that get them from the initial to the goal state.
Deductive reasoning involves drawing conclusions from premises based on rules of logic.
Inductive reasoning involves inferring a conclusion from evidence based on its likelihood or probability.
— Judgment and Decision Making
Much of judgment and decision making is guided by heuristics — mental shortcuts that can help individuals reach solutions quickly.
Availability, representativeness, and anchoring can all lead to errors when they are misapplied.
Decision making is affected by the way in which different options are framed.
The possibility of regret makes some decisions hard, particularly for individuals who are maximizers rather than satisficers.