Cognition Ch. 11

Front 1

reasoning

Back 1

thought process that yields a conclusion from premises

Front 2

syllogistic reasoning

Back 2

a syllogism consists of two premises and a conclusion. each of the premises specifies a relationship between two categories.

Front 3

logicism

Back 3

the belief that logical reasoning is an essential part of human nature

Front 4

practical syllogism

Back 4

occurs when the conclusion drawn from two premises becomes an action

Front 5

relational reasoning

Back 5

reasoning involving premises that express the relations between items, such as A is taller than B

Front 6

three-term series problem

Back 6

linear syllogisms consisting of two comparative sentences from which a conclusion must be drawn

Front 7

iconic

Back 7

a principle of Johnson Laird's mental models theroy: the relations between the parts of the model correspond to the relations between the parts of the situation it represents

Front 8

emergent consequences

Back 8

a princIple of Johnson-LAIRD'S THEORY: YOU CA GET MORE OUT OF A MENTAL MODEL THAN you put into it

Front 9

parsimony

Back 9

a principle of Johnson Laird's theory: people tend to construct only the simplest mental model if possible

Front 10

natural dedication

Back 10

a reasoning system made up of propositions and deduction rules to draw conclusions from these propositions

Front 11

generative problem

Back 11

participants are told that the three numbers 2,4, and 6 conform to a simple relational rule that the experimenter has in mind, and that their task is to discover the rule by generating sequences of three numbers. The experimenter tells them each time whether the rule has been followed

Front 12

selection task (Watson)

Back 12

a four-card problem based on conditional reasoning

Front 13

elimination strategy

Back 13

the attempt to falsify your hypotheses, and thus eliminate incorrect beliefs

Front 14

confirmation bias

Back 14

the tendency to seek confirmatory evidence for a hypothesis

Front 15

conditional reasoning

Back 15

reasoning that requires the use of conditional-'if...then' statements

Front 16

truth tables

Back 16

a way of presenting the various combinations of the constituents of logical statements

Front 17

social contract theory

Back 17

the theory that inference procedures have evolved to deal with social contracts in which people give something up in order to gain something else

Front 18

heuristics and biases

Back 18

people often use heuristics, or rules of thumb, which may work in some situations, but may bias or mislead them in others

Front 19

law of large numbers

Back 19

the larger the sample, the more nearly a statistic will be to the true value

Front 20

law of averages

Back 20

a fallacy based on the assumption that events of one kind are always balanced by events of another kind

Front 21

Gambler's fallacy

Back 21

the mistaken belief that an event that has not occurred for a number of independent trials is more likely to happen on future trials

Front 22

law of smaller numbers

Back 22

the mistaken belief that a small sample should be representative of the population from which it is drawn

Front 23

representative heuristic

Back 23

making inferences on the assumption that small samples resemble one another and the population from which they are drawn

Front 24

adjustment and anchoring

Back 24

people's judgements of magnitude are biased by the initial value to which they are exposed

Front 25

hot-hand belief and hot-hand behaviour

Back 25

the former is the belief in streak shooting by basketball players. the latter is a bias for a basketball player to take the next shot after previously scoring a basket.

Front 26

availability

Back 26

the ease with which an item can be brought to mind as a label for experience

Front 27

intuitive concept

Back 27

a concept that is easily acquired and used by almost all adults

Front 28

illusory correlation

Back 28

the mistaken belief that events go together when in fact they do not

Front 29

regression to the mean

Back 29

for purely mathematical reasons, whenever two variables are not perfectly correlated, extreme values on one variable tend to be related to less extreme values on the other variable

Front 30

recognition heuristic

Back 30

when choosing between two objects (according to some criterion), if one is recognized and the other is not, then select the former.

Front 31

ecologically rational

Back 31

a heuristic is ecologically rational if it produces useful inferences by exploiting the structure of information in the environment

Front 32

less-is-more effect

Back 32

sometimes the person who knows less can make a better judgement than the person who knows more