Cognitive Psychology Lecture mp3s and Podcast

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3/25 Decision Making (2.4 mb; 10:06 min)

Introduction to decision making, stages in decision making

3/25 Decision Making Models (7.5 mb; 31:06 min)

Overview, normative versus descriptive versus prescriptive models, compensatory versus noncompensatory models, additive model, additive-difference model, elimination by aspects, conjunctive model and satisficing search, Payne (1976)

3/25 More Decision Making Models (3.4 mb; 13:57 min)

Expected value, expected utility, subjective expected utility

3/30 Decision Making Heuristics: Representativeness (3.4 mb; 13:57 min)

Definition of representativeness, errors associate with use of heuristics including random looking outcomes, ignoring sample size, gamblers fallacy, ignoring base rate, conjunction fallacy Definition of availability heuristic, source of errors when using availability heuristic

3/30 Decision Making Heuristics: Availability (7.8 mb; 32:37 min)

Factors affecting availability including familiarity and how media contributes to familiarity. Other things affecting decision making including the framing effect, sunk cost effect, causal scenarios

3/30 Decision Making: Overconfidence (1.1 mb; 4:30 min)

3/30 Components of Propositional Reasoning (1.1 mb; 4:44 min)

Discusses components of propositional reasoning such as logical connectives, propositions, affirming and denying antecedents and consequents

4/1 Factors Hindering and Facilitating Propositional Reasoning (8.1 mb; 33:42 min)

Review of antecedents and consequents as well as affirming and denying, fallacies, modus ponens, modus tollens, practice distinguishing fallacies from valid inferences, factors making reasoning more difficult such as negatives, abstraction, believability effects, Wason Selection Task confirmation bias, content effects

4/1 Inductive Reasoning (4.1 mb; 17:03 min)

Category based inductive reasoning, inferences about blank properties, similarity-coverage model, premise-conclusion similarity effects, typicality effects

4/6 Inductive Reasoning: Day 2 (3.0 mb; 12:21 min)

Effects of premise diversity and expertise on inductive reasoning, reasoning with non-blank properties

4/6 Problem Solving Terms (4.1 mb; 17:00 min)

Terminology, algorithms versus heuristics, well-defined versus ill-defined problems, computer science (AI) contributions to knowledge of human problem solving

4/6 Types of Problems (3.7 mb; 15:17 min)

Problems of arrangement and useful skills, problems of inducing structure, problems of transformation, insight problems, their characteristics and the debate about the cognitive processes underlying insight problem solving

4/8 Problem Solving Heuristics (10.8 mb; 44:48 min)

Hill climbing heuristic and problem of local maxima, means-ends heuristic and potential problems with using means-ends heuristic, working backwards, analogy with discussion of analogy research, the factors affecting retrieval of isomorphic problems, the formation of problem solving schemas for isomorphic problems, types of fixation

4/8 Creative Problem Solving (2.2 mb; 9:19 min)

Creativity as problem solving, creativity definition, psychological versus historical creativity, the Romantic approach to creativity

4/8 Creativity: Romantic Approach (1.5 mb; 6:07 min)

Assumptions of the Romantic view of creativity, creativity problem solving processes, divergent thinking and divergent production tasks, and how divergent thinking tasks are coded.

4/8 Creativity: Romantic Approach Day2 (3.2 mb; 13:26 min)

Ability to form remote associations and testing for that ability via the Remote Associates Task, description of Remote Associates Task, evaluating romantic view of creativity, description and the assumptions of the Cognitive View of creativity

4/13 Creativity: Cognitive Approach (15.3 mb; 1:03:46 min)

Review of the assumptions underlying the cognitive view, effects of semantic knowledge on creativity including correlated attributes typicality effects and the path of least resistance, effects of episodic memory in terms of conformity to examples viewed prior to a creativity generation task, analogy and creativity including the components of analogical thinking and the effect of conceptual distance on the creativity of solutions, the Geneplore model