1. Cognition and Intelligence

2. Cognition
• Mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, and
remembering
• Ideas, thoughts, concept formation, logic and reasoning,
problem solving, decision making
• “Meta-cognition” – thinking about thinking; thought
control

3. Cognition
• Categorization
o Natural groupings based on common properties
(Jeopardy)
o “Animals” is a category with many concepts
• Concept
o A mental representation of a category (“prototypes”)
o “Chicken” = farm animal, small, feathers

5. NAGAMAR
SLEVO
STINGIH
UNOSB
KITNH
MIECOVHH

8. Problem Solving
• Heuristics
o Cognitive shortcuts for selecting among alternatives
without carefully considering each one
o Allows for rapid and efficient (but sometimes)
misleading judgments
o Ex: Representative heuristic, availability heuristic

9. Problem Solving
• Confirmation Bias
o Tendency to recall info that supports preconceived
(biased?) beliefs
o Leads to interpretation of ambiguous evidence to
supporting existing opinions
 The more emotionally involved with a belief, the more
likely of ignoring facts that undermine/challenge it
o Ex: “Remember the hits and forget the misses”,
psychic readings, Hussein/WMD

10. Intelligence
• Achievement tests
o Measure what you’ve already learned
o Reading recognition, spelling, arithmetic, computation
(scholastic exam)
• Aptitude tests
o Goal is to test how you will do in the future (prediction)
o Measures how you apply existing information into a
new scenario (career placement exam, IQ tests)

12. Intelligence
• Autistic-savant
o Scoring extremely low on IQ tests but demonstrate
extraordinary mental abilities in a specific area
o Not all individuals with autism are savants (Rain Man)
• Estimated prevalence of savant abilities in autism
~10%
o Not all individuals with low IQ are savants
• Estimated prevalence ~1%

13. Intelligence
• Multiple Intelligences
a) Musical
b) Kinesthetic
c) Spatial
d) Verbal
e) Logical/Mathematical
f) Intra-personal
g) Interpersonal

14. Creativity
• Defined as “divergent problem solving”
• How do we operationalize creativity?
• Recognizing creativity?
o Independence
o Originality
o Persistence
o Flexibility

15. Creativity
• Moderately correlated with intelligence
• Not all highly-intelligent people are creative!
• Impediments
o Functional fixedness
o Habitual set

16. Intelligence
• What is the operational definition for intelligence?
• What two factors influence IQ?
• History of the IQ test
o 1904: Binet developed first IQ test in France to rate child
intelligence
o 1916: IQ test later modified at Stanford University
IQ = (mental age/chronological age) x 100

18. Intelligence
• Are IQ tests reliable? Valid?
• Issues with IQ tests?
o Lack of theoretical basis
o Cultural bias
o Only measures certain types of intelligence
o What is intelligence?

19. Intelligence
• Fluid knowledge
o Ability to draw analogies, recognize patterns, solve novel
problems
o As age increases, this type of intelligence decreases
• Crystallized knowledge
o This is your knowledge base
o Vocabulary, geography, general world knowledge

20. Action
• Options in the decision-making process
o Routine behavior
o External referral
o Intentional randomization
o Affect (emotional) referral

21. Action
• Decision making can produce conflict
o Approach-approach decisions
o Avoidant-avoidant decisions
o Approach-avoidant decisions