Cognition Discussion Questions

Please do not include any in-text citations. Use your own words for those questions. Your answers needs to go though Turnitin. For each question please provide around 250 words.

For these two questions, there should be at least two aspects to every answer you give – a description of your experience and an attempt to account for that experience using what you learned in class.(Related to the textbook which I will send you later)

1. Identify a problem you’ve solved recently. What were the initial state, goal state, operators and constraints? How did you go about solving it? Account for your problem solving strategy in terms of one of the heuristics we discussed (hill-climbing, means-end heuristic/working backwards, analogy).
2. Pick a judgment heuristic that we discussed (availability, representativeness – including gamblers, base rate and conjunction fallacies, or anchoring and adjustment) and give an example from real life. How was the heuristic applied and what was the outcome?

For the following questions, just answer them in your own words

1.When you need to think creatively (for school, work or solving real-life problems), is there any kind of preparation you do or particular situation you try to create for yourself? What helps? Why do you think it helps?

2.Confirmation bias is a term you hear a lot. It’s often invoked to explain entrenched beliefs about politics, religion, climate change… but it’s a force in lots of day-to-day judgements, too. Try to think of some less weighty effects of confirmation bias – where in your daily life, your relationships and your commonplace decision making might it come into play?