BEHV 3200 001 Exam 3 Study Guide Lectures 24 Oct 4 Nov Personal Experience We are not perfect observers we make cognitive and perceptual errors Psychologists show that under specific circumstance completely natural events can be observed as strange and bizarre Strange phenomena will be experienced regardless of whether there are strange phenomena occurring The Brain and Expectation Errors extend beyond the perceptual Our brain tries to make sense of stimulus Sometimes not all relevant information is present and we fill in gaps to create coherent experience Our brain will fill in gaps for us so that experience is consistent with expectation o When told to expect something we experience as expected not as things really are The brain has to be selective o We often miss very important details if the environment shifts quickly change blindness Deficits in Metacognition Kruger and Dunning 1999 Least skilled students were likely to overestimate how well they would perform Poor reasoning skills led to reduced accuracy and prevented students from seeing how inaccurate they were Interpreting Experience We are rarely aware of all the factors impacting our reasoning The Left Brain Interpreter The left brain interpreter is our running commentary on the world It attempts to make sense of various experiences It does make sense out of them even if they don t make sense to you Personal Experience If something feels right it s right If it seems real it s real We often want to trust our feelings and intuition should we Statistical Error We are generally bad at statistics Availability Error We commit the availability error when we pass judgment based upon evidence that is memorable and vivid Car vs Motorcycle deaths Car 1 158 Motorcycle 1 1012 Vending Machine vs Shark Attacks Vending Machines 1 215 800 000 more statistically realistic than a shark attack The Four Card Experiment Confirmation Bias The tendency to look for information that produces agreement or confirmation Ex Full Moon Effect in hospital emergency rooms Correlation versus Causation Just because situations co occur does not mean they are related We have to look at more than confirming evidence misses and false alarms are important as well as hits and correct rejections Finding Patterns Where They Don t Exist Lorraine Pace lived a healthy lifestyle ate well exercised often but developed breast cancer was certain that her healthy lifestyle should have made her exempt made assumption that it was an external source that caused her cancer instigated a large scale expensive investigation into environmental factors and nothing was discovered Patternicity Type I Error see signals that aren t there Type II Error ignores signals that are there Misinformation Effect When people observe an event and later receive some misinformation about the event Lost in the Mall Effect People presented with a false story family members corroborate it s false In several post experiment interviews people are asked about the false event 10 30 of people will remember the false stories as real Imagination Inflation Thinking about or imagining what one might have done during a known false memory is sufficient for later recall of the event Attaching a false memory to a visceral component gives it real feeling later and the person cannot tell the difference What is your best argument for a causal relationship between your thoughts and intentions and your action Hume Hume noted that we can never really be sure A causes B all we can be sure of is the perception that two things A and B go together He noted that this was the case for our thoughts too Libet Readiness Potential Potential Shift 500 ms I m going to move 250 ms Observed Finger Movement 0 ms A third of a second before we know we are going to move our brain has already made the decision to move Who s making that decision Will is experienced to the degree that an apparent causal path is inferred from thought to action