PSYC 3610 – Lecture 2

hi everyone this is lecture two for thinking and decision making I want to remind you how you know we've evolved cognitively to engage in a lot of automatic processing right and that includes detecting patterns um and as we'll see today making connections among the patterns that we've detected okay so what I want to lecture

on is how information is organized in the mind and I'm want to spend quite a bit of time on this because I think the readings for this week um kind of lean on that understanding so while I'm going to very briefly touch on what the book talks about regarding priming and associations cognitive ease Norm

surprises and causes what I really am going to focus on here is how information is organized in the mind and I'm going to do my absolute best to try to explain this to you because it's it can be difficult to explain all right so bear with me okay in order to kind of give you an

idea of how information is organized in the mind I am going to lean on a couple of models and a model when it comes to cognitive psychology is you know some sort of analogy or something that is kind of explaining or modeling so to speak um the way our mind works okay so I'm going

to talk about a couple of connectionist model and they're they are connectionist because they focus on the connections of information in our mind okay uh I'm going to talk about one called parallel distributed processing or PDP and I'm also going to discuss a semantic Network model okay but I really want you to

focus on kind of how similar they are I'm not going to focus too much on details of the models and their pros and cons cons and that kind of thing I just want you to understand how together you can get a really big picture of how the mind works so let's talk about that let's