Thinking and deciding

By means of the literature and lectures, students will be introduced into these two interdisciplinary fields:

• Cognitive science: How do people perceive and understand the world, and how is their behavior guided by their perceptions and thoughts? Some topics that will be included are: How can we study mental processes? Can we mathematically model mental processes? Can a machine think? How is thinking related to the brain? How do we store our experiences in our memory? Is the mind a modular system? How do mental representations come about? Do people think by means of formal logic, analogies and concepts, or by means of language, mental images and vague categories? How can technology support our cognitive processes?
• Decision Making: This comprises the study of how people form subjective judgments and choose between alternatives. Topics are: What is a rational choice? Are people rational decision makers? How do people make judgments and decisions under uncertainty? How do people choose with known probabilities? How do they choose between alternative options? How do external factors (context, emotions) influence decision making? How does decision making evolve over time? How can we measure and influence subjective judgments and preferences? How can technology support decision making with tools such as decision aids?

Cognition:

• History/emergence of cognitive psychology

• Recognition and perception (object recognition / top-down processes/ face perception / speech perception)

• Attention (divided / selective attention, consciousness)

• Working memory and it’s components

• Long-term memory (encoding en retrieval)

• Memory strategies

• Mental imagery and cognitive maps

• Knowledge representation and network models

• Language (reading/ writing / bilingualism)

• Problem solving and logic

Decision Making:

• Rationality

• Judgments

• Heuristics and biases

• Confidence, covariation and causation

• Risk and uncertainty (Utility Theory and Prospect theory)

• Preference and Choice

• Defaults, nudges and choice architectures

• Intertemporal choice

• Intuition & Reflective thinking (Two systems)

• Application in technology:

• Specialized lectures on connectionist models, Artificial Intelligence, Recommender systems and decision aids

Tutorials: Workshops & Debates:

• In addition to the regular lectures, there will be workshops. In the workshops students will discuss scientific papers and get practical experience in applying their knowledge gained in the course. In these workshops the students will learn to reflect on the literature and how to express their own position in a discussion point. The workshops will be followed by short writing assignments, and will help students to develop three professional skills: writing, handling scientific information and reflecting.

Knowledge

• The student is able to recall and classify the most important theoretical approaches in the study of Thinking and Deciding, the recent developments, and the scientific research on which these theories are based.

• The student is able to judge boundary conditions of each theoretical approach in the study of Thinking and Deciding.

• The student can analyze differences between each of the theoretical approaches in the study of Thinking and Deciding.

• The student is able to apply and integrate the theoretical approaches in the study of Thinking and Deciding to applications in the technological domain.

Skills

• The student is able to write an argumentative text related to the content of the course that meet standards for academic writing and is tailored to the target group.
• The student is able to find and evaluate various sources of information on relevance and validity and to adequately refer to them in written communication.
• The student is able to reflect on their own writing skills and to define an action plan accordingly.
• The student is able to design and lead a discussion on a scientific paper in small groups.

You must meet the following requirements

• Registered for a degree programme other than
• HBO-TOP Applied Physics, Pre-Master
• Completed none of the course modules listed below
• Cognitive Science and AI (JBC000)

• Thinking Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman)
• Cognition, 11th edition (Thomas A. Farmer and Margaret W. Matlin), Wiley custom (ISBN: 9781119891710)
• Additional articles on judgement and decision making and for the debates