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Cognitive Psychology: Attention · Decision making · Learning · Judgement · Memory · Motivation · Perception · Reasoning · Thinking - Cognitive processes Cognition - Outline Index
In psychology, a set is a group of expectations that shape experience by making people especially sensitive to specific kinds of information. A perceptual set, also called perceptual expectancy, is a predisposition to perceive things in a certain way.[1] Perceptual sets occur in all the different senses.[2] They can be long term, such as a special sensitivity to hearing one's own name in a crowded room, or short term, as in the ease with which hungry people notice the smell of food.[3] A mental set is a framework for thinking about a problem.[4] It can be shaped by habit or by desire.[5] Mental sets can make it easy to solve a class of problem, but attachment to an inappropriate mental set can restrict problem-solving and creativity.[4][6]
Perceptual[]
Perception can be shaped by "top-down" processes such as drives and expectations. An effect of these factors is that people are particularly sensitive to perceive certain things, detecting them from weaker stimuli than otherwise.[7] A simple demonstration of the effect involved very brief presentations of non-words such as "sael". Subjects who were told to expect words about animals read it as "seal", but others who were expecting boat-related words read it as "sail".[3]
Sets can be created by motivation and so can result in people interpreting ambiguous figures so that they see what they want to see.[7] For instance, how someone perceives what unfolds during a sports game can be biased if they strongly support one of the teams.[8] In one experiment, students were allocated to pleasant or unpleasant tasks by a computer. They were told that either a number or a letter would flash on the screen to say whether they were going to taste an orange juice drink or an unpleasant-tasting health drink. In fact, an ambiguous figure was flashed on screen, which could either be read as the letter B or the number 13. When the letters were associated with the pleasant task, subjects were more likely to perceive a letter B, and when letters were associated with the unpleasant task they tended to perceive a number 13.[1]
Perceptual set has been demonstrated in many social contexts. People who are primed to think of someone as "warm" are more likely to perceive a variety of positive characteristics in them, than if the word "warm" is replaced by "cold". When someone has a reputation for being funny, an audience are more likely to find them amusing.[3] Individual's perceptual sets reflect their own personality traits. For example, people with an aggressive personality are quicker to correctly identify aggressive words or situations.[3]
Mental[]
Mental sets are subconscious tendencies to approach a problem in a particular way.[6] They are shaped by past experiences and habits.[9] An inappropriate mental set can hamper the solution of straightforward problems.[3] For example when people are asked, "When a United States plane carrying Canadian passengers crashes in international waters, where should the survivors be buried?" the phrasing of the question suggests that it is a problem of international law. People who interpret the statement with this mental set will miss the fact that survivors would not need to be buried.[6] A specific form of mental set is functional fixedness, in which someone fails to see the variety of uses to which an object can be put.[6][9][3] An example would be someone who needs a weight but fails to use an easily available hammer because their mental set is to think of a hammer as for a specific purpose.[6]
See also[]
|References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Weiten, Wayne (17 December 2008). Psychology: Themes and Variations, Cengage Learning. URL accessed 24 March 2011.
- ↑ Sonderegger, Theo (16 October 1998). Psychology, 43–44, John Wiley and Sons. URL accessed 24 March 2011.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 (2 December 1999) Beginning Psychology, 24–27, Oxford University Press. URL accessed 24 March 2011. Cite error: Invalid
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tag; name "HardyHeyes1999" defined multiple times with different content - ↑ 4.0 4.1 Galotti, Kathleen M. (5 February 2009). Cognitive Psychology: In and Out of the Laboratory, 341–344, Cengage Learning. URL accessed 25 March 2011.
- ↑ (1 January 2003) General Psychology, Atlantic Publishers & Dist. URL accessed 25 March 2011.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 Bruno, Frank Joe (2 August 2002). Psychology: a self-teaching guide, 127–128, John Wiley and Sons. URL accessed 25 March 2011.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 (29 December 2008) Introduction to Psychology: Gateways to Mind and Behavior, 171–172, Cengage Learning. URL accessed 24 March 2011.
- ↑ (1 October 2002) Can You Believe Your Eyes?: Over 250 Illusions and Other Visual Oddities, 173–174, Robson. URL accessed 24 March 2011.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 Mangal, S. K. (1 August 2007). Essentials of educational psychology, 393–394, PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd.. URL accessed 25 March 2011.
Further reading[]
- (2008) Cognitive psychology, 163–166, Pearson/Prentice Hall. URL accessed 25 March 2011.