'Student-steered' PBL session: From necessity to opportunity

E. C. Tolman emphasized the purposiveness of behavior — the idea that much of our behavior is goal-directed. For instance, employees who aim for a promotion work diligently to meet their targets. Tolman argued that when classical conditioning and operant conditioning occur, the organism acquires certain expectations. In classical conditioning, a child might fear a dog because they expect it to bite. In operant conditioning, a person might consistently work overtime because they expect a...

Cognitive learning is based on purposive behavior, incidental learning, and insight learning.
E. C. Tolman's theory of purposive behavior emphasizes that much behavior is goal-directed. He argued that to understand behavior, we must look at the entire sequence of actions leading to a goal. For instance, high school students study hard, not just due to past reinforcement but also to achieve the goal of getting into a good college.
Tolman introduced the idea that behavior is influenced by...

Hindsight bias leads you to believe that the event you just experienced was predictable, even though it really wasn’t. In other words, you knew all along that things would turn out the way they did. Can you relate this to the phrase "Hindsight is 20/20" now? 

Effective problem-solving consists of two steps: 1. identifying the problem and 2. selecting the appropriate problem-solving strategy (i.e., a plan of action used to find a solution). Humans use four problem-solving strategies:

The second moment of an area, also known as the moment of inertia of an area, is a geometric property of a shape that reflects its resistance to change. The moment of inertia of an area can be calculated for both two-dimensional and three-dimensional shapes. The moment of inertia of an area is calculated by taking the sum of the product of the area and the square of its distance from a chosen axis of rotation. For two-dimensional shapes, the moment of inertia can be expressed as a single...

There are many research methods available to psychologists in their efforts to understand, describe, and explain behavior and the cognitive and biological processes that underlie it.