Application of Cognition - Essay Example

Application of Cognition A college is a place where high school go to advance their knowledge gained in high school, in preparation for their career. College offers one with the opportunity to meet new friends and have new experience. There is a lot of freedom in college; it is not like high school where students are constantly monitored. In college, everyone is regarded as mature and one is expected to conduct him or herself with dignity. College has well developed infrastructure compare to high school and this enable it offer hostel facilities to students who come from far places.

The purpose of a prototype is to enable one revise their plan so that the plan can be easily achievable using minimum resources possible. In decision making, a prototype helps in testing and improving the decision one is about to make. Many people, who don’t use prototypes, end up spending so much and also make a lot of mistakes along the way, while they pursue the real process as defined by their decision. It is therefore important to use prototypes to minimize this. Every student would want to go to a college that a good performance history so that their confidence in excelling in life, can increase.

Therefore, one heuristic strategy to use is to go online and research about the college. The results of search engine will enable one filter colleges that are unsatisfactory and remain with a list of colleges that meet the desired criteria. Confirmation bias is one of the obstacles that can create errors in thinking. A good example is when a college is poorly performing yet one want to go to that college may because it has good infrastructure or a lot of his or her friends are in the college.

Mental set is another, which is the tendency to solve a problem using strategies one used to solve past problems. In this case one may use Google search to find a college that bests suits them because they used the same strategy to search for the current high school they are in. finally, belief perseverance which is a strong confidence in what one believes in about something even if it is wrong. A good example is when one is told that a certain college does not perform well yet in the past one year it among the best college (Ashcraft, Mark, and Gabriel, 6).

One fails to consider past performance of the college as base their confidence on it due to one-year good performance. Coupled with understanding of problem-solving and thinking errors, the aim is to minimize errors, biasness, belief perseverance and mental set errors so that the prototype is close to perfect. This will save on time that would have otherwise been wasted in revising, testing and improving the prototype. In addition to that, the college process will be easy to set and determine since this understanding will have imparted the necessary know how on the step by step process of making good decisions.

Works Cited Ashcraft, Mark H., and Gabriel A. Radvansky. Cognition. 5th ed. Boston: Prentice Hall, 2010.