Final answer:
Pattern recognition is the term that describes our brain's process of analyzing new situations based on past experiences. Confirmation bias and availability heuristic are related cognitive processes but represent different concepts. Pattern recognition helps in decision-making by utilizing previous knowledge to recognize similar patterns in new information.
Step-by-step explanation:
The question asks to identify the concept that occurs when our brain analyzes new situations based on past experiences that seem similar. The correct answer is pattern recognition. This is because pattern recognition involves using past experiences to identify and process new information that appears similar. It's a cognitive process where people can find or see patterns in a clutter of data through top-down processing and by using previous experiences to quickly recognize stimuli. It significantly helps in decision-making and problem-solving. Topics like confirmation bias and availability heuristic are also related to how we process information, but they refer to different cognitive phenomena.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to focus on information that supports our existing beliefs or hypotheses, ignoring any contrary evidence. It is a common cognitive bias where we seek out or interpret information in a way that confirms our preconceptions.
The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method, or decision. This heuristic operates on the notion that if something can be recalled easily, it must be important or at least more relevant than alternative solutions which are not as readily recalled. Meanwhile, the term hindsight refers to the belief that an event just experienced was predictable, even if it was not.