ap unit 5 Flashcards
Cognitive Psychology
the study of internal mental process (perception, thinking, memory, attention, language, problem solving, and learning)
Metacognition
when we think about our thinking, active control and awareness of our own thinking (planning, monitoring one’s own thoughts, making decisions, evaluating)
Concepts
Organization, mental groupings of similar objects, events, ideas or people (form category hierarchies from concept, help us to identify objects)
Prototype
First Think Of, mental image or the best example of a specific concept or category (the more closely something matches our prototype of a concept, the more readily we recognize it)
Convergent Thinking
Logic, type of thinking that focuses on coming up with the single, well established answer to a problem (limits creativity)
Divergent Thinking
Imagination, thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions (spontaneous, non linear manner of thinking)
Problem Solving
the mental process that people go through to discover, analyze, and solve problems
Algorithms
set of step by step procedures that provide the correct answer to a particular problem (useful in situations when accuracy is needed or where similar problems need to be solved frequently)
Heuristics
Rules of Thumb, an educated guess based on prior experiences that helps narrow down the possible solutions to a problem (mental shortcut, effort reduction)
Representative Heuristics
comparing the present situation to the most representative mental prototype (allows us to make decisions quickly, helps us to ignore factors in shaping events)
Availability Heuristics
basing decisions on examples and information that immediately spring to mind (anything that enables information to pop in the mind with no effort, connected to events in common)
Mental Set
tendency people have to only use solutions that have worked in the past rather than looking for an alternative idea (rigid thinking)
Functional Fixedness
tendency to view problems only in their customary manner (prevents people from seeing all of the different options to see a solution)
Confirmation Bias
a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence (hears what they want to hear)
Belief Perseverance
Denial, tendency to hold on to beliefs even when evidence proves those beliefs to be wrong
Overconfidence
tendency to overestimate our own knowledge, skill, or judgment (people might not know how uninformed they are on a subject)
Hindsight Bias
I Knew It All Along, the tendency people have to view events as more predictable than they really are (after an event, people say they believed to have known the outcome before it actually happened)
Framing
Cognitive Bias, the process of presenting or posing an issue or question, how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments people make
Anchoring Effect
Cognitive Bias, favoring the first information offered (people have a tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information given, givens impact on choices)
Language
language our spoken written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning
Phonemes
smallest meaningful unit of sound in a language (meaningful sound is one that will change one word into another word, shortly after birth)
Morphemes
the smallest pairing of meaning to any given set of sounds (a single word can have a bunch of meaning wrapped in it)