Chapter 10: Thinking and Language Flashcards
Cognition
the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. -
Concept
a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people. -
Prototype
a mental image or best example of a category. -
Algorithm
a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrasts with the usually speedier – but also more error-prone – use of heuristics. -
Heuristic
a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone than algorithms. -
Insight
a sudden realization of a problem’s solution; contrasts with strategy-based solutions.
Confirmation Bias
A tendency to search for information that confirms one’s preconceptions, ignoring anything against it. -
Fixation
the inability to see a problem from a new perspective; an impediment (obstacle) to problem solving. -
Mental Set
a tendency to approach a problem in a particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past. -
Functional Fixedness
the tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions; an impediment to problem solving. -
Representativeness Heuristic
judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes; may lead one to ignore other relevant information. -
Availability Heuristic
estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory. -
Overconfidence
the tendency to be more confident than correct–to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs and judgments. -
Framing
the way an issue is posed; how as issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments. -
Belief Bias
the tendency for one’s preexisting beliefs to distort logical reasoning sometimes by making invalid conclusions seem valid or valid conclusions seem invalid. -
Belief Perseverance
clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited. -
Artificial Intelligence
AI-
Computer Neural Networks
A method of AI that teaches computers to think like the brain. -
Language
our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning. -
Phoneme
in a language the smallest distinctive sound unit. -
Morpheme
in a language the smallest unit that carries meaning. -
Grammar
in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate and understand others. -
Semantics
the set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences in a given language also the study of meaning. -
Syntax
the rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language. -
Babbling Stage
(beginning at about 4 months) the stage of speech development where the child makes sounds that resemble their language, from about age 1 to 2 during. -
One-word Stage
(occurs from about age 1-2) the stage in which children speak mainly in single words. -
Two-word Stage
(beginning about age 2) the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly in 2 word statements. -
Telegraphic Speech
early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram using mostly nouns and verbs and omitting auxiliary words. -
Linguistic Determinism
Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think. -