Chapter 10 - Vocabulary Flashcards
Concept
A mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people.
Cognition
The mental activities associated with thinking, remembering, and communicating.
Prototype
A mental image or best example of a category. Matching new items to the prototype provides a quick and easy method for including items in 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 judgements and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone than algorithms.
Insight
A sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem; it contrasts with strategy-based solutions.
Confirmation Bias
A tendency to search for information that confirms one’s preconceptions.
Fixation
The inability to see a problem from a new perspective; an impediment 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.
Representative 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; if instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), we presume such events are common.
Overconfidence
The tendency to be more confident than correct - to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs and judgements.
Framing
The way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgements.
Belief Bias
The tendency for one’s pre-existing beliefs to distort logical reasoning, sometimes by making invalid conclusions seem valid, or making valid conclusions seem invalid.
Belief Perseverance
Clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited.o
Babbling Stage
Beginning at 4 months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to household language.
One Word Stage
The stage in speech development, from age 1-2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words.
Two Word Stage
Beginning at age 2, the two word stage is the stage of speech development in which a child mostly speaks two word statements.
Telegraphic Stage
Early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram, using mostly nouns and verbs and omitting auxiliary words. (Example: Go car.)
Linguistic Determinism
Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think.
Language
Our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning.
Phoneme
In language, the smallest distinctive sound unit.
Morpheme
The smallest unit that carries meaning. It may be a word or a part of a word.
