Chapter 7B Vocab

Question 1

cognition

Answer 1

all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.

Question 2

concept

Answer 2

a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people

Question 3

prototype

Answer 3

a mental image or best example of a category. Matching new items to a prototype provides a quick and easy method for sorting items into categories (as when comparing feathered creatures to a prototypical bird, such as a robin).

Question 4

algorithm

Answer 4

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.

Question 5

heuristic

Answer 5

a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone than algorithms

Question 6

insight

Answer 6

a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem; it contrasts with strategy-based solutions. (pp. 236, 300)

Question 7

creativity

Answer 7

the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas. (p. 301)

Question 8

confirmation bias

Answer 8

a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence. (p. 303)

Question 9

fixation

Answer 9

(1) the inability to see a problem from a new perspective, by employing a different mental set. (2) according to Freud, a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were unresolved. (pp. 303, 483)

Question 10

mental set

Answer 10

a tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past. (p. 303)

Question 11

functional fixedness

Answer 11

the tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions; an impediment to problem solving. (p. 303)

Question 12

representative heuristic

Answer 12

judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes; may lead us to ignore other relevant information. (p. 304)

Question 13

availability heuristic

Answer 13

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. (p. 305)

Question 14

overconfidence

Answer 14

the tendency to be more confident than correct—to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments. (p. 306)

Question 15

belief perseverance

Answer 15

clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited. (p. 307)

Question 16

intuition

Answer 16

an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning. (p. 308)

Question 17

framing

Answer 17

the way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments. (p. 311)

Question 18

language

Answer 18

our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning. (p. 313)

Question 19

phoneme

Answer 19

in language, the smallest distinctive sound unit. (p. 313)

Question 20

morpheme

Answer 20

in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or a part of a word (such as a prefix). (p. 314)

Question 21

grammar

Answer 21

in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others. (p. 314)

Question 22

semantics

Answer 22

the set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences in a given language; also, the study of meaning. (p. 314)

Question 23

syntax

Answer 23

the rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language. (p. 314)

Question 24

babbling stage

Answer 24

beginning at about 4 months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language. (p. 315)

Question 25

one-word stage

Answer 25

the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words. (p. 316)

Question 26

two-word stage

Answer 26

beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly two-word statements. (p. 316)

Question 27

telegraphic speech

Answer 27

early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram—“go car”—using mostly nouns and verbs. (p. 316)

Question 28

linguistics determinism

Answer 28

Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think. (p. 319)