Chapter 7B Vocab Flashcards
cognition
all 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. 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).
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 and often novel realization of the solution to a problem; it contrasts with strategy-based solutions. (pp. 236, 300)
creativity
the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas. (p. 301)
confirmation bias
a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence. (p. 303)
fixation
(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)
mental set
a tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past. (p. 303)
functional fixedness
the tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions; an impediment to problem solving. (p. 303)
representative heuristic
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)
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. (p. 305)
overconfidence
the tendency to be more confident than correct—to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments. (p. 306)
belief perseverance
clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited. (p. 307)
intuition
an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning. (p. 308)
framing
the way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments. (p. 311)
language
our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning. (p. 313)
phoneme
in language, the smallest distinctive sound unit. (p. 313)
morpheme
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)
grammar
in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others. (p. 314)
semantics
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)
syntax
the rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language. (p. 314)
babbling stage
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)
one-word stage
the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words. (p. 316)
two-word stage
beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly two-word statements. (p. 316)
telegraphic speech
early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram—“go car”—using mostly nouns and verbs. (p. 316)
linguistics determinism
Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think. (p. 319)
