Chapter 8 Flashcards
All mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering and communicating.
Cognition
Mental grouping of similar
objects, events, ideas,
and people.
Concept
A mental image of best example of a category. Matching new items to a prototype provides a quick and easy method of sorting items into categories, (as when comparing feathered creatures to a prototype bird, such as a robin).
Prototype
The Aha! Moment
Before the moment, the problem solvers’ frontal lobes (which are involved in focusing attention) were active. As the insight occurred, there was a burst of activity in the right temporal lobe just above the ear.
A methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees you will solve a particular problem. Contrast with the usually speedier—but also more error-prone—use of heuristics.
Algorithm
A simple, thinking strategy that often allows you to make a judgment and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier, but also more error prone than algorithms.
Heuristics
A sudden realization of a solution to a problem; it contrasts with strategy-based solution.
Insight
A Tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort evidence that contradicts them.
Confirmation bias
The inability to see a problem from of new perspectives; an obstacle to problem-solving.
Fixation
And effortless, immediate, automatic, feeling, or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning.
Intuition
The way an issue is pose; ——- can significantly affect decisions and judgments.
Framing
Cling to beliefs and ignoring evidence that provides they are wrong
Belief perseverance
The tendency to be more confident and correct—— to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments.
Overconfidence
Judging the likelihood of an event based on its availability in memory; if an event comes readily to mind (perhaps because it was vivid), we assume it must be common.
Availability heuristics
When someone describes his political beliefs as “strongly liberal,” but he has decided to explore opposing viewpoints. How might he be affected by confirmation bias and belief perseverance in this effort?
Carefully guard against confirmation bias (searching for support for his own views, and ignore contradictory evidence) as he seeks out opposing viewpoints. Belief perseverance may lead him to cling to be fused anyways. It will take more compelling evidence to change his beliefs than it took to create them.
A major obstacle to problem solving is fixation, which is a(n)
Inability to view a problem from a new perspective
After the 911 attack by foreign-born terrorist, some observers initially assume that the 2003 US East Coast blackout was probably also the work of foreign-born terrorists. This assumption illustrates the ——-
Availability Heuristics.
The systematic procedure for solving a problem is a(n)
Algorithm
A mental grouping of similar things is called a
Concept
Why can news be described as “something that hardly ever happens”?How does knowing this help us assess our fears?
If a tragic event, such as a plane crash makes the news, is noteworthy and unusual, unlike much more common bad news, such as a traffic accident. knowing this, we can worry less about unlikely events, and think more about improving the safety of our every day activities.
The 5 ingredients of creativity
-Expertise
-Imaginative thinking skills
-A venturesome personality
-Intrinsic motivation
-A creative environment
Motivation that arises internally rather than from outside rewards or external pressure.
Intrinsic motivation
The ability to produce new and valuable ideas
Creativity
Narrows the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution
Convergent thinking
Expands the number of possible problem solutions (creative thinking that diverges in different directions).
Divergent thinking
Sudden Aha! Reaction that instantly reveals the solution
Insight
Simple thinking shortcuts that let you act quickly and efficiently, but put you at risk for errors
Heuristics
Our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meeting.
Language
Beginning at about four months, the stage of speech and development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at the first unrelated to the household language.
Babbling stage
A stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which the child speaks mostly in single words
One-word stage
Beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly two-word statements.
Two-word stage
Early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram-“ go car”-using mostly nouns and verbs.
Telegraphic speech
In a specific language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others
Grammar
What is the difference between receptive and productive language, and when do children normally hit these milestones in language development?
Infants normally start developing receptive language skills around four months of age. Then starting with babbling at four months and beyond, infants normally start building productive language skills.
What was Noam Chomsky’s explanation of language development?
Chomsky maintains that all languages share a universal grammar and humans are biologically predisposed to learn the grammar rules of language.
Why is it so difficult to learn a new language in adulthood?
Our brains critical period for language learning is in childhood, when we absorb language structure almost effortlessly. As we move past that stage in our brains development, our ability to learn a new language drops dramatically.
———— is the part of the brain that if damaged may impair your ability to speak words.
Broca’s area (controls language expression; left hemisphere of the frontal lobe)
If you damage ———-, you may impair your ability to understand language.
Wernicke’s area (controls language reception; usually in the left temporal lobe)
Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory
-Analytical intelligence (school smarts: traditional academic problem solving)
-creative intelligence (trailblazing smarts: the ability to generate novel ideas)
-Practical intelligence (StreetSmarts: skillet handling every day tasks)
A condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computerization or drawing.
Savant syndrome
A general intelligence factor that, according to spearman, and others underline specific mental abilities and is therefore measured by every day task on an intelligence test.
General intelligence (g) -g factor -common skill set
The ability to perceive, understand, manage and use emotions.
Emotional intelligence
A method for assessing an individuals mental aptitudes and comparing
them with others,
using numerical scores
Intelligence test
A test design to predict
a persons,
future performance;
——— is the capacity to learn
Aptitude test
Aptitude
A test designed to assess what a person has learned
Achievement test
A measure of intelligence test performance devised by Binet; the chronological age that most typically corresponds to a given level of performance. Thus, a child who does as well as an average eight-year-old is said to have a mental age of eight.
Mental age
The widely used American revision of Binet’s original
intelligence test.
Stanford-Binet
To help an employee decide whom she should hire she should use an ——- test.
Aptitude
For an employer, wishing to test the effectiveness of a
new on-the-job training
program, it would be
wise to use an ——— test.
Achievement
What did Binet hope to achieve by establishing a child’s mental age?
Binet hoped that a child’s mental age would help identify appropriate school placements with children of similar abilities.
What are the three requirements that psychological test must meet in order to be widely excepted?
-standardized(pre-tested on a similar group of people)
-reliable(yielding consistent results)
-valid (measuring, or predicting what is supposed to measure or predict).
The bell-shaped curve that describes the distribution of many physical and psychological attributes. Most scores fall near the average, and fewer scores line near the extremes.
Normal curve
The most widely used intelligence
test; contains verbal
and performance (nonverbal)
subtests.
Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)
The extent to which a test yields consistent results, and assessed by the consistency of scores on two halves of the test, on alternative forms of the test, or on retesting.
Reliability
The extent to which a test measures or predicts what it is supposed to.
Validity
Defining uniform testing procedures and meaningful scores by comparison with the performance of a pre-tested group.
Standardization
A condition of mild to severe intellectual disability and associated physical disorders caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21
Down syndrome
A condition of limited mental ability, indicated by an intelligence test score of 70 or below, and difficulty adapting to the demands of life. Formally referred to as mental retardation.
Intellectual disability
If environments become more equal, the heritability of intelligence would
Increase
The portion of variation among individuals that we can attribute to genes. The heritability of a trait may very, depending on the population and environment.
Heritability
A study in which people of different ages are compared with one another
Cross-sectional study
Research in which the same people are restudied and retested over a long period.
Longitudinal study
Our accumulated knowledge and verbal skills; tends to increase with age
Crystallized intelligence
Our ability to reason speedily and abstractedly; tends to decrease during late adulthood
Fluid intelligence
A self-confirming concern that will be judged based on a negative stereotype. It may impair your attention in learning.
Stereotype threat
What are the characteristics of a creative person?
Expertise, adventuresome personality, imaginative thinking skills
Children reach the one word stage of speech development at about
One year of age
When young children speak in short phrases using mostly verbs and nouns, this is referred to as
Telegraphic speech
According to Chomsky, all languages share a(n)
Universal grammar
Most researchers agree that apes can
Communicate through symbols.
Charles spearman suggest we have one ——— ——— underlying success across a variety of intellectual abilities.
General intelligence (g)
The existence of savant syndrome seems to support
Gardners theory of multiple intelligences
Sternberg’s three types of intelligence are
Academic, practical, creative
Emotionally intelligent people tend to
Succeed in their careers
The IQ of a six year old with a measured mental age of nine would be
150
The Wechsler adult intelligence scale (WAIS) is best available to tell us
How the test taker compares with other adults in vocabulary and arithmetic reasoning
The strongest support for hereditary‘s influence on intelligence is the finding that
Identical twins, but not other siblings, have nearly identical intelligence test scores.
Say that heritability of intelligence is about 50% means that 50% of
That variation intelligence within a group of people is attributable to genetic factors.
The environmental influence that has the clearest, most profound effect on intellectual development is
Being raised in conditions of extreme deprivation.
——— ——— can lead to poor performance on test by undermining testtakers believe that they can do well on the test
Stereotype threat
