Chapter 9 - Thinking and Language Flashcards
Concept
A mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people.
Cognition
The mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating
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).
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 contaste with strategy-based solutions.
Confirmation bias
A tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence
Fixation
The inability to see a problem from a new perspective, by employing a different mental set.
Mental set
A tendency to approach a problem in on 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 see, to represent, or match particular prototypes; may lead us to ignore other relevant information.
Availability heuristic
Estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory; if instances come readily to mind we presume such events are common.
Overconfidence
The tendency to be more confident than correct— to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgements.
Belief perseverance
Clinging to ones initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited.
Intuition
An effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought,and contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning.
Framing
The way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgements.
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
In a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or part of a word.
Grammar
In a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with 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 four months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household languages.
One-word stage
The stage in speech development, from about she one to two, during which a child speaks, mostly in single words.
Two-word stage
Beginning about age two, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly two word statements.
Telegraphic speech
Early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram —”go car”— using mostly nouns and verbs.
Aphasia
Impairment of language, usually caused by left hemisphere damage either to Broca’s or Wernicke’s area.
Broca’s Area
Controls language expression—an area of the frontal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech.
Wernicke’s area
Controls language reception—a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression; usually in the left temporal lobe.
Linguistic determinism
Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think.
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.
