Cognitive Psychology Flashcards
Concept
A mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people
Prototype
A mental image or best example of a category. Matching items to a prototype provides a quick and easy method for sorting items into a category.
Creativity
Ability to produce new and valuable ideas.
Convergent Thinking
Narrowing the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution
Divergent Thinking
Expanding the number of possible problem solutions; creative thinking that diverges in different directions
Algorithm
A methodical, logical rule, or procedure that guarantees solving a problem.
Heuristic Representative
The representativeness heuristic involves estimating the likelihood of an event by comparing it to an existing prototype that already exists in our minds.
Insight
A sudden realization of a problem’s sollution
Heuristic Availability
The availability heuristic describes our tendency to use information that comes to mind quickly and easily when making decisions about the future.
Confirmation Bias
A tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence.
Fixation
In cognition, the inability to see a problem from a new perspective. Locked into one perspective.
Mental Set
A tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past.
Overconfidence
The tendency to be more confident than correct. It is to overestimate the accuracy of our judgements and beliefs.
Belief Perserverance
Clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis of which they were formed has been discredited.
Framing
The way an issue is posed; how an issue is worded can significantly affect decisions and judgements.
Language
Our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning.
Phoneme
Smallest distinctive sound unit in language.
Morpheme
Smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or a part of a word
Grammar
System of rules that allows humans to communicate and understand others.
Babbling Stage
It begins around 4 months after birth. The stage of speech development in which an infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language.
One-Word Stage
The stage in speech development, typically from age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words.
Two-Word Stage
Beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly in two word statements.
Telegraphic Speech
Early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram, using mainly nouns and verbs.
Critical Period
A critical period is defined as the time during which a given behavior is especially susceptible to, and indeed requires, specific environmental influences to develop normally.
Aphasia
Impairment of language, usually caused be left hemisphere damage either to Broca’s area (impairing speaking) or Wernicke’s Area (impairing understanding)
Broca’s Areas
Left Frontal Lobe. It controls language expression. It directs muscle movements directed in speech.
Wernicke’s Areas
Left Temporal Lobe. Involved in language expression and comprehension.
Linguistic Determinism
The strong form of Whorf’s hypothesis - that language controls the way we think and interpret the world around us.
Intelligence
The ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations.
General Intelligence
According to Spearman and others, underlies all mental abilities and is therefore measured by every task on an intelligence test. The unit is g.
Factor Analysis
A statistical procedure that identifies clusters of related items on a test; used to identify different dimensions of a performance that underline a person’s total score.
Savant Syndrome
A condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computation or drawing.
Grit
Passion and perseverance in the pursuit of long term goals
Emotional Intelligence
The ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions.
Intelligence Test
A method for assessing an individual’s mental aptitudes and comparing them with those of others, using numerical scores.
Achievement Test
A test designed to assess what a person has learned.
Aptitude Test
A test designed to predict a person’s future performance; aptitude is the capacity to learn
Mental Age
A measure of intelligence test performance devised by Binet; the level of performance typically associated with children of a certain chronological age. Thus a child who does as well as an average 8 year old is said to have a mental age of 8.
Stanford-Binet
The widely used American revision of Binet’s originally intelligence test.
Intelligence Quotient (IQ)
(ma/ca) times 100 = IQ. Measures IQ through numbers.
Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale
The WAIS and its companion versions for children are the most widely used intelligence tests; they contain verbal and performance subtests.
Standardization
Defining uniform testing procedures and meaningful scores by comparison with the performance of a pretested group.
Normal Curve
A symmetrical, bell shaped curve that described the distribution of many types of data; most scores fall between the mean (within one standard deviation) and fewer and fewer near the extremes.
Flynn Effect
The Flynn Effect refers to the substantial and consistent rise in average IQ scores observed over the past century in numerous countries, as political scientist James Flynn discovered. This increase is attributed to environmental factors like improved nutrition, education, and reduced exposure to toxins.
Reliability
The extent to which a test yields consistent results, an assessed by the consistency of scores on two halves of the test, on alternative forms of the test, or on retesting.
Validity
The extent to which a test experiment or predicts what it is supposed to.
Validity Content
The extent to which a test samples the behavior that is of interest.
Validity Predictive
The success with which a test predicts the behavior it is designed to predict; it is assessed by computing the correlation between test scores and criterion behavior.
Cohort
A group of people sharing a common characteristic, such as from a given time period.
Crystallized Intelligence
Our accumulated knowledge and verbal skills; tends to increase with age.
Fluid Intelligence
Our ability to reason speedily and abstractly; tend to decrease with age, especially during late adulthood.
Cross-Sectional Study
The cross-sectional study definition in psychology is research that involves different groups of people who do not share the same variable of interest (like the variable you’re focusing on) but who do share other relevant variables.
Longitudinal Study
In a longitudinal study, researchers repeatedly examine the same individuals to detect any changes that might occur over a period of time. Longitudinal studies are a type of correlational research in which researchers observe and collect data on a number of variables without trying to influence those variables.
Intellectual Disability
A condition of limited mental ability, indicated by a intelligence score of 70 or below and difficulty adapting to the means of life.
Down Syndrome
A condition from mild to severe intellectual disability and associated physical disorders caused by an extra copy of a chromosome.
Heritability
The proportion of variation among individuals in a group that we can attribute to genes. The heritability of a trait may vary, depending on the range of populations and environments studied.
Stereotype Threat
A self-confirming concern that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype.
Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky proposed that linguistics, or the study of language, should be included in the field of cognitive psychology since it involves mental processes. Additionally, he proposed the theory of universal grammar, which states language acquisition is innate or inborn as opposed to being learned.
Benjamin Lee Whorf
Whorf is widely known for his ideas about linguistic relativity, the hypothesis that language influences thought. An important theme in many of his publications, he has been credited as one of the fathers of this approach, often referred to as the “Sapir–Whorf hypothesis”, named after him and his mentor Edward Sapir.
Charles Spearman
pioneer of factor analysis, and for Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. He also did seminal work on human intelligence, including the discovery of the g factor.
L.L. Thurstone
Thurstone was responsible for the standardized mean and standard deviation of IQ scores used today, as opposed to the Intelligence Test system originally used by Alfred Binet. He is also known for the development of the Thurstone scale.
Howard Gardner
With his “theory of multiple intelligences,” Gardner challenged the notion of a singular entity of mind, mostly genetic, and instead put forward the idea that all of us possess different types of intelligences, including linguistic, spatial, and musical.
Robert Sternberg
He is best known for his intelligence theory, which states that there are three aspects to intelligence. These are creative, analytical, and practical intelligence.
Alfred Binet
Alfred Binet (French: [binɛ]; 8 July 1857 – 18 October 1911), born Alfredo Binetti, was a French psychologist who invented the first practical IQ test, the Binet–Simon test.
Lewis Terman
Lewis Terman was an influential psychologist who is known for his version of the Stanford-Binet intelligence test and for his longitudinal study of giftedness. His research is the longest-lasting longitudinal study ever conducted.
Carol Dweck
Dweck has sought to understand why some students give up in the face of failure, while others thrive. Over the past three decades, her research has shown that the way students think about intelligence and their ability affects their motivation and achievement in school.
