Midterm #2 Flashcards
Define: A concept
A concept is the mental representation of an object, event, or idea.
Define: Categories
Categories refer to these clusters of interrelated concepts.
Define: Classical Organization
This theory claims that objects or events are categorized according to a certain set of rules or by a specific set of features.
Define: Graded membership
the observation that some concepts appear to make better category members than others.
Define: Prototypes
mental representations of an average category member
Define: Semantic network
an interconnected set of nodes (or concepts) and the links that join them to form a category.
Define: Nodes
Nodes are circles that represent concepts, and links connect them together to represent the structure of a category as well as the relationships among different categories.
Define: Linguistic relativity (Whorfian hypothesis)
The theory that the language we use determines how we understand the world.
When we think logically, we rely on ________.
Algorithms (problem-solving strategies based on a series of rules.)
Define: Heuristics
Problem-solving strategies that stem from prior experiences and provide an educated guess as to what is the most likely situation.
Define: Mental Set
A mental set is a cognitive obstacle that occurs when an individual attempts to apply a routine solution to what is actually a new type of problem.
Define: Functional Fixedness
Occurs when an individual identifies an object or technique that could potentially solve a problem, but can think of only its most obvious function.
Define: Representativeness Heuristic
Making judgements of likelihood based on how well an example represents a specific category.
Define: Availability Heuristic
Entails estimating the frequency of an event based on how easily examples of it come to mind.
Define: Anchoring Effect
Occurs when an individual attempts to solve a problem involving numbers and uses previous knowledge to keep the response within a limited range.
