Psychology 111: Chapter 7 Flashcards
What are people able to do?
People are even able to mentally rotate, or turn, images
What are concepts?
Concepts are ideas that represent a class or category of objects, events, or activities.
What do concepts allow you to do? (2)
Concepts not only contain the important features of the objects or events people want to think about, but also they allow the identification of new objects and events that may fit the concept
Concepts defined by specific rules or features are called?
Formal concepts
What are natural concepts?
Concepts people form not as a result of a strict set of rules but rather as the result of experiences with these concepts in the real world.
What is a prototype?
A concept that closely matches the defining characteristics of the concept.
How do prototypes develop?
More than likely, prototypes develop according to the exposure a person has to objects in that category.
How do prototypes affect thinking?
People tend to look at potential examples of a concept and compare them to the prototype to see how well they match.
What is a schema?
Mental generalizations about objects, places, events, and people.
What is a script?
A kind of schema that involves a familiar sequence of activities (for example, “going to a movie” would include traveling there, getting the ticket, buying snacks, finding the right theater, etc.
What do concepts help people do?
Problem solve.
What is problem solving?
Occurs when a goal must be reached by thinking and behaving in certain ways.
What is decision making?
Identifying, evaluating, and choosing among several alternatives.
Another word for trial and error?
Mechanical solution.
Specific, step-by-step procedures for solving certain types of problems
Algorithm.
What do algorithms always result in?
The correct answer.
What is a heuristic? What is it based on?
A heuristic is an educated guess based on prior experiences that helps narrow down the possible solutions for a problem.
What is the representative heuristic used for?
Used for categorizing objects and simply assumes that any object (or person) that shares characteristics with the members of a particular category is also a member of that category.
What is the availability heuristic?
Which is based on our estimation of the frequency or likelihood of an event based on how easy it is to recall relevant information from memory or how easy it is for us to think of related examples.
What is a heuristic that does work most of the time?
A useful heuristic that does work much of the time is to work backward from the goal..
What is a subgoal?
Yeah, you know what this is.
What is insight?
When the solution to a problem seems to come suddenly to mind, it is called insight..
How does insight work inside your head?
What usually happens is that the mind imply reorganizes a problem, sometimes while the person is thinking about something else.
What is functional fixedness?
One problem-solving difficulty involves thinking about objects only in terms of their typical uses.
What is a mental set?
Which is defined as the tendency of people to persist in using problem-solving patterns that have worked for them in the past.
What is confirmation bias?
The tendency to search for evidence that fits one’s beliefs while ignoring any evidence to the contrary.
What is creativity?
This kind of thinking is called creativity: solving problems by combining ideas or behavior in new ways.
What is convergent thinking?
What is not good for?
In convergent thinking, a problem is seen as having only one answer and all lines of thinking will eventually lead to (converge on) that single answer by using previous knowledge and logic (Ciardiello, 1998).
Solving problems that require creativity.
What is divergent thinking?
“In what ways is Trish stupid?”
What are the most productive periods of divergent thinking?
Why?
That the most productive periods of divergent thinking for those people tend to occur when they are doing some task or activity that is more or less automatic, such as walkingor swimming.
What are divergent thinkers less prone to?
Divergent thinkers will obviously be less prone to some of the barriers to problem solving, such as functional fixedness.
What is a neglected topic in education?
Creative, divergent thinking is often a neglected topic in the education of young people.
Is creativity prized in all parts of the world?
No.
What is the good news about creativity?
You can improve it.
What are four ways to boost creativity?
Journaling, brainstorming, concept maps, and freewriting.
What are the four characteristics of creative people?
Have a broad range of knowledge about a lot of subjects.
They are not afraid to be different.
They are independent.
Often unconventional.
What is the workable defenition of intelligence? (3)
They define intelligence as the ability to learn from one’s experiences, acquire knowledge, and use resources effectively in adapting to new situations or solving problems (Sternberg & Kaufman, 1998; Wechsler, 1975).
What did Charles Spearman think of intelligence?
Defined intelligence as two primary abilities: the wider ability of general intelligence, labeled as g factor, and task-specific abilities in certain areas such as music, business, or art, labeled as s factor for a specific intelligence.
What did Gardner think?
There are nine multiple intelligence.
How did intelligent tests originate?
Where?
France: They thought that if a way could be found to identify these students more in need, they could be given a different kind of education than the more capable students.
What did Binet decide was the key element to be tested?
Binet decided that the key element to be tested was a child’s mental age, or the average age at which children could successfully answer a particular level of questions
What did Lewis Terman do?
Come up with how we calculate IQ.
What advantage of testing IQ has to offer?
The quotient has the advantage of allowing testers to compare the intelligence levels of people of different age groups.