Psychology chapter 9 Flashcards
Cognition
the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing , remembering, and communicating.
Concept
a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people.
Prototyped
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.
Insight
a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem; it contrasts with strategy-based solutions.
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.
Heuristics
a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone
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 one 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.
Framing
the way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments.
Hindsight Bias
the tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that once would have foreseen it.
Representativeness Heuristic
judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem 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 to readily mind. we presume such events are common.
Overconfidence
the tendency to be more confident than correct- to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgment.
Belief perseverance
clinging to ones initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited.
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 a part of a word (like a prefix)
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 4 months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language.
One-word stage
the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words.
