Thinking and laguage

Question 1

• are the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.
• includes the formation of concepts: mental groupings of similar objects, events, ideas, and people.

Answer 1

cognition

Question 2

is a mental image or best example of a category.
allows us to more readily recognize something as an example of a concept depending on how closely this thing matches it.
allows people to more quickly recognize that “a robin is a bird” than that “a penguin is a bird”.

Answer 2

prototype

Question 3

• is a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem.
• type of problem-solving strategy that is usually slower but also less error-prone.
• type of problem-solving strategy that the following would be: finding a word using the 10 letters in SPLOYOCHYG by trying each letter in each of the 10 positions, with 907,200 permutations in all.

Answer 3

algorithm

Question 4

• is a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgements and solve problems efficiently.
• type of problem-solving strategy that is usually faster but also more error-prone.
• type of problem-solving strategy that the following would be: finding a word using the 10 letters in SPLOYOCHYG by grouping letters that often appear together (CH and GY) and excluding rare letter combinations (such as two Y’s together)

Answer 4

Heuristic

Question 5

-is a sudden realization of a problem’s solution.
-occurs when the pieces of a problem suddenly fall together in an abrupt, true-seeming, and often satisfying solution.
-type of solutions to word problems that is accompanied by a burst of activity in the right temporal lobe.
may provide the joy of a joke, with its sudden comprehension of an unexpected ending or double meaning.

Answer 5

insight

Question 6

• is a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence.
• describes the fact that once people form a belief (e.g., that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction) they prefer evidence in favor of the belief and ignore evidence that refutes it.

Answer 6

conformation bias

Question 7

• is a tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past.
• is an example of fixation: an inability to see a problem from a fresh perspective.
• predisposes how we think based on past experiences and expectations.

Answer 7

mental set

Question 8

is an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning.
for making each day’s hundreds of judgements and decisions, we typically use this instead of taking the time and effort to reason systematically.
approach are we relying on when we let our brains work on a problem without thinking about it and let it “incubate” while we attend to other things.
are learned associations that surface as gut feelings, such as when we react warily to a stranger that looks like someone who previously harmed or threatened us, but without consciously recalling the earlier experience.
for anything in which you have developed a special skill, this is an acquired ability to size up a situation in an eyeblink.
can be perilous, especially when we overfeel and underthink, as we do when judging risks.

Answer 8

intuition

Question 9

• is the estimation of the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory.
• type of heuristic that is being used if we presume an event is common because instances of it come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness).
• type of heuristic that entices us to gamble at a casino because even small wins there are more memorable (they set off bells and whistles that make them more vivid) while big losses are not (typically occur soundlessly and invisibly).
• type of heuristic that can lead us astray in our judgements of other people since anything about a person or group that is more easily recalled - perhaps due to its vividness, recency, or distinctiveness - can make it seem more typical of that person or group.
• type of heuristic that causes more people to fear flying than to be concerned about global warming because we lack comparably memorable images of global climate change.

Answer 9

availability heuristic

Question 10

• is the tendency to be more confident than correct is the tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgements.
• drives stockbrokers and investment managers to market their ability to outperform stock market averages, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
• causes students to expect to finish assignments and write papers ahead of schedule when, in fact, the projects generally take about twice the number of days predicted.
• type of decision-making tendency that is associated with people who live more happily, make tough decisions more easily, and seem more credible than others.

Answer 10

overconfidence

Question 11

is clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited.
often fuels social conflict, as it did in a classic study of people with opposing views of capital punishment whose disagreement actually increased when they were shown mixed evidence for both sides of the argument.
describes the fact that once beliefs form and get justified, it takes more compelling evidence to change them than it did to create them.

Answer 11

belief perseverance

Question 12

is the way an issue is posed.
is the way in which a problem is interpreted that can significantly affect decisions and judgements about it.
describes the fact that both patients and physicians deem the risk of a surgery as being greater when they hear that 10 percent of people will die from it, as opposed to being told that 90 percent will survive it.

Answer 12

framing

Question 13

• is our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning.
• in its spoken version, this would need three building blocks: phonemes, morphemes, and grammar.
• human infants have a remarkable capacity and built-in predisposition for this, but the particular version of it that they learn will reflect their unique interactions with others.
• most psychologists agree that humans alone possess this if it is defined as verbal or signed expression of complex grammar.

Answer 13

language

Question 14

• in a language, this is the smallest distinctive sound unit.
• may not always be letters, such as the following three things in the word chat: ch, a, and t.
• linguists identified 869 different ones of this in human speech across nearly 500 languages, but which no single language uses all of them.
• the English language uses about 40 of these, while other languages use anywhere from half to more than twice that many.

Answer 14

phoneme

Question 15

• in a language, this is the smallest distinctive unit that carries meaning.
• typically combines two or more phonemes, and may be a word or a part of a word (such as a prefix).
• the English language has more than 100,000 of these.

Answer 15

morpheme

Question 16

• in a language, this is a system of rules that enable us to communicate with and understand others.
• are the rules that guide us in deriving meaning from sounds (semantics) and in ordering words into sentences (syntax).
• determines how the morphemes found in the English language, either alone or combined, can produce the 615,500 word forms in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Answer 16

Grammar

Question 17

• is the first stage of speech development, which begins at about 4 months old.
• is the stage of speech development during which an infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language.
• at this early stage of speech development a listener could not identify an infant as being, say, French, Korean, or Ethiopian.

Answer 17

Babbling stage

Question 18

• is the stage of speech development that occurs from 1 to 2 years of age.
• is the stage of speech development during which a child speaks mostly in single words.
• during this stage of speech development a single inflected word (“Doggy!”) may equal a sentence (“Look at the dog out there!”
• by the time of this stage of speech development, infants have lost their ability to hear and produce sounds and tones found outside their native language.
• by the time of this stage of speech development, a Japanese child with no training in English would not be able to hear and produce the difference between the English r and l.

Answer 18

one-word stage

Question 19

is the stage of speech development that begins at about 2 years of age.
is the stage of speech development during which a child speaks mostly in two-word statements.
during this stage of speech development, a child uses telegraphic speech (“go car”) using mostly nouns and verbs.
during what stage of speech development, a child uses rules of syntax: the words are in a sensible order.

Answer 19

two-word stage

Question 20

• the time of childhood represents this for mastering certain aspects of language before the language-learning window closes.
• concept that accounts for the fact that people who learn a second language not until after childhood (as adults) usually speak it with the accent of their native language, and they also have difficulty mastering the new grammar.
• type of window for mastering language that closes if, by about 7 years of age, a child has not been exposed to either a spoken or a signed language.

Answer 20

critical period

Question 21

• is the brain area that controls language expression.
• is an area of the frontal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech.
• after damage to this brain area, a person would struggle to speak words while still being able to sing familiar songs and comprehend speech.

Answer 21

Brocas area

Question 22

• is the brain area that controls language reception.
• is an area of the temporal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, involved in language comprehension.
• after damage to this brain area, a person would speak only meaningless words.

Answer 22

Warnickes area

Question 23

was the name of Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think.
describes the fact that the Hopi, who have no past tense for their verbs, could not readily think about the past.
theory that most psychologists now believe is too extreme, since it is possible to think about things for which we have no words and since we routinely have unsymbolized (wordless, imageless) thoughts.
theory that most psychologists now believe not to be exactly true, since our words may not determine what we think so much as influence our thinking.

Answer 23

Linguistic determinism

Question 24

• is a type of thought that is not in words (nondeclarative).
• type of thought that Albert Einstein used when he achieved some of his greatest insights through visual images, and only later put them into words.
• type of thought for a physical experience that will activate some of the same neural networds that are active during the actual experience.
• type of thought that was found to help students achieve a better academic performance by each day visualizing effective studying techniques.

Answer 24

imaginal thought