Thought And Language Flashcards
Manipulating mental representations for a purpose.
Thinking
People think using:
Mental images and mental models
A visual representation of a stimulus.
Mental image
Representations that describe, explain or predict the way things work.
Mental model
A mental representation of a class of objects, ideas or events that share common properties.
Concept
Groupings based on common properties.
Categories
In problem solving, these are shortcuts or rules of thumb.
Heuristics
Most of the time, people rely on these cognitive shortcuts that allow them to make rapid judgements but can sometimes lead to irrational choices.
Heuristics
The conscious manipulation of representations.
Explicit cognition
Cognition outside awareness.
Implicit cognition
The theory that asserts that most cognitive processes occur simultaneously through the action of multiple, activated networks.
Connectionism, or parallel distributed processing.
The process by which people generate and evaluate arguments and beliefs.
Reasoning
The process of transforming one situation into another to meet a goal.
Problem solving
The process by which an individual weighs the pros and cons of different alternatives in order to make a choice.
Decision making
The system of symbols, sounds, meanings and rules for their combination that constitutes the primary mode of communication among humans.
Language
The theory that language shapes thought, thought shapes language, and language evolves to express new concepts.
Whorfian hypothesis of linguistic relativity
The process of using rules to transform sounds and symbols into meaningful language.
Grammar
The way language is used and understood in everyday life.
Pragmatics
The way people speak, hear, read and write in interconnected sentences.
Discourse
The ideal time to gain fluency in a language.
First three years of life.
The stages of speech acquisition.
Babbling, one-word, two-word, holophrastic, fluency.
Speech used by children that leaves out all but the essential words.
Telegraphic speech
The ability to attribute mental states to oneself and to others, enabling social interaction to occur.
Theory of mind
Essential or present qualities needed to classify the object as a member of the category.
Defining features
A typical mental example of a category of things.
Prototype
A particularly good example of a category.
Exemplar
The level people tend to use in categorising objects
Basic level
The level of categorisation to which people naturally go; the level at which objects share distinctive common attributes.
Basic level
A level of categorisation below the basic level in which more specific attributes are shared by members of a category.
Subordinate level
The most abstract level of categorisation in which members of a category share few common features.
Superordinate level
Reasoning from specific observations to more general propositions.
Inductive reasoning
Identifying an object as belonging to a category.
Categorisation
The process by which people understand a novel situation in terms of a familiar one.
Analogical reasoning
Systematic procedures that produce a solution to a problem.
Algorithm
Mentally imagining the steps involved in solving a problem before doing them.
Mental simulation
The tendency for people to ignore other possible functions of an object when they have a fixed function in mind.
Functional fixedness
The tendency to use the same problem solving techniques that have worked in the past.
Mental set
The tendency for people to search for confirmation of what they already believe.
Confirmation bias
Unrealistic optimism
Optimism bias
A tendency to overestimate how successful our predictions could have been once the outcome is known and when the event itself was predictable.
Hindsight bias
In expectancy value theory, a combined measure of the importance of an attribute and how well a given option satisfies it.
Weighted utility value
A combined assessment of the value and probability of different options.
Expected utility
A cognitive shortcut used to assess whether an object or incident belongs in a particular class.
Representativeness heuristic
A strategy that leads people to judge the frequency of a class of events or the likelihood of something happening on the basis of how easy it is to retrieve from explicit memory.
Availability heuristic
People are rational within constraints imposed by their environment, goals and abilities.
Bounded rationality
An area in the brain that plays a central role in working memory and explicit manipulation of representations.
Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
An area in the brain that helps people use their emotional reactions to guide decision making and behaviour.
Ventromedial prefrontal cortex
The elements of language.
Phonemes, morphemes, phrases and sentences.
The rules that govern the meanings of morphemes, words, phrases and sentences.
Semantics
When answers to seemingly insoluble problems come to mind after the problem has been put aside.
Implicit problem solving
