Unit 7B Thinking, Problem Solving, Creativity, and Language Flashcards
Cognition
The mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.
What does a cognitive psychologist do?
They study the logical and sometimes illogical ways in which we create concepts, solve problems, make decisions, and judgments
Schema/Concept
A mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people (Ex. When I think of dogs that includes all diff breeds)
Prototypes
Mental images or best examples of a category
Algorithms
A methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem (Ex. The step-by-step procedure to solving a math problem)
Heuristics
A simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently
What are 2 differences between algorithms and heuristics?
Heuristics are faster but more error prone than algorithms
Insight
A sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem; it contrasts w strategy-based solutions
Creativity
The ability to produce novel and valuable ideas
Convergent thinking
Determining one correct answer
Divergent thinking
Determining many uses for one thing (this is easiest for creative ppl)
What did Robert Sternberg say were the five components of creativity?
- Expertise
- Imaginative thinking skills
- A venturesome personality
- Intrinsic motivation
- A creative environment
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 (Ex. You might view a thumbtack as something that can only be used to hold paper to a cork board)
Representative heuristics
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 readily to mind (perhaps because you saw them on the news a couple times) we presume they are common
Overconfidence
The tendency to be more confident than correct - to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgment
Belief perseverance
Clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited
Intuition
An effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning
Framing
The way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments
Language
Our spoken, written, or signed words and the way we combine them to communicate meaning
Phonemes
In language, the smallest distinctive sound unit (Ex. B-A-T (3), CH-A-T (3))
Morphemes
I’m language, the smallest units that carry meaning; may be a word or part of a word, like a prefix (Ex. Bat, pre-, -ed, etc)
Grammar
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 (Ex. Semantic rule tells us that adding -ed to the word laugh means that it happened in the past)
Syntax
The rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language (Ex. In English syntactical rule says that adjectives come before nouns; White House. In Spanish it’s the opposite; casa blanca.)
About how old are babies when they start babbling?
4 months
One-word stage
The stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words
Telegraphic speech
An early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram - “go car” - using mostly nouns and verbs
Language activation device
A “switch box” that needs to be turned either “on” or “off” for us to understand and produce language
Linguistic determinism
Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think (Ex. A tribe has no past tense in there language, so they must not think about the past)
What increases our overconfidence?
Heuristics, confirmation of beliefs, and the inclination to explain failures
Exaggerated Fear
The opposite of having overconfidence is having an exaggerated fear about what may happen. Such fears may be unfounded. (Ex. The 9/11 attacks led to a decline in air travel due to fear)
Receptive Language
Is the child’s ability to comprehend speech. Begins to mature before their productive language, which is their ability to produce words.
Productive Language
Is a child’s ability to produce words (improves with improvement of receptive language)
How did BF Skinner (Behavioral Psychology) think children acquire language?
- through operant learning
- language acquisition is association, imitation, and reinforcement
- grammar and sentence structure are learned through positive and negative reinforcement
How did Noam Chomsky (Linguist) think children acquire language?
- we learn language too quickly for it to be through reinforcement and punishment
- inborn universal language acquisition device + grammar
Universal Grammar
- all human languages have the same grammatical building blocks, such as nouns and verbs, subjects and objects, negations and questions
- we all start speaking mostly in nouns
- we all follow language development stages
Critical Period
Children can’t perform that same statistical analysis and intense language acquisition through our whole life
Mental Practice
Repeatedly imagining achieving your goals under several different conditions
Retroactive Interference
Occurs when new information makes it harder to recall something you learned earlier
Broca’s Area
Associated with speech production and articulation
