Question | Answer |
cognition | the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. |
concept | a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people. |
prototype | 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 |
algorithm | a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrast with the usually speedier-but also more error-prone-use of heuristics. |
heuristic | a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgements and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone than algorithms. |
insight | a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem; it contrasts with strategy-based solutions. |
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. |
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 readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), we presume such events are common. |
overconfidence | the tendency to be more confident than correct-to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgements. |
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 judgements. |
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. |
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. |
two-word stage | beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly two-word statements. |
telegraphic speech | early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram-"go car"- using mostly nouns and verbs. |
aphasia | impairment of language, usually caused by left hemisphere damage either to Broca's area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke's area (impairing understanding) |
Broca's area | control language expression-an area of the frontal lobe, uaually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech. |
Wernicke's area | controls language reception-a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression; usually in the left temporal lobe. |
linguistic determinism | Whorf's hypothesis that language determines the way we think. |