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 |
Algorithm | a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem |
Heuristic | a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently |
Insight | a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem |
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 |
Mental set | a tendency to approach a problem in one particular way |
Functional fixedness | the tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions |
Representativeness heuristic | judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent particular prototypes |
Availability heuristic | estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory |
Overconfidence | the tendency to be more confident than correct |
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 |
Framing | the way an issue is posed |
Language | our spoken, written, or signed words and the way we combine them to communicate meaning |
Phoneme | the smallest distinctive sound unit |
Morpheme | the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word of part of a word |
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 |
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 |
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, stage where a child speaks mostly two-word statements |
Telegraphic speech | early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram using mostly nouns and verbs |
Aphasia | impairment of language, usually caused by left hemisphere damage either to Broca's area or to Wernicke's area |
Broca's area | controls language expression- directs the muscle movements involved in speech; in left frontal lobe |
Wernicke's area | controls language reception- a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression; in left temporal lobe |
Linguistic determination | Whorf's hypothesis that language determines the way we think |