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Myers 9 Chapter 9
Bell West / Thinking and Language
| 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. |