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Unit #7B
Thinking
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Cognition | all 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 the prototype provides a quick and easy method for including items in a category (as when comparing feathered creatures to a prototypical bird, such as a robin). |
| Algorithm | a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrasts with the usually speedier-- but also more error-prone—use of heuristics. |
| Heuristic | a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments 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 confirms one's preconceptions. |
| Fixation | the inability to see a problem from a new perspective; an impediment to problem solving. |
| Mental Set | a tendency to approach a problem in a 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 one 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 one's beliefs and judgments. |
| Framing | the way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments. |
| Belief perseverance | clinging to one's initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited. |
| Language | our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning. |
| Phoneme | in a 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 (such as a prefix). |
| Grammar | in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others. |
| Syntax | the rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language. |
| Babbling stage | at about 4 months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language. |
| Telegraphic speech | early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram--"go car"--using mostly nouns and verbs and omitting auxiliary words. |
| Linguistic Determinism | Whorf's hypothesis that language determines the way we think. |
| Semantics | the set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences in a given language; also, the study of meaning. |
| 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. |
| Creativity | the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas |
| Intuition | an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning. |
| Anchoring Heuristic | The tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood of an event by using a starting point (an anchor) and then making adjustments up and down from this starting point. |
| Convergent Thinking | narrows the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution. |
| Divergent Thinking | expands the number of possible problem solutions (creative thinking that diverges in different directions). |
| Receptive Language | This period marks the beginning of the development of babies; it is the ability to comprehend speech. |
| Productive Language | Babies' ability to produce words. |
| 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 | controls language expression—an area of the frontal lobe, usually 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. |