| Term | Definition |
|---|
| all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. | cognition |
| a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people. | concept |
| 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). | prototype |
| 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. | algorithm |
| a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone than algorithms. | heuristic |
| a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem; it contrasts with strategy-based solutions. | insight |
| a tendency to search for information that confirms one's preconceptions. | confirmation bias |
| the inability to see a problem from a new perspective; an impediment to problem solving. | fixation |
| a tendency to approach a problem in a particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past. | mental set |
| the tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions; an impediment to problem solving. | functional fixedness |
| 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. | representativeness 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. | availability heuristic |
| the tendency to be more confident than correct—to overestimate the accuracy of one's beliefs and judgments. | overconfidence |
| the way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments. | framing |
| the tendency for one's preexisting beliefs to distort logical reasoning, sometimes by making invalid conclusions seem valid, or valid conclusions seem invalid. | belief bias |
| clinging to one's initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited. | belief perseverance |
| our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning. | language |
| in a language, the smallest distinctive sound unit. | phoneme |
| in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or a part of a word (such as a prefix). | morpheme |
| in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others. | grammar |
| the rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language. | syntax |
| at about 4 months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language. | babbling stage |
| early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram--"go car"--using mostly nouns and verbs and omitting auxiliary words. | telegraphic speech |
| Whorf's hypothesis that language determines the way we think. | linguistic determinism |
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