Memory Cognition and Learning
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42 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Cognition | the higher mental processes of humans, including how people know and understand the world, process information, make judgments and decisions, and describe their knowledge and understanding to others |
| Thinking | the manipulation of mental representations of information. This is important because it is the crux of the difference between animals and humans |
| Mental Image | representations in the mind that resemble the object or event represented. This is not exclusively visual, but can be from all other senses as well. |
| Concepts | categorizations of objects, events, or people that share common properties. Often based on previous experiences |
| Prototypes | typical, highly representative examples of a concept |
| Algorithm | a rule which, if followed, guarantees a solution to a problem |
| Heuristic | a rule of thumb or mental shortcut that may lead to a solution |
| Arrangement problem | a problem that requires that a group of elements be rearranged or recombined in a way that will satisfy a certain criteria |
| Problems of inducing structure | a problem that requires a person to identify the relationships that exist among the elements presented and construct a new relationship among them |
| Transformation problems | a problem that consists of an initial state, a goal state, and a series of methods for changing the initial state into the goal state |
| Confirmation bias | the search for information that confirms one's preconceptions |
| Creativity | the combining of responses or ideas in a novel way |
| Divergent thinking | the ability to generate unusual, yet nonetheless appropriate, responses to problems or questions. This is important because it is the kind of thinking that often results in what is perceived as creativity. |
| Convergent Thinking | the ability to produce responses that are based primarily on knowledge and logic |
| Cognitive Complexity | the use of and preference for elaborate, intricate, and complex stimuli and thinking patterns |
| Language | the systematic, meaningful arrangement of symbols |
| Learning Theory Approach to language acquisition | suggests that language acquisition follows the principles of reinforcement and conditioning. This suggests that the reason children learn to talk is because they are rewarded when they make a sound close to a word and through successive approximations began to speak in even more complex ways |
| Linguistic-Relativity hypothesis | the theory that language shapes and may even determine the way people of a particular culture perceive and understand the world |
| deductive reasoning | deduced from facts that are assumed |
| inductive reasoning | inferred from information but there is not necessarily a clear path from the information to the conclusion |
| Availability heuristic | involves judging the probability of an event by how easily the event can be recalled from memory |
| means-end analysis | the repeated testing for differences between the desired outcome and what currently exists |
| representative heuristic | a rule we apply when we judge people by the degree to which they represent a certain category or group of people |
| subgoals | a heuristic in which the individual divided the problem into a series of intermediate steps and then proceeds to solve each one |
| Wolfgang Kohler | studied insight by dangling a banana above a chimp's head and providing them all the materials necessary to get it, but not all together. He found that the chimps would first try in vain to get the banana through the use of trial and error, and then they would all of a sudden realize the solution |
| Functional Fixedness | the tendency to think of an object only in terms of its typical use |
| Mental Set | the tendency for old patterns of problem solving to persist |
| Phonemes | the smallest speech unit that can be perceived, 100 sounds in human language |
| Morphemes | smallest unit of meaning, includes root words, prefixes, suffixes |
| Phrases | a sequence of two or more words that comprise a unit of a sentence |
| Sentences | a grammatical unit that is syntactically independent and contains a noun and verb phrase |
| Grammar | System of rules that enables us to communicate with others |
| Semantics | set of rules used to derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences (adding -ed) |
| Syntax | system of rules that specify arrangements of words in sentences |
| 3-10 months | Language development, cooing and babbling |
| 10-13 months | language development, 1st words, usually single words |
| < 18 months | language development, 3-50 word vocab for production, but understanding a lot more |
| 18-24 months | fast mapping (map a word into a concept quickly) vocabulary spurt, telegraphic speech |
| telegraphic speech | words not critical to the message are left out |
| Metalinguistic Awareness | able to reflect on speech, understand puns, jokes and sarcasm |
| Chomsky | critiqued the learning theory approach to language acquisition by pointing out that children are encouraged even when their sentences don't make complete sense grammatically. He pointed out, also, that all languages share a similar underlying structure, and also that the brain has a language-acquisition device. Nativist Theory |
| Iconic memory | memory of visual information |
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