| Term | Definition |
|---|
| cognition | mental activites associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating |
| concept | mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people |
| prototype | mental image or best example of a category |
| algorithm | a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem |
| heuristic | simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier and more error-prone |
| insight | suddent and often novel realization of the solution to a problem |
| confirmation bias | tendency to search for information that confirms one's preconceptions |
| fixation | inability to see a problem from a new perspective |
| mental set | tendency to approach a problem in a particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past |
| functional fixedness | 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, or match, particular prototypes |
| availibility heuristic | estimating the likelihood of events based on their availibility in memory |
| overconfidence | tendency to be more confident than correct- to overestimate the accuracy of one's beliefs and judgments |
| framing | the way an issue is posed |
| belief bias | tendency for one's preexisting beliefs to distort logical reasoning |
| belief perseverance | clinging to one's initial conceptions after the bias 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 unit |
| morpheme | in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; like a prefix |
| grammar | in a language, a system of rules tha enable us to communicate with and understand others |
| semantics | set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences in a given language |
| syntax | 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 | stage in speech development, from age 1 to 2, during which a child mostly speaks single words |
| two-word stage | beginning at 2, 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" |
| linguistic determinism | Whorf's hypothesis that language determines the way we think |
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