| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Cognitive Psychology | The study if the overlapping fields of perception, learning, memory, and thought, with a special emphasis on how people attend to, acquire, transform, store, and retrieve knowledge. |
| Concept | Mental category used to classify an event or object according to some distinguishing property or feature. |
| Prototype | An abstraction, an idealized pattern of an object or idea that is stored in memory and used to decide whether similar objects or ideas are members of the same class of items. |
| Problem Solving | The behavior of individuals when confronted with a situation or task that requires insight or determination of some unknown elements. |
| Algorithm | Procedure for solving a problem by implementing a set of rules over and over again until the solution is found. |
| Heuristics | Sets of strategies, rather than strict rules, that act as guidelines for discovery-oriented problem solving. |
| Subgoal analysis | Heuristic procedure in which a problem is broken down into smaller steps, each of which has a subgoal. |
| Means-ends analysis | Heuristic procedure in which the problem solver compares the current situation with the desired goal to determine the most efficient way to get from one to the other. |
| Backward search | Heuristic procedure in which a problem solver works backward from the goal or end of a problem to the current position, in order to analyze the problem and reduce the steps needed to get from the current position to the goal. |
| Functional fixedness | Inability to see that an object can have a function other than its stated or usual one. |
| Creativity | A feature of thought and problem solving that includes the tendency to generate or recognize ideas considered to be high-quality, original, novel, and appropriate. |
| Convergent thinking | In problem solving, the process of narrowing down choices and alternatives to arrive at a suitable answer. |
| Divergent thinking | In problem solving, the process of widening the range of possibilities and expanding the options for solutions. |
| Brainstorming | Problem-solving technique that involves considering all possible solutions without making prior evaluative judgments. |
| Reasoning | The purposeful process by which a person generates logical and coherent ideas, evaluates situations, and reaches conclusions. |
| Logic | The system of principles of reasoning used to reach valid conclusions or make inferences. |
| Decision making | Assessing and choosing among alternatives. |
| Language | A system of symbols, usually words, that convey meaning and a set of rules for combining symbols to generate an infinite number of messages. |
| Linguistics | The study of language, including speech sounds, meaning, and grammar. |
| Psycholinguistics | The study of how language is acquired, perceived, understood, and produced. |
| Phonology | The study of the patterns and distributions of speech sounds in a language and the tacit rules for their pronunciation. |
| Phoneme | A basic or minimum unit of sound in a language. |
| Morpheme | A basic unit of meaning in a language. |
| Semantics | The analysis of the meaning of language, especially of individual words. |
| Syntax | The way words and groups of words combine to form phrases, clauses, and sentences. |
| Grammar | The linguistic description of how a language functions, especially the rules and patterns used for generating appropriate and comprehensible sentences. |
| Naturalistic observation | A descriptive research method in which researchers study behavior in its natural context. |
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