| Term | Definition |
|---|
| cognition | 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 |
| algorithm | a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem |
| 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 |
| 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, 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 bias | the tendency for one's preexisting beliefs to distort logical reasoning, sometimes by making invalid conclusions seem valid, or valid conclusions seem invalid |
| 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 |
| semantics | the set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences in a given language; also, the study of meaning |
| syntax | the 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 at first unrelated to the household language |
| 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 |
| 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 |
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