Chapter seven: thought and language
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52 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 ALGORITHMS | systematic problem-solving procedures that inevitably produce a solution |
| ANALOGICAL REASONING | the process by which people understand a novel situation in terms of a familiar one |
| AVAILABILITY HEURISTIC | a strategy that leads people to judge the frequency of a class of events or the likelihood of something happening on the basis of how easy it is to retrieve from memory |
| BASIC LEVEL | the level of categorization to which people naturally go; the level at which objects share distinctive common attributes |
| BOUNDED RATIONALITY- | the notion that people are rational within restraints composed by their environment, goals, and abilities |
| CATEGORIES | groupings based on common properties |
| CATEGORIZATION | the process of identifying an object as an instance of a category, recognizing its similarity to some objects and dissimilarly to others |
| CONCEPT | a mental representation of a category of objects, ideas, or events that share common properties |
| CONFRIMATION BIAS | the tendency for people to search for information that confirms their expectations |
| CONNECTIONISM | a model of human cognitive processes in which many cognitive processes occur simultaneously so that a representation is spread out (i.e., distrusted) throughout a network of interacting processing units; also called parallel distributed processing (PDP) |
| CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION | the tendency to settle on a cognitive solution that satisfies as many restraints as possible in order to achieve the best fit to the data |
| DEFINING FEATURES | qualities that are essential, or necessarily present, in order to classify an object as a member of a category |
| DESCISION MAKING | the processes by which people weigh the pros and cons of different alternatives in order to make a choice among two or more options |
| DEDUCTIVE REASONING | the process of reasoning that draws logical conclusions from premises |
| DISCOURSE | the way people ordinarily speak, hear, read, and write in interconnected sentences |
| DORSOLATERAL PREFRONTAL CORTEX | an area in the brain that plays a central role in working memory and explicit manipulations of representations |
| EXPECTED UTILITY | a combined assessment of the value and probability of different options |
| EXPLICIT COGNITION | thinking that involves conscious manipulation of representations |
| FUNCTIONAL FIXEDNESS | the tendency to ignore other possible functions of an object when one already has a function in mind |
| GRAMMER | a system of rules for generating understandable and acceptable language utterances |
| HEURISTICS | in problem solving, cognitive shortcuts or rules of thumb |
| ILL-DEFINED PROBLEM | a situation in which both the information needed to solve a problem and the criteria that determine whether the goals are attained are vague |
| IMPLICIT COGNITION | thinking that occurs outside awareness |
| INDUCTIVE REASONING | the process of reasoning from specific observations to general propositions |
| LANGUAGE | the system of symbols, sounds, meanings, and rules for their combination that constitutes the primary mode of communication among humans |
| MENTAL IMAGES | visual representations of a stimulus |
| MENTAL MODELS | representations that describe, explain, or predict the way things work |
| MENTAL STIMULATIONS | a problem-solving strategy in which people imagine the steps to problem solving mentally before actually undertaking them |
| MORPHEMES | in language, the smallest units of meaning |
| NONVERBAL COMMUNICATIONS | modes of communication that relies on gestures, expressions, intonation, body language, and other unspoken signals |
| PARALLEL DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING (PDP) | a model of human cognitive processes in which many cognitive processes occur simultaneously so that a representation is spread out (i.e., distrusted) throughout a network of interacting processing units; also called Connectionism |
| PHONEMES | the smallest unit of speech that distinguishes one linguistic utterance from another |
| PHRASES | groups of words that act as a unit and convey meaning |
| PRAGMATICS | the way language is used and understood in everyday life |
| PROBLEM SOLVING | the process of transforming one situation into another that meets a goal |
| PROBLEM-SOLVING STRATEGIES | techniques used to solve problems |
| PROTOTYPE | a particularly good example of a category |
| REASONING | the process by which people generate and evaluate arguments and beliefs |
| REPRESENTATIVE HEURISTIC | a cognitive shortcut used to assess whether an object or incident belongs in a particular class |
| SEMANTICS | the rules that govern the meanings, rather than the order, if morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences |
| SENTENCES | units of language that combine a subject and predicate and express thought or meaning |
| SUBGOALS | mini-goals on the way to achieving a broader goal |
| SUBORDINATE LEVEL | a level of categorization below the basic level in which more specific attributes are shared by members of a category |
| SUPERORDINATE LEVEL | the most abstract level of categorization in which members of a category share few common features |
| SYLLOGISM | a formal statement of deductive reasoning which consists of two premises that lead to a logical conclusion |
| SYNTAX | rules that govern the placement of specific words or phrases within a sentence |
| THINKING | manipulating mental representations for a purpose |
| VENTROMEDIAL PREFRONTAL CORTEX | an area in the brain that serves many functions, including helping people use their emotional reactions to guide decision making and behavior |
| WEIGHTED UTILITY VALUE | a combined measure of the importance of an attribute and how well a given option satisfies it |
| WELL-DEFINED CONCEPTS | concepts that have properties clearly setting them apart from other concepts |
| WELL-DEFINED PROBLEMS | problems in which there is adequate information to solve the problem and clear criteria by which to determine whether the problem has been solved |
| WHORFIAN HYPOTHESIS OF LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY | the notion that language shapes thoughts |
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