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Cognition Quizlet 2022

Terms in this set (31)

cognition
all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e pp. 365, 498)
concept
a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 365)
prototype
a mental image or best example of a category. Matching new items to a prototype provides a quick and easy method for sorting items into categories (as when comparing feathered creatures to a prototypical bird, such as a robin). (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 365)
creativity
the ability to produce new and valuable ideas. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 366)
convergent thinking
narrowing the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 366)
divergent thinking
expanding the number of possible problem solutions; creative thinking that diverges in different directions. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 366)
algorithm
a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrasts with the usually speedier—but also more error-prone—use of heuristics. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 370)
heuristic
a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone than an algorithm. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 370)
insight
a sudden realization of a problem's solution; contrasts with strategy-based solutions. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e pp. 304, 370)
confirmation bias
a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 371)
fixation
(1) in cognition, the inability to see a problem from a new perspective; an obstacle to problem solving. (2) in personality theory, according to Freud, a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were unresolved. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e pp. 371, 581)
mental set
a tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 371)
intuition
an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 372)
representativeness heuristic
estimating the likelihood of events in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes; may lead us to ignore other relevant information. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 372)
availability heuristic
estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory; if instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), we presume such events are common. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 373)
overconfidence
the tendency to be more confident than correct—to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 375)
belief perseverance
clinging to one's initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 376)
framing
the way an issue is posed; how an issue is worded can significantly affect decisions and judgments. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 376)
language
our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 381)
phoneme
in a language, the smallest distinctive sound unit. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 381)
morpheme
in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or a part of a word (such as a prefix). (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 382)
grammar
in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others. Semantics is the language's set of rules for deriving meaning from sounds, and syntax is its set of rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 382)
babbling stage
beginning around 4 months, the stage of speech development in which an infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 384)
one-word stage
the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 384)
two-word stage
beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly in two-word statements. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 384)
telegraphic speech
early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram—"go car"—using mostly nouns and verbs. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 384)
aphasia
impairment of language, usually caused by left hemisphere damage either to Broca's area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke's area (impairing understanding). (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 387)
Broca's area
helps control language expression—an area of the frontal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 388)
Wernicke's area
a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression; usually in the left temporal lobe. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 388)
linguistic determinism
the strong form of Whorf's hypothesis—that language controls the way we think and interpret the world around us. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 389)
linguistic influence
the weaker form of "linguistic relativity"—the idea that language affects thought (thus our thinking and world view is "relative to" our cultural language). (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 389)
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