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AP_Unit 7B
Cognition
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Cognition | Refers to all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. |
| Concept | A mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people. |
| Category Hierarchy | Dividing broad concepts into increasingly smaller and detailed subgroupings. To promote cognitive efficiency, concepts are organized into category hierarchies. |
| 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. Important in the process of classifying objects. |
| Convergent Thinking | Narrows the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution. Injury to the left parietal lobe damages convergent thinking required for successful performance on intelligence tests. |
| Divergent Thinking | Expands the number of possible problem solutions (creative thinking that diverges in different directions). Injury to certain areas of the frontal lobe can destroy imagination while leaving reading, writing, and arithmetic skills intact. |
| Creativity | The ability to produce novel and valuable ideas. The components of creativity include: expertise and a venturesome personality. Intrinsic motivation is an important component of creativity. |
| Trial and Error | A fundamental method of problem-solving characterized by repeated, varied attempts which are continued until success or until the agent stops trying. |
| Algorithm | A logical, methodical step-by-step procedure for solving problems. |
| Heuristic | Simple thinking strategies for solving problems quickly and efficiently. The use of heuristics rather than algorithms saves time in arriving at solutions to problems. |
| Insight | A sudden realization of the solution to a problem. Unlike algorithms or heuristics, insight does not involve strategy-based solutions. Insight is accompanied by a burst of activity in the brain’s right temporal lobe. |
| Confirmation Bias | The tendency to search for information that supports preconceptions. Scientists are trained to carefully observe and record any research outcomes that are inconsistent with their hypotheses to reduce confirmation bias. |
| Fixation | The inability to take a new perspective on a problem. Brainstorming sessions that encourage people to spontaneously suggest new and unusual solutions to a problem are designed to avoid fixations. |
| Mental Set | A tendency to approach a problem in a way that has been successful in the past. Mental sets inhibit creativity. |
| Intuition | Effortless and automatic feelings or thoughts. A highly adaptive heuristic used without awareness. Although intuition can hinder rationality, it is often valuable because it facilitates quick decisions. |
| Representative Heuristic | Our tendency to judge the likelihood of category membership by how closely an object or event resembles a particular prototype. It may lead us to disregard probability information that is relevant to our judgments. |
| Availability Heuristic | Our tendency to judge the likelihood of an event on the basis of how readily we can remember instances of its occurrence. Leads us to fear things that are more memorable. |
| Overconfidence | A cognitive bias in which someone believes subjectively that his or her judgment is better or more reliable than it objectively is. |
| Belief Perseverance | An unwillingness to give up our beliefs even when the evidence proves us wrong. Encouraging people to elaborate on why their own personal views on an issue are correct is most likely to promote belief perseverance. |
| Framing | The way in which a problem or issue is phrased or worded. |
| Language | The spoken, written, or signed words and the ways they are combined to communicate meaning. |
| Phoneme | The smallest distinctive sound unit of language. English words are constructed from about 40 different phonemes. Various vowel sounds represent different phonemes. |
| Morpheme | The smallest speech units that carry meaning. |
| Grammar | The system of rules in a language that enables us to understand and communicate with others. |
| Semantics | Rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences. Word meaning. |
| Syntax | Rules about combining words into grammatically sensible sentences. Word order. |
| Receptive Language | The ability to comprehend the meaning of speech. This is best illustrated by babies’ capacity to match another person’s distinctive mouth movements with the appropriate sounds. |
| Productive Language | The ability to produce speech. Infants make some speech sounds that do not occur in their parents’ native language. Occurs during the one-word stage. |
| Babbling | The spontaneous utterance of a variety of sounds by infants. The earliest stage of speech development. Infants are first able to discriminate speech sounds. |
| Telegraphic Speech | A grammatically correct two-word utterance. Children begin to demonstrate that they know how to put words in a sensible order during the two-word stage |
| Language Association | Associating a picture and identifying it with its name. |
| Language Reinforcement | B.F. Skinner emphasized the importance of reinforcement in language acquisition. Learning theory is limited because children generate all sorts of sentences they have never heard before. |
| Language Biological Predisposition | Emphasizes that the acquisition of language by children is facilitated by an inborn readiness to learn grammatical rules. |
| Noam Chomsky | Suggested that diverse human languages share a universal grammar. |
| Statistical Learning | The ability for humans and other animals to extract statistical regularities from the world around them to learn about their environment. |
| Aslin and Newport Study | Infants were able to learn statistical relationships between syllables with very little exposure to a language. Infants were able to learn which syllables were always paired together and which occurred relatively rarely. |
| Language Critical Period | There is a critical period for language acquisition. The best evidence that there is a critical period is that people most easily master the grammar of a second language during childhood. |
| Broca's Area | Controls language expression. An area of the frontal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere. Directs the muscle movements involved in speech. |
| Wernicke's Area | Controls language reception. A area in the left temporal lobe. Involved in language comprehension and expression. |
| Aphasia | Impairment of language, usually caused by left-hemisphere damage either to Broca’s area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke’s area (impairing understanding). |
| Linguistic Determinism | Words shape the way people think. Our capacity to form concepts depends on our verbal memory. Criticized for underestimating the extent to which thinking occurs without language. |
Created by:
satecAP