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Thinking&Language
Ch. 9
Question | Answer |
---|---|
cognition | (thinking) refer to all the mental activities associtated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. |
concepts | mental groupings of similar objects, events, and people. |
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. |
algorithm | a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particularproblem. contrasts with the usually speedier but also more error prone use heuristics. |
insight | a suddend and often novel realization of th esolution to a probem; it contrasts with strategy based solutions. |
conformation bias | a tendency to search for info that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence. |
fixation | the inability to see a problem from a new perspective, by employing a differnt mental set. |
mental set | a tendency to approach a problem one 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. |
reprsentativeness heuristic | judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match particular prototypes; may lead us to ignore other relevant info. |
availability heuritic | estimationg the likelihood of events based on their availablity in memory. |
overconfidence | the tendency to be more confident than correct-to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgements. |
belief persverance | clinging to one's initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited. |
intution | an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning. |
framing | the waay an issue is posed: how an issue is framed an significantly affect decisions and judgments. |
language | our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning. |
phoneme | in languages, the smallest distinctive sound unit. |
morpheme | in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning;may be a word or part of a word. |
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 sentensces in a given lanugage. |
babbling stage | beginning at aobut 4 months, the stage of speech development in which the infant sponataneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language. |
one-word stage | the stage in speech development, from aobut age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words. |
two-word stage | beginning at about 2, 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 nounds and verbs. |
aphasia | impairment of language, usually caused by left hemisphere damage eirther to Broca's area or to Wernicke's area. |
Broca's area | controls language expression-an area of the frontal lobe, usually left hemisphers, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech |
Wernicke's area | controls language reception-a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression; usually in the left temporal lobe. |
linguistic determinism | Whorf's hypothesis that language dermines the way we think. |
intelligence test | a method for assessing an individual's mental aptitudes and comparing them with those of others, using numerical scores. |
intelligence | mental quality consisting of the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations. |
general intelligence (g) | a general intelligence factor that, according to Spearman and others, underlies specific mental abilities and is therefore measured by every task on an intelligence test |
factor analysis | a statistical procedure that identifies clusters of related item on a test; used to identify different dimensions of performance that underlie a person't total score. |
savant syndrome | a condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computation or drawing. |
creativity | the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas. |
emotional intelligence | the ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions. |
mental age | a measure of intelligence test performance devised by Binet; the chronological age that most typically corresponds to a given level of performance. |
Stanford-Binet | the widely used American revision of Binet's original intelligence test. |
intelligence quotient (IQ) | defined originally as the ratio of mental age to chronological age multiplied by 100. On contemporary intelligence tests, the average performance for a given age is assgned a score of 100. |
achievement tests | a test designed to assess what a person has learned. |
aptitude tests | a test designed to predict a person's future performance; aptitude is the capacity to learn. |
Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)(WISC) for children | the WAIS is the most widely sed intelligence test; contains verbal and performance (nonverbal) subtests. |
standardization | defining meaningful scores by comparison with the performance of a pretested group. |
normal curve | the symmetrical bell-shaped curve that describes the distribution of many physical and psychological attributes. most scores fall near the averag, and fewer and fewer scores lie near the extremes. |
reliability | the extent to which a test yields consistent results, as assessed by the consistency of scores on two halves of the test, or on retesting. |
validity | the extent to which a test measures or predicts what it is supposed to. |
content validity | the extent to which a test samples the behaivor that is of interest. |
predictive validity | the success with which a test predicts the behavior it is designed to predict; it is assess by computing the correlation between test score and the criterion behavior. |
mental retardation | a condition of limited mental ability, indicated by an intelligence score of 70 or below and difficulty in adapting to the demand of life; varies from mild to profound. |
Down syndrome | a condition of retardation and associated physical disorders caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21. |
stereotype threat | a self-confirming concern that one will be evaluated based on negative sterotype. |