Chapter 10 Vocabulary

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 category. Matching new items to the prototype provides a quick and easy method for including items in a category (as when comparing feathered creatures to a prototypical bird, such as a robin)

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.

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; it contrast with strategy-based solutions.

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 (perhaps because of their vividness), 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 fro 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, a system of 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 utter 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 at 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.