Ap Psych Unit 7B Vocab

Front 1

Cognition

Back 1

all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.

Front 2

Concept

Back 2

a mental grouping of similar objects

Front 3

Prototype

Back 3

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

Front 4

Algorithm

Back 4

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.

Front 5

heuristic

Back 5

a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone than algorithms.

Front 6

insight

Back 6

a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem; it contrasts with strategy-based solutions.

Front 7

creativity

Back 7

the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas.

Front 8

confirmation bias

Back 8

a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence.

Front 9

fixation

Back 9

the inability to see a problem from a new perspective, by employing a different mental set.

Front 10

mental set

Back 10

a tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past.

Front 11

functional fixedness

Back 11

the tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual uses or purposes; an impediment to problem solving.

Front 12

representativeness heuristic

Back 12

judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to match particular prototypes; may lead us to ignore other relevant information.

Front 13

availability heuristic

Back 13

estimating the likelihood of events based on their presence in our memory; if instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), we presume such events are common.

Front 14

overconfidence

Back 14

the tendency to be more certain than correct—to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments.

Front 15

belief perseverance

Back 15

clinging to one's initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited.

Front 16

intuition

Back 16

an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning.

Front 17

framing

Back 17

the way an issue is posed; how an issue is presented can significantly affect decisions and judgments.

Front 18

language

Back 18

our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning.

Front 19

phoneme

Back 19

in language, the smallest distinctive sound unit.

Front 20

morpheme

Back 20

in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or a part of a word (such as a prefix).

Front 21

grammar

Back 21

in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others.

Front 22

semantics

Back 22

the set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences in a given language; also, the study of meaning.

Front 23

syntax

Back 23

the rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language.

Front 24

babbling stage

Back 24

beginning at about 4 months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language.

Front 25

one-word stage

Back 25

the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words.

Front 26

two-word stage

Back 26

beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly statements made up of only a couple of words.

Front 27

telegraphic speech

Back 27

early speech stage in which a child speaks using mostly nouns and verbs such as "go car".

Front 28

linguistic determinism

Back 28

Whorf's hypothesis that language determines the way we think.