Psychology: Chapter 9

Front 1

Cognition

Back 1

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

Front 2

Concept

Back 2

a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, and people

Front 3

Prototyple

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 (as when comparing feathered creatures to a prototypical bird, such as a robin).

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 realization of a problem's solution; contrasts with strategy-based solutions

Front 7

confirmation bias

Back 7

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

Front 8

mental set

Back 8

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

Front 9

intuition

Back 9

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

Front 10

availability heuristic

Back 10

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

Front 11

overconfidence

Back 11

the tendency to be more confident than correct - to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments

Front 12

belief perseverance

Back 12

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

Front 13

framing

Back 13

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

Front 14

creativity

Back 14

the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas

Front 15

convergent thinking

Back 15

narrows the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution

Front 16

divergent thinking

Back 16

expands the number of possible problem solutions (creative thinking that diverges in different directions).

Front 17

language

Back 17

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

Front 18

phoneme

Back 18

in a language, the smallest distinctive sound unit

Front 19

morpheme

Back 19

in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or a part of a word

Front 20

grammar

Back 20

in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others. In a given language, semantics is the set of rules for deriving meaning from sounds, and syntax is the set of rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentence

Front 21

babbling stage

Back 21

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 22

one-word stage

Back 22

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

Front 23

two-word stage

Back 23

beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly in two-word statements

Front 24

telegraphic speech

Back 24

early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram -- "go car" -- using mostly nouns and verbs

Front 25

aphasia

Back 25

impairment of language, usually caused by left-hemisphere damage either to Broca's area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke's area (impairing understanding)

Front 26

Broca's area

Back 26

controls language expression - an area of the frontal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech

Front 27

Wernicke's area

Back 27

controls language reception- a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression; usually in the left temporal lobe

Front 28

linguistic determinism

Back 28

Whorf's hypothesis that language determines the way we think

Front 29

intelligence

Back 29

mental quality consisting of the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations

Front 30

general intelligence (g)

Back 30

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

Front 31

savant syndrome

Back 31

a condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computation or drawing

Front 32

emotional intelligence

Back 32

the ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions

Front 33

intelligence test

Back 33

a method for assessing an individual's mental aptitudes and comparing them with those of others, using numerical scores

Front 34

aptitude test

Back 34

a test designed to predict a person's future performance; aptitude is the capacity to learn

Front 35

achievement test

Back 35

a test designed to assess what a person has learned

Front 36

mental age

Back 36

a measure of intelligence test performance devised by Binet; the chronological age that most typically corresponds to a given level of performance. Thus, a child who does as well as an average 8-year-old is said to have a mental age of 8

Front 37

Stanford-Binet

Back 37

the widely used American revision (by Terman at Stanford University) of Binet's original intelligence test

Front 38

Intelligence quotient (IQ)

Back 38

defined originally as the ratio of mental age (ma) to chronological age (ca) multiplied by 100 (thus, IQ= ma/ca x 100). On contemporary intelligence tests, the average performance for a given age is assigned a score of 100

Front 39

Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)

Back 39

the WAIS is the most widely used intelligence test; contains verbal and performance (nonverbal) subtests

Front 40

standardization

Back 40

defining uniform testing procedure and meaningful scores by comparison with the performance of a pretested group

Front 41

normal curve

Back 41

the bell-shaped curve that describes the distribution of many physical and psychological attributes. Most scores fall near the average, and fewer and fewer scores lie near the extremes

Front 42

reliability

Back 42

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

Front 43

Validity

Back 43

the extent to which a test measures or predicts what it it supposed to

Front 44

content validity

Back 44

the extent to which a test samples the behavior that is of interest

Front 45

predictive validity

Back 45

the success with which a test predicts the behavior it is designed to predict; it is assessed by computing the correlation between test scores and the criterion behavior

Front 46

crystallized intelligence

Back 46

our accumulated knowledge and verbal skills tends to increase with age

Front 47

fluid intelligence

Back 47

our ability to reason speedily and abstractly; tends to decrease during late adulthood

Front 48

intellectual disability

Back 48

a condition of limited mental ability, indicated by an intelligence test score of 70 or below and difficulty in adapting to the demands of life

Front 49

Down Sydrome

Back 49

a condition of mild to severe intellectual disability and associated physical disorders caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21

Front 50

heritability

Back 50

the proportion of variation among individuals that we can attribute to genes. The heritability of a trait may vary, depending on the range of populations and environments studied.

Front 51

stereotype threat

Back 51

a self-confirming concern that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype