Psychology - Thinking And Language

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, or people

Front 3

prototype

Back 3

a mental image or best example of a category; matching new items to an image 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 judgements to be made and problems to be solved 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 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), it is presumed that such events are common

Front 11

overconfidence

Back 11

the tendency to be more confident than correct - to overestimate the accuracy of beliefs or 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; can significantly affect decisions or judgments

Front 14

language

Back 14

spoken, written, or signed words and the way they are combined to communicate meaning

Front 15

phoneme

Back 15

in a language, the smallest distinctive sound unit

Front 16

morpheme

Back 16

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

Front 17

grammar

Back 17

in a language, a system of rules that enables communication with and the understanding of 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 sentences

Front 18

babbling stage

Back 18

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 19

one-word stage

Back 19

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

Front 20

two-word stage

Back 20

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

Front 21

telegraphic speech

Back 21

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

Front 22

aphasia

Back 22

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

Front 23

Broca's area

Back 23

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

Front 24

Wernicke's area

Back 24

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

Front 25

linguistic determinism

Back 25

Whorf's hypothesis that language determines the way humans think