Cognition -- Thinking and Language (AP) Flashcards

5596206500	cognition	the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating	0
5596206501	concept	a mental group of similar objects, events, ideas, or people	1
5596206502	prototype	a mental image or best example of a category	2
5596206503	algorithm	a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrasts with the speedier -- but also more error prone -- use of heuristics.	3
5596206504	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	4
5596206505	insight	a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem; it contrasts with strategy-based solutions	5
5596206506	creativity	the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas	6
5596206507	confirmation bias	a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence	7
5596206508	fixation	the inability to see a problem from a new perspective, by employing a different mental set	8
5596206509	mental set	a tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past	9
5596206510	functional fixedness	the tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions; an impediment to problem solving	10
5596206511	representativeness 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 information	11
5596206512	availability heuristic	estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory; if instances come readily to mind, we presume such events are common	12
5596206513	overconfidence	the tendency to be more confident than correct -- to over-estimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments	13
5596206514	belief perseverance	clinging to one's initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited	14
5596206515	intution	an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning	15
5596206516	framing	the way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments	16
5596206517	language	our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning	17
5596206518	phoneme	in language, the smallest distinctive sound	18
5596206519	morpheme	in language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or part of a word (such as a prefix)	19
5596206520	grammar	in language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others	20
5596206521	semantics	the set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences in a given language; the study of meaning	21
5596206522	syntax	the rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language	22
5596206523	babbling stage	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	23
5596206524	one-word stage	the stage in speech development, from about 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words	24
5596206525	two-word stage	the stage in speech development, beginning around age 2, during which a child speaks mostly in two-word statements	25
5596206526	telegraphic speech	early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram --"go car"--using mostly nouns and verbs	26
5596206527	linguistic determinism	Whorf's hypothesis that language determines the way we think	27
5596206530	schema	a mental framework used to organize and interpret information (perspective)	28
5596206531	critical period	an optimal period shortly after birth when an organism's exposure to certain stimuli or experiences produces proper development	29
5596206534	convergent thinking	thinking that is dominated by conforming to a single, correct answer	30
5596206535	divergent thinking	thinking that is linked to creativity and finding multiple solutions to a problem	31
5596206536	overgeneralization	the over-extension of grammar rules	32
5608658712	behavioral psychology	perspective that believes only observable behavior can be measured	33
5608665176	cognitive psychology	perspective that studies how the brain processes information; believes the mind is like a computer.	34