AP Psychology - Language and Cognition Flashcards

Advanced Placement Psychology
Enterprise High School, Redding, CA
All terms from Myers Psychology for AP (BFW Worth, 2011)

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9382657609	cognition	all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.	0
9382657610	concept	a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people.	1
9382657611	prototype	the best or most typical example of a concept	2
9382657612	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.	3
9382657613	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
9382657614	insight	a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem; it contrasts with strategy-based solutions.	5
9382657616	confirmation bias	a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence.	6
9382657618	functional fixedness	the tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions; an impediment to problem solving.	7
9382657619	representative heuristic	judging the likelihood of things in terms of how it connects to our past experiences	8
9382657620	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.	9
9382657622	belief bias	clinging to one's initial conceptions despite logic	10
9382657623	Chomsky, Noam	Linguist who suggested children have an innate capacity for language acquisition	11
9382657624	framing	the way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments.	12
9382657625	Language	our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning	13
9382657626	phoneme	in language, the smallest distinctive sound unit.	14
9382657627	morpheme	in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or a part of a word (such as a prefix).	15
9382657628	grammar	in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others.	16
9382657629	syntax	the rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language.	17
9382657630	babbling stage	babies spontaneously uttering a variety of words, such as ah-goo	18
9382657631	one-word stage	the stage in which children speak mainly in single words	19
9382657632	telegraphic speech	early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram—"go car"—using mostly nouns and verbs.	20
9382657633	Whorf, Benjamin	Whorf's hypothesis that language determines the way we think.	21
9405491681	Creativity	A mental process that produces novel responses that contribute to the solutions of problems.	22
9405553593	convergent thinking	narrows the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution	23
9405553594	divergent thinking	a type of creative thinking in which one generates new solutions to problems	24
9405553595	mental set	the tendency to persist in solving problems with solutions that have worked in the past	25
9405553596	belief perseverance	tendency to stick to initial beliefs even when evidence contradicts them	26
9405553597	Anchoring	The tendency for individuals to rely too heavily on a single piece of information.	27
9405553598	intuition	the power of knowing things without thinking; sharp insight	28
9405553599	Semantics	Meaning of words and sentences	29
9405553600	two-word stage	beginning about age 2, children speak mostly in two-word sentences	30
9405553601	universal grammar	Noam Chomsky's theory that all the world's languages share a similar underlying structure	31
9405553602	surface structure	the literal ordering of words in a sentence	32
9405553603	deep structure of language	underlying meaning of sentences	33
9405553604	Critical Period Hypothesis	(Chomsky) A proposal that there is a limited period during which language acquisition can occur.	34
9405553605	linguistic determinism	Whorf's hypothesis that language determines the way we think	35
9405553606	Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman	psychologists who researched heuristics and their effects on decision making	36