AP Psych - Ch. 10 Thinking & Language

Convergent Thinking

A cognitive process in which a person attempts to find a single, correct answer to a problem.

Divergent Thinking

A cognitive process in which a person generates many unique, creative responses to a single question or problem.

Concept

A mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas or people.

Prototypes

A mental image or best example of a category. Matching new items to the prototype provides a quick and easy method for including items in a category (as when comparing feathered creatures to a prototypical bird, such as a robin).

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.

Intuition

A person's capacity to obtain or have direct knowledge and/or immediate insight, without observation or reason.

Heuristics

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

Insight

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

Confirmation Bias

A tendency to search for information that confirms one's preconceptions.

Cognition

All the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering an communicating.

Belief perserverance

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

Telegraphic speech

Early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram (ex: "go car"), using mostly nouns and verbs and omitting auxiliary words.

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.

Phonemes

In a language, the smallest distinctive sound unit.

Morphemes

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

Mental Images

Is an experience that, on most occasions, significantly resembles the experience of perceiving some object, event, or scene, but occurs when the relevant object, event, or scene is not actually present to the senses.

Linguistic relativity hypothesis

Is the idea that differences in the way languages encode cultural and cognitive categories affect the way people think.

Representativeness Heuristic

Judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes; may lead to one to ignore other relevant information.

Language Acquisition

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate.

Language

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

Overgeneralization

The misapplication of a rule of grammar or syntax in language use.

Syntax

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

Belief bias

The tendency for one's preexisting beliefs to distort logical reasoning, sometimes by making invalid conclusions seem valid, or valid conclusions to seem invalid.

Functional fixedness

The tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions; an impediment to problem solving.