AP Psych Cognition, Language, and Intelligence Vocab

Representativeness Heuristic

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

Noam Chomsky

Language development; Disagreed with Skinner about language acquisition, stated there is an infinite number of sentences in a language, humans have an inborn native ability to develop language

Semantics

Meaning of words and sentences

Intelligence

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

Fluid Intelligence

One's ability to reason speedily and abstractly; tends to decrease during late adulthood.

Crystallized Intelligence

One's accumulated knowledge and verbal skills; tends to increase with age

Norm

Principles of right action, binding upon the members of a group and serving to guide, control, or regulate proper and acceptable behavior.

Triarchic Theory of Intelligence

Robert Sternberg's theory that describes intelligence as having analytic, creative and practical dimensions

g Factor

The ability to reason and solve problems, or general intelligence

Syntax

The arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language.

Validity

The extent to which a test measures or predicts what it is supposed to.

Functional Fixedness

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

Linguistic Determinism

Whorf's hypothesis that language determines the way we think

Mental Retardation

a condition of limited mental ability, indicated by an intelligence score of 70 or below and difficulty in adapting to the demands of life; varies from mild to profound

Mental Age

a measure of intelligence test performance devised by Binet; Divided by the chronological age that most typically corresponds to a given level of performance

Insight

a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem

Mental Set

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

Confirmation Bias

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

Divergent Thinking

a type of creative thinking in which one generates new solutions to problems

Louis Terman

altered Binet's IQ test, calling it the Stanford-Binet

Standardization

defining meaningful scores by comparison with the performance of a pretested group

Howard Gardner

devised theory of multiple intelligences: logical-mathematic, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, intrapersonal, linguistic, musical, interpersonal, naturalistic

Telegraphic Speech

early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram, using mostly nouns and verbs

Robert Sternberg

intelligence; devised the Triarchic Theory of Intelligence (academic problem-solving, practical, and creative)

Charles Spearman

intelligence; found that specific mental talents were highly correlated, concluded that all cognitive abilities showed a common core which he labeled 'g' (general ability)

Francis Galton

interested in link between heredity and intelligence; founder of the eugenics movement

Benjamin Whorf

language; his hypothesis is that language determines the way we think

Alfred Binet

pioneer in intelligence (IQ) tests, designed a test to identify slow learners in need of help-not applicable in the U.S. because it was too culture-bound (French)

Creativity

the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas

Emotional Intelligence

A different type of intelligence, composed of: perceiving emotions, using and reasoning with emotions, understanding emotions, and managing emotions.

Prototype

A full-scale working model used to test a design concept by making actual observations and necessary adjustments.

Intelligence Quotient

A measure of a person's intelligence as indicated by an intelligence test. ((ma/ca)*100)

Concept

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

Algorithm

A methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem.

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.

Factor Analysis

A statistical procedure that identifies clusters of related items (called factors) on a test; used to identify different dimensions of performance that underlie one's total score.

Language

A system of communication through the use of speech, a collection of sounds understood by a group of people to have the same meaning.

Reliability

Ability of a test to yield very similar scores for the same individual over repeated testings

Cognition

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

David Wechsler

Developed a series of widely used intelligence tests. Instead of using Terman's approach to calculate an IQ score, he determined how far a person's score deviates from a bell-shaped normal distribution of scores. Most intelligence tests now use this system.

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

Wolfgang Kohler

Gestalt psychologist that first demonstrated insight through his chimpanzee experiments. He noticed the solution process wasn't slow, but sudden and reflective.

Phoneme

In language, the smallest distinctive sound unit

Morpheme

In language, the smallest unit that carries meaning