AP Psychology Thinking, Language, and Intelligence Modules 28-32

Belief perseverance:

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

Confirmation bias:

tendency to search for info that confirms one's preconceptions

Functional fixedness:

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

Aptitude test:

test deigned to predict a person's future performance; aptitude is the capacity to learn

Achievement test:

test designed to assess what a person has learned

Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS):

the WAIS is the most widely used intelligence test; contains verbal and performance (nonverbal) subtests

Overconfidence:

tendency to be more confident than correct—to overestimate the accuracy of one's beliefs and judgments

Babbling stage:

the stage of speech development, beginning around 3-4 months, in which the infant spontaneously utter various sounds at first unrelated to the household language

Linguistic determinism:

Whorf's hypothesis that language determines the way we think

Emotional intelligence:

ability to perceive, express, understand, and regulate emotions.

Creativity:

ability to produce novel and valuable ideas

Two-word stage:

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

Criterion:

behavior (such as college grades) that a test (such as the SAT) is designed to predict; thus, the measure used in defining whether the test has predictive validity

Computer neural networks:

computer circuits that mimic the brain's interconnected neural cells, performing tasks such as learning to recognize visual patterns and smells

Savant syndrome:

condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computation or drawing

Mental retardation:

condition not limited mental ability, lack of normal development of intellectual capacities

Down syndrome:

condition of retardation and associated physical disorders caused by an extra chromosome in one's genetic makeup

Intelligence quotient (IQ):

defined originally as the ratio of mental age (ma) to chronological age (ca) multiplied by 100 (thus, IQ = ma/ca X 1000. On contemporary intelligence tests, the average performance for a given age is assigned a score of 100.

Standardization:

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

Telegraphic speech:

early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram—"go car"—using mostly nouns and verbs and omitting "auxiliary"(secondary or supporting) 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

Validity:

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

Content validity:

extent to which a test samples the behavior that is of interest (such as a driving test that samples driving tasks)

Reliability:

extent to which a test yields consistent results, as assessed by the consistency of scores on two halves of the test, on alternate forms of the test, or on retesting

General intelligence (g):

general intelligence factor that Spearman and others believed underlies specific mental abilities and is therefore measured by every task on an intelligence test

Fixation:

inability to see a problem from a new perspective; an impediment to problem solving

Representative 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 info

Mental age:

measure of intelligence test performance devised by Binet; the chronological age that most typically corresponds to a given level of performance. Thus, a child who does as well as the average 8-year-old is said to have a mental age of 8

Cognition:

mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communication.

Concept:

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

Prototype:

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

Intelligence:

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

Intelligence test:

method for assessing an individual's mental aptitudes and comparing them with those of others, using numerical scores

Algorithm:

methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrasts with the usually speedier—but also more error-prone-use of heuristics

Heritability:

proportion of variation among individuals that we can attribute to genes. The heritability of a trait may vary,, depending on the range of populations and environments studied

Syntax:

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

Artificial intelligence (AI):

science of designing and programming computer systems to do intelligent things and to simulate human thought processes, such as intuitive reasoning, learning, and understanding language

Stereotype threat:

self-confirming concern that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype

Semantics:

set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences in a given language; also, the study of meaning

Heuristic:

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

Phoneme:

smallest distinctive sound unit in a spoken language

Morpheme:

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

Language:

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

One-word stage:

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

Factor analysis:

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

Predictive validity:

success with which a test predicts the behavior it is designed to predict; it is assessed by computing the correlation between test scores and the criterion behavior

Insight:

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

Normal curve:

symmetrical bell-shaped curve

Grammar:

system of rules in a language that enables us to communicate with and understand others

Belief bias:

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

Mental set:

tendency to approach a problem in a particular way, especially a way that has been successful in the past but may or may not be helpful in solving a new problem

Framing:

the way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments

Stanford-Binet:

widely used American revision of Binet's original intelligence test