psych (5. thinking+decisions)

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cognition

mental activities involved in acquiring, retaining, and using knowledge

concept

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

formal concept

concepts that are defined by specific, rigid rules or features.

* a square has four equal sides

natural concept

concepts people form as a result of their experiences in the real world.

* a platypus being “fuzzy”

prototype

a mental image or best example of a category.

matching new items to a prototype provides a quick and easy method for sorting items into categories.

* birds fly, birds have wings, birds have beaks

* ex. an ostrich would not fit (can’t fly)

creativity

the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas.

convergent thinking

narrows the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution.

divergent thinking

expands the number of possible problem solutions (creative thinking that diverges in different directions)

(creative) expertise

experience, a well-developed base of knowledge—furnishes the ideas, images, and phrases we use as mental building blocks.

(creative) imagination

provide the ability to see things in novel ways, to recognize patterns, and to make connections.

having mastered a problem’s basic elements, we redefine or explore it in a new way.

(creative) verturesome

seeking new experiences, tolerating ambiguity and risk, and persevering in overcoming obstacles.

(creative) intrinsic motivation

being driven more by interest, satisfaction, and challenge than by external pressures, creative people focus less on extrinsic motivators than the pleasure of the work itself.

(creative) environment

sparks, supports, and refines creative ideas.

* also, a network of supporters

trial and error

trying solutions randomly

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.

heuristic

simple thinking strategies that often allow us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone than algorithms. reduces number of possible solutions, no guarantee

(heuristic) subgoals

divide the problem into more manageable parts

(heuristic) working backward

determine the steps to reach your goal starting from the end point

insight

a sudden realization of a problem’s solution; contrasts with strategy-based solutions.

* “aha!” moment

intuition

an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning.

confirmation bias

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

mental set

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

* may or may not be helpful in solving a new problem

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.

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.

overconfidence

the tendency to be more confident than correct—to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments.

belief perseverance

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

framing

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

language

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

phoneme

in a language, the smallest distinctive sound unit.

morpheme

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

grammar

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

(grammar) semantics

set of rules for deriving meaning from sounds

(grammar) syntax

set of rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences.

babbling

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.

one-word speech

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

two-word speech

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

telegraphic speech

early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram—“go car”—using mostly nouns and verbs.

universal grammar

the basic building blocks of language and that humans are born with a predisposition to learn language.

* ex. all languages have nouns, verbs, adjectives

functional fixedness

inability to see an object as having a funcion other than its intended one.

anchoring effect

the tendency to use an initial experience as an "anchor," or reference point, in making a new estimate

* first information offered takes precedence

in-class definition: the tendency to be influenced by a single reference point. decisions are based on one or minimal number of factors, ignoring others.

belief bias

the tendency to view that which conflicts with one's own bias as illogical, or believing something illogical in order to support a preexisting belief.

in-class: accept only information that confirms your belief, may distort logical reasoning.

inductive reasoning

when you start with true statements about specific things and then make a more general conclusion

* divergent thinking, expands

deductive reasoing

starts with a general statement or hypothesis and examines possibilities in order to reach a specific conclusion.
* convergent thinking, narrows

noam chomsky

linguist noam chomsky has argued that all languages do share some basic elements, which he calls universal grammar.

benjamin whorf

contended that language determines the way we think: “language itself shapes a [person’s] basic ideas.”

* linguistic determinalism

linguistic determinalism

whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think.

* too extreme, because we can think of things we have no words for

phonology

study of speech sounds and manual units and how they change in different contexts within and among languages

generative

language is generative; a limited number of symbols can combine in an infinite amount of ways to generate an endless array of messages.

* every day you create a sentence you have never spoken before.

displacement

shifting sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person.

pragmatics

the study of how people use language