Psychology in Everyday Life Chapter 8 (Myers/DeWall)

Cognition

all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering and communicating

Concept

a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas and people

Prototype

a mental image of best example of a category

Algorithm

a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees you will solve a particular problem

Heuristic

a simple thinking strategy that often allows you to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error prone than Algorithms

Insight

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

Confirmation Bias

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

Fixation

the inability to see a problem from a new perspective; an obstacle to problem solving

Intuition

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

Availability Heuristic

judging the likelihood of an event based on its availability in memory; if an event comes readily to mind, we assume it must be common

Overconfidence

the tendency to be more confident than correct- to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs

Belief Perspective

clinging to beliefs and ignoring evidence that proves they are wrong

Framing

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

Creativity

the ability to produce new 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 into different directions

Language

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

Babbling Stage

at 4 months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to household language

One-Word Stage

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

Two-Word Stage

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

Telegraphic Speech

early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram "go car" using mostly nouns and verbs

Grammar

in a specific language, a system of rules that enable us to communicate with and understand others

Broca's Area

controls language expression, an area of the frontal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movement involved in speech

Wernicke's Area

controls language reception, a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression, usually in the left temporal lobe

Intelligence

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

General Intelligence

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

Savant Syndrome

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

Emotional Intelligence

the ability to perceive, understand, manage and use emotions

Intelligence Test

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

Aptitude Test

a test designed to predict a person's future performance, aptitude is the capacity to learn

Achievement Test

a test designed to assess what a person has learned

Mental Age

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

Stanford-Binet

the widely used American revision of Binet's original intelligence test

Intelligence Quotient

defined originally as the ratio of mental age (ma) to chronological age (ca) multiplied by 100, thus IQ=ma/cax100; on contemporary intelligence tests, the average performance for a given age is assigned a score of 100

Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale

the most widely used intelligence test, contains verbal and performance subjects

Standardization

defining uniform testing procedures and meaningful scores by comparison with the performance of a pretested group

Normal Curve

the bell shaped curve that describes the distribution of many physical and psychological attributes

Reliability

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

Validity

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

Cross-Sectional Study

a study in which people of different ages are compared with one another

Longitudinal Study

research in which the same people are restudied and retested over a long period

Crystallized Intelligence

our accumulated knowledge and verbal skills; tends to increase with age

Fluid Intelligence

our ability to reason speedily and abstractly; tends to decrease during late adulthood

Stereotype Threat

a self confirming concern that we will be judged based on a negative stereotype