AP Psych - Unit 7B Vocab

Concept

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

Heuristic

a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently

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

Framing

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

Intuition

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

Overconfidence

the tendency to be more confident that correct – to over-estimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments

Insight

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

Phoneme

in language, the smallest distinctive sound unit

telegraphic speech

early speech state in which a child speaks like a telegram – “go car” – using mostly nouns and verbs

Language

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

Semantics

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

babbling stage

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 stage

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

belief perseverance

the tendency to be more confident that correct – to over-estimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments

Cognition

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

mental set

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

Algorithm

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

functional fixedness

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

Syntax

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

Creativity

the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas

confirmation bias

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

two-word stage

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

Fixation

the inability to see a problem from a new perspective, by employing a different mental set

Morpheme

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

Prototype

a mental image or best example of a category (provides a quick and easy method for sorting items into categories)