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AP Psychology, Chapter 9: Thinking and Language
cognition
all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.
concept
a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people.
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 (as when comparing feathered creatures to a prototypical bird, such as a robin).
algorithm
a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrasts with the usually speedier—but also more errorprone—use of heuristics.
heuristic
a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone than an algorithm.
insight
a sudden realization of a problem's solution; contrasts with strategy-based solutions.
confirmation bias
a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence.
fixation
in thinking, the inability to see a problem from a new perspective; an obstacle to problem solving.
mental set
a tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past.
intuition
an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning.
representativeness heuristic
estimating the likelihood of events 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.
creativity
the ability to produce new and valuable ideas.
convergent thinking
narrowing the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution.
divergent thinking
expanding the number of possible problem solutions; creative thinking that diverges in different directions.
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. Semantics is the language's set of rules for deriving meaning from sounds, and syntax is its set of rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences.
babbling stage
beginning around 4 months, the stage of speech development in which an 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.
two-word stage
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.
aphasia
impairment of language, usually caused by left hemisphere damage either to Broca's area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke's area (impairing understanding).
Broca's area
helps control language expression—an area of the frontal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech.
Wernicke's area
a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression; usually in the left temporal lobe.
linguistic determinism
Whorf's hypothesis that language determines the way we think.
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