Psych test 3

System 1 processing

fast, automatic thinking. Ex: recognizing a friend’s face, or using the brakes on a car.

System 2 processing

slow, deliberate thinking. Ex: comparing three apartment leases, or solving 17×24 in your head

Conjunction fallacy

A cognitive bias where people mistakenly believe that two specific events happening together are more probable than just one of those events happening by itself.

Heuristics

Simple mental shortcuts that help you make judgments or decisions quickly without analyzing every piece of information

Availability heuristic

Judging how common or likely something is by how easily examples come to mind. Ex: After heavy news coverage of a plane crash, people overestimate the danger of flying.

The gambler’s fallacy

Believing that a random outcome is “due” because of earlier outcomes. Independent trials have no memory. Ex: a roulette wheel lands on black 5 times in a row, so someone bets heavily on red because its “due”

Anchoring bias

Relying too heavily on the first piece of information you receive when making a judgment or decision. Ex: a restaurant lists a $90 steak. Now a $40 entree seems reasonable by comparison.

One-cue strategy

Decide using a single informative cue. Ex: picking a laptop by brand reputation alone

Take-the-best strategy

Check cues in order of importance and stop at the first one that distinguishes the options.

Ex: choosing between two colleges by first comparing their psych programs. If one is clearly better, you stop comparing instead of looking at every feature

Tallying

Counting how many positive features each option has without necessarily giving more important features extra weight,

Ex: College A has 4 positive features, while College B has 3. You choose college A

Maximizing

Examining everything exhaustively to find the single best option

Satisficing

Choosing the first option thats good enough *describes when you stop searching

Less is more effect

Ignoring information can sometimes produce equal or better judgments. Ex: if you only recognize one of two cities, picking the one you recognize often works well. Someone who uses both has to use less reliable cues.

Zero-price effect

Something labeled ‘free’ is disproportionately attractive, even if the overall value hasn’t improved.

Normative model

Defines how people SHOULD make decisions based on strict logic and rationality

Descriptive model

Explains how people ACTUALLY make decisions in real life, accounting for human behavior, emotions, and cognitive limits

Loss aversion

A loss feels worse than an equal-sized gain feels good.

Endowment effect

You value something more once you own it. Ex: you paid 50 for a concert ticket, but now you won’t sell it for less than 100

Status quo bias

People prefer things to stay the same because changing takes effort and creates uncertainty.

Sunk cost fallacy

Letting money, time, or effort you’ve already spent and can’t recover influence whether you continue. Ex: sitting through a terrible movie because you paid for the ticket

Delay (temporal) discounting

A reward loses subjective value the longer you have to wait for it. Ex: offered 50 today or 70 in a month, many people take the 50.

Effort discounting

A reward loses subjective value when you have to work hard to get it. Ex: you could earn 20 for an easy task or 30 for a grueling, long task. You pick the 20

Deductive reasoning

Starting with information you know is true and using it to reach a conclusion. Ex: all mammals have lungs. Whales are mammals. So whales have lungs. *conclusive if valid

Inductive reasoning

You observe individual patterns or examples and use them to make a broader conclusion. *conclusion is probable, not guaranteed

Ex: every swan you’ve ever seen is white, so you conclude all swans are white.

Syllogisms

An argument that uses two premises to reach a conclusion. Ex: premise 1 - all dogs are animals. Premise 2 - all poodles are dogs. Conclusion: all poodles are animals

Conditional reasoning

The ability to evaluate statements that follow an if-then structure. Ex: “If it is raining (P), then the group is wet (Q).”

Seeking disconfirming evidence

To test a rule, look for the case that could prove it wrong, not cases that fit it.

Inductive strength

An inductive argument is stronger when evidence is: numerous, representative, varied, and relevant. Ex: concluding dogs are friendly from meeting three dogs is weak. Meeting hundreds of dogs is stronger.

Confirmation bias

Seeking, noticing, and favoring evidence that fits what you already believe, while ignoring or downplaying evidence against it

Causal reasoning

The process of figuring out WHY something happened by identifying what caused an effect. Causes come before effects, but that alone doesn’t prove causation.

Ex: you study for an exam and get a good grade. The timing makes sense, but that alone doesn’t prove studying caused the grade.

Covariation

A cue to causation when two events change together. When one happens, the other also tends to happen. *shows association but not cause

Ex: people who get more sleep tend to do better on tests. This suggests a relationship, but it doesn’t prove that sleep causes better grades.

Temporal sequence

A cue to causation when the cause must happen BEFORE the effect. *narrows possibilities but isn’t proof

Ex: the rash started after the new soap

Intervention

A cue to causation that occurs when someone actively changes one thing to see if the other changes. Ex: you stop using the soap and the rash goes away. *strongest evidence

Plausible causal mechanism

A cue to causation that says there should be a reasonable explanation for HOW one event could cause another. Ex: the soap contains an irritant known to cause rashes. A mechanism makes a connection more believable

Causal models

An internal framework that lets people predict, explain, and simulate the consequences of actions before they take them. Ex: “What would have happened if I hadn’t touched the stove?”

Illusory correlations

Perceiving a connection between events that aren’t actually related because distinctive coincidences are memorable.

Ex: believing the full moon causes strange behavior in the ER because you remember the odd nights.

Counterfactual reasoning

Imagining how things would have turned out if an earlier event or decision had been different (“If only I had left earlier, I wouldn’t have missed the train”).

Routine problems

Problems that have familiar procedures or steps. Ex: solving a multiplication problem using a formula you’ve already learned.

Nonroutine problems

Problems that don’t have an obvious solution. Ex: you’re trying to figure out how to fit all your belongings into a small dorm room.

Insight

A sudden realization, often from restructuring how you see the problem, that makes a solution apparent. The “aha!” moment.

Analogical reasoning

Applying what you learned from one situation to a similar situation.

Ex: learning how to solve a math problem in class. Later, you encounter a similar problem and you apply what you learned.

Transfer

Applying knowledge or skills learned in one situation to another situation.

Hill climbing

Choosing the action that seems to bring you closer to your goal at each step. Ex: hiking a mountain in thick fog. You can’t see the entire mountain, but you keep going.

Means-ends analysis

Compare your current state to the goal, then set subgoals to reduce the difference.

Ex: “I want to get to Chicago. I need to get to the airport first. To get there, I need a ride”

Situated cognition

Knowledge and skills are often connected to the environment and context in which they were learned. Ex: someone good at solving math in a classroom might struggle to recognize those concepts in the real world

Remote associations

Connections between ideas or concepts that are not obviously related to each other. Ex: when given the words cake and candles, you can connect them to birthday.

Divergent thinking

The ability to generate multiple different ideas or solutions to an open-ended problem

Convergent thinking

The process of narrowing down different possibilities to identify one correct or best answer. Ex: using a multiple choice question to determine which answer is correct

Functional fixedness

When you’re so used to seeing an object used for one particular purpose that you struggle to recognize other ways it could be used.

Intrinsic motivation

Doing something because you personally enjoy it or find it interesting

Extrinsic motivation

Doing something primarily to receive an outside reward or avoid a negative consequence.

Incubation

When you step away from a problem for a period of time and later return with a fresh perspective

Mental lexicon

Contains the words you know, their meanings, how they’re pronounced, and how they’re connected to other words.

Lexical access

The process of retrieving a word and its meaning from your mental lexicon. Ex: you see the world apple and understand what it means

Orthographic processing

How your brain identifies letters, spelling patterns, and written words when you’re reading. Ex: when you see the word cat, you brain recognizes its written letter pattern and identifies it as a word.

Fast mapping

The ability to quickly connect a new word to its meaning after limited exposure. Especially important in children’s language development

Problem finding

Noticing a problem others overlook, or reframing the question, before trying to solve it.

Semantic priming

Seeing a word makes related-meaning words easier to process. Ex: After seeing doctor, you recognize nurse faster than table.

Affective priming

Seeing a word with a certain emotional tone (positive or negative) speeds responses to words within the same tone, regardless of meaning.

Ex: after ‘murder’ (negative) you recognize ‘cancer’ (negative) faster than ‘sunshine’ (positive)

Syntax

Rules for arranging words into sentences. You can use the exact same words in different orders and completely change the meaning.

Productivity

The ability to create endless new sentences. Ex: you could tell someone, “yesterday, I saw a purple elephant riding a bicycle.” Even though you’ve never heard that exact sentence, you understand it.

Recursion

The ability to place one grammatical structure inside another structure of the same type. Ex: “the girl is studying.” “the girl who lives next door is studying.”

Behaviorist accounts of language learning

Children learn language by imitation, association, and reinforcement. Ex: a child says ‘milk’ and gets milk, so the word is reinforced.

Sequential accounts of language

How people use the order of words and the patterns in language to predict what comes next. Ex: someone says “i brushed my teeth with a…” you would predict “toothbrush”.

Poverty of the stimulus

The argument that the language input children receive is too limited to account for their ability to learn complex grammar.

Negative evidence

Explicitly correcting the child by telling them what is ungrammatical. Ex: a child says something ungrammatical and an adult says “thats not correct”

Overgeneralization

Applying a regular grammar rule to an exception. Ex: a child says “I goed to the store” because they’ve learned the rule (add -ed for past tense)

Universal grammar

Chomsky’s proposal that all humans are born with innate constraints on possible grammar, which makes language learning possible

Modularity

The idea that language is a specialized mental “module” separate from general abilities like memory, attention, or social understanding.

Critical (sensitive) periods

A window in development when language learning is easiest. Age of first exposure and quality of language input matter

Pidgin

A simplified communication system that develops when people who speak different languages need to communicate

Creole

A language that develops from a contact language and becomes a more complete, established language with its own grammar

Phoneme

The smallest sound unit that can change a word’s meaning. ‘b’ vs ‘p’ changes “bat” to “pat”

Phonetic categories

Mental groupings of speech sounds your brain uses to organize the messy variations of human speech (voice, accent, and speaking rate) into recognizable speech sounds.

Native-language magnet effect

The tendency for experience with a native language to shape how the brain perceives and distinguishes speech sounds. Ex: a baby exposed to English becomes familiar with the sound distinctions in English.

Morphology

How meaningful units (morphemes) are combined into words. Ex: the word unhelpful contains three meaningful parts - ‘un’ ‘help’ ‘ful’

Morphemes

The smallest unit of meaning in a word. Ex: the word “dogs” has two morphemes - “dog” = the animal. “s” = more than one

Lexical retrieval

The process of finding and retrieving words stored in your mental lexicon when you want to communicate.

Ex: someone asks you to name a fruit, and you remember the word apple

Tip of the tongue states

The temporary inability to retrieve a word that you know

Broca’s aphasia

Damage to a left frontal area leads to slow, effortful, nonfluent speech. Comprehension is relatively preserved. Ex: “walk…dog…park” when trying to say “I walked the dog to the park”

Wernicke’s aphasia

Damage to a left temporal area leads to fluent speech that often makes little sense, plus poor comprehension.

Ex: “the thing went to that place and the other one was over there.”

Stages of speech production

1. Message level: deciding what you want to say

2. Grammatical level: choosing words and sentence structure

3. Sound level: organize the speech sounds and physically produce them

Parsing

The process of analyzing sentence structure to understand how words relate to one another. Ex: in the sentence “the girl chased the dog” your brain identifies the girl as performing the action and chased as the action

Segmentation

The process of identifying individual words in continuous speech. When you hear a sentence spoken, you don’t actually hear clear pauses between every word, but your brain automatically separates the sounds.

Phonemic restoration

Perceiving a missing speech sound as if it were present when it’s covered by noise (like a cough).

Expectations and garden-path sentences

Listeners interpret sentences as they unfold. A garden-path sentence leads you to an initially likely interpretation that turns out wrong.

Ex: “while Anna dressed the baby spit up on the bed.” You first read, “dressed the baby” then must reinterpret.

Prosody

The rhythm, pitch, stress, and intonation of speech. How someone says something can change its meaning even when the words stay the same.

Pragmatics

The use of language in social situations. Understanding what people mean beyond their literal words and adjusting communication based on the situation and the person listening.

Curse of knowledge

When someone who knows a lot about a topic has difficulty imagining what it is like not to know that information.

Linguistic determinism - Saphir-Whorf hypothesis

Language determines thought. If you don’t have a word for it, you can’t think it. Very strong claim and generally not supported

Linguistic relativity - Saphir-Whorf hypothesis

Language influences how people think, categorize information, remember experiences, and pay attention to certain details. Weaker version with more research support.

Psychological field

Our reactions depend on how we interpret situations and people, not just objective facts. Two people can receive the same feedback but respond completely differently to it.

Pygmalion effect

Expectations about someone influence how you treat them, which influences how they perform. Ex: Teachers gave certain students encouragement; those students showed larger gains.

Theory of mind

The ability to understand that other people have their own thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Recognizing that another person’s knowledge may be different from yours

False-belief tasks

Tests on whether someone understands that another person can hold a belief that is different from reality.

Ex: Sally puts a marble in her basket and leaves. Anne moves it. Where will Sally look? A child who says the box is answering from their own knowledge, not from Sally’s perspective

Social shortcuts

We use mental shortcuts to make quick judgments about people and social situations, but they can lead to inaccurate assumptions.

Thin-slice impressions

Judgments based on very brief exposure (seconds). They can be surprisingly accurate but can also be misleading.

Minimal groups

Groups created using very small or seemingly meaningless differences. Ex: researchers divide participants into two groups. Even though groups have no meaningful differences, they may begin favoring their group.

Entitativity

Perceiving members of an out-group to be uniform in their characteristics. Out-groups are often seen as being ‘all alike’.

Other-race effect

People are generally better at recognizing and telling apart faces from their own race than other races