Unit 7B - Cognition

Concept

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

Prototype

- a mental image or best example of a category

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

Algorithms

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

Heuristic

- a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently
- usually speedier but also more error-prone than algorithms

Wolfgang Kohler

- 1887-1967
- Gestalt psychologist that first demonstrated insight through his chimpanzee experiments
- He noticed the solution process wasn't slow, but sudden and reflective

Insight

- a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem

Confirmation Bias

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

Fixation

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

Mental Set

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

Representative Heuristic

- a mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case
- an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning

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

Belief Perserverance

- 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 _____ed can significantly affect decisions and judgments

Phonemes

- the smallest speech units in a language that can be distinguished perceptually

Grammar

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

Semantics

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

Syntax

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

Universal Grammar

- Noam Chomsky's theory that all the world's languages share a similar underlying structure

Receptive Language

- ability to comprehend speech

Productive Language

- babies' ability to produce words

Babbling Stage

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

Telegraphic Speech

- early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram, using mostly nouns and verbs.
- ex: "go car"

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

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

Wernicke's Area

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

Benjamin Lee Whorf

- famous for describing concept of "linguistic determinism"
- theorized that language itself shapes one's basic ideas

Linguistic Determination

- the strong form of Whorf's hypothesis
- that language controls the way we think and interpret the world around us

Critical Period

- the time during which language develops readily and after which language acquisition is much more difficult and ultimately less successful
- sometime between age 5 and puberty

Creativity

- the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas

Overconfidence

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

Linguistic Influence

- the weaker form of "linguistic determinism"
- the idea that language affects thought, thus our thinking and world view is "relative to" our cultural language.

Intrinsic Motivation

- a desire to perform a behavior for its own sake

Extrinsic Motivation

- a desire to perform a behavior to receive promised rewards or avoid threatened punishment

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 two-word statements

Functional Fixedness

- the tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions
-an impediment to problem solving
- a block to problem solving that comes from thinking about objects in terms of only their typical functions
- very similar to fixation (idk if its the same lol)

Morpheme

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

Noam Chomsky

- language development
- disagreed with Skinner about language acquisition, stated there is an infinite # of sentences in a language, humans have an inborn native ability to develop language
- believed that the capacity for language and manipulate language is innately preprogrammed in our brains, and that the role of the environment is to this genetic language foundation with whatever languages we dump into it
- described children's errors in using irregular past tense forms as overregularizing past tense forms

Self-Efficacy

- one's sense of competence and effectiveness

Deep Processing

- encoding semantically, based on the meaning of the words
- tends to yield the best retention

Shallow Processing

- encoding on a basic level based on the structure or appearance of words