AP Psych Modules 34 and 35 - Cognition and Creativity

Cognition

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

Concepts

A mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people.

Prototypes

Mental images or best examples of a category used to match new items for classification.

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 in creative thinking.

Expertise

Well-developed knowledge that contributes to the generation of ideas.

Intrinsic Motivation

Being driven by interest, satisfaction, and challenge rather than external pressures.

Algorithms

Methodical, logical rules or procedures that guarantee solving a particular problem.

Heuristics

Simple thinking strategies that allow us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently.

Confirmation Bias

A tendency to search for information that supports preconceptions and ignore contradictory evidence.

Fixation

The inability to see a problem from a new perspective.

Mental Set

A tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often based on past success.

Intuition

An effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, opposed to explicit reasoning.

Representativeness Heuristic

Estimating the likelihood of events based on how well they seem to represent particular prototypes.

Availability Heuristic

Estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory.

Sunk-Cost Fallacy

A cognitive bias leading individuals to continue investing in a situation due to already incurred costs.

Functional Fixedness

The tendency to perceive an object only in terms of its most common use.

Priming

The recent experience of a stimulus facilitates or inhibits later processing of the same or a similar stimulus.

Gambler’s Fallacy

The mistaken belief that past chance events influence the likelihood of future chance events.