AP Psych

Cognition

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 that provides a quick and easy way for sorting things into categories.

Creativity

The ability to produce novel 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.

Algorithm

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.

Insight

A sudden realization of a problem’s solution.

Confirmation bias

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

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

Judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes.

Availability heuristic

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

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; it can significantly affect decisions and judgments.

Language

A system of spoken, written, or signed words used for communication.

Phoneme

The smallest distinctive sound unit in a language.

Morpheme

The smallest unit in a language that carries meaning; may be a word or a part of a word.

Grammar

A system of rules in a language that enables us to communicate with and understand others.

Babbling stage

The stage of speech development in which infants spontaneously utter various sounds.

One-word stage

The stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly in single words.

Two-word stage

The stage in speech development where a child speaks mostly in two-word statements.

Telegraphic speech

Early speech stage in which a child speaks using mostly nouns and verbs.

Aphasia

Impairment of language, usually caused by damage to specific brain areas.

Broca’s area

An area of the frontal lobe that controls language expression.

Wernicke’s area

A brain area involved in language comprehension and expression.

Linguistic determinism

Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think.

Trait

Stable and enduring behavior patterns that describe personality.

Personality inventories

Questionnaires used to assess various personality traits.

Big Five personality factors

Five basic personality dimensions: Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness, and Extraversion.

Gordon Allport

Psychologist who emphasized describing personality through identifiable behavior patterns.

Hans and Sybil Eysenck

Psychologists who proposed that personality is understood through the dimensions of extraversion-introversion and stability-instability.