AP Psych Vocab Mods 33-36

Anterograde Amnesia

an inability to form new memories.

Retrograde Amnesia

an inability to retrieve information from one's past.

Proactive Interference

the forward-acting disruptive effect of older learning on the recall of new information.

Retroactive Interference

the backward-acting disruptive effect of newer learning on the recall of old information.

Repression

in psychoanalytic theory, the basic defense mechanism that banishes from consciousness anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories.

Reconsolidation

a process in which previously stored memories, when retrieved, are potentially altered before being stored again.

Misinformation Effect

occurs when misleading information has distorted one's memory of an event.

Source Amnesia

faulty memory for how, when, or where information was learned or imagined. (Also called source misattribution.) Source amnesia, along with the misinformation effect, is at the heart of many false memories.

Deja Vu

that eerie sense that "I've experienced this before." Cues from the current situation may unconsciously trigger retrieval of an earlier experience.

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).

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.

Algorithm

a methodical, Logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrasts with the usually speedier-but also more error-prone—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 cognition, 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 worded can significantly affect decisions and judgments.

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

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

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

Linguistic influence

the weaker form of "linguistic relativity" —the idea that language affects thought (thus our thinking and world view is "relative to" our cultural language).