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Cognition
All the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating
Forming concepts
A mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people
Forming schemas
A concept or framework that organizes and interprets information
Forming prototypes
A mental image or best example of a category which provides a quick and easy method for sorting items into categories and can help organize unfamiliar items by finding an appropriate category
Assimilation
Trying to find a place for something in your schema
Accommodation
Altering your schema to include new information
Algorithm
A methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees a solution to a problem
Heuristic
A simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgements and solve problems efficiently, but does not guarantee a solution
Insight
Provides instant realization of solution
Intuition
An effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought with explicit conscious reasoning to make decisions
Representative Heuristic
Estimating the likelihood of events in reference to how closely they resemble a particular prototype
Availability Heuristic
Estimating the likelihood of events on how readily they come to mind
Priming
A phenomenon in which exposure to one stimulus influenced how a person responds to a subsequent, related stimulus
Perceptual set
A mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another
Framing
The way an issue is presented or worded can impact how people respond
Confirmation Bias
A tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence
Overconfidence
The tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgements
Fixation
The inability to see a problem from a nee perspective
Mental set
Tendency to persist in using the same problem-solving strategy that have worked in the past
A type of fixation
Functional fixedness
The inability to recognize novel uses for an item and only see it for its most common purpose
A type of fixation
Belief perseverance
Clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited
Sunk cost fallacy
A cognitive bias that makes you stay in a situation despite losing resources or benefits
Gambler’s fallacy
A cognitive bias that adheres to the ideas that if something hasn’t happened recently it soon will
Executive functions
Mental skills that help us learn, work, and manage daily life, including working memory, flexible thinking, and self-control
Examples of executive functions
Impulse control, emotional control, flexible thinking, working memory, self-monitoring, planning and prioritizing, task initiation, and organization
Creativity
The ability to produce ideas that are both novel and valuable
Requires divergent thinking
Robert Sternberg’s Five components of creativity
Expertise, Imagination, A venturesome personality, Intrinsic motivation, and A creative environment
Divergent thinking
Expanding the number of possible problem solutions
Convergent thinking
Narrows down the solutions to the single best option
