all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating-cognition

a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people: concepts

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): prototype

the ability to produce new and valuable ideas: creativity

narrowing the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution, the SAT does this: convergent thinking

expanding the number of possible problem solutions; creative thinking that diverges in different directions, this is required in creativity tests: divergent thinking

Expertise, imaginative thinking skills, a venturesome personality, intrinsic motivation, and a creative environment: the 5 components of creativity

a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrasts with the usually speedier: but also more error-prone- algorithms

a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error prone: heuristics

a sudden realization of a problem’s solution; contrasts with strategy-based solutions.: insight

a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence.: confirmation bias

in cognition, the inability to see a problem from a new perspective; an obstacle to problem solving: fixation

a tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past.: mental set

an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning: intuition

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: representativeness 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.: availability heuristic

the tendency to be more confident than correct—to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments: overconfidence

clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited: belief perseverance

Rather than using evidence to draw conclusions, they used their conclusions to assess evidence-- a phenomenon also known as: motivated reasoning.

the way an issue is posed; how an issue is worded can significantly affect decisions and judgments- framing

our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning- language

in a language, the smallest distinctive sound unit: phonemes

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

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

beginning around 4 months, the stage of speech development in which an infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language: babbling stage

the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words.: one word stage

beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly in two-word statements.: two word stage

early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram—“go car”—using mostly nouns and verbs: telegraphic speech

impairment of language, usually caused by left hemisphere damage either to Broca’s area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke’s area (impairing understanding): aphasia

helps control language expression—an area of the frontal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech.: brocas area

a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression; usually in the left temporal lobe: wernike’s area

the strong form of Whorf’s hypothesis—that language controls the way we think and interpret the world around us: linguistic determinism

the weaker form of “linguistic determinism”—the idea that language affects thought (thus our thinking and world view is “relative to” our cultural language): linguistic influence

proposed that humans are biologically predisposed to learn the grammar rules of language. He calls this trait universal grammar.: Linguist Noam Chomsky