David Meyers Psychology Textbook - Chapter 9 Vocab

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

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

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).

a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrasts with the usually speedier—but also more errorprone—use of heuristics.

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.

a sudden realization of a problem's solution; contrasts with strategy-based solutions.

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

in thinking, the inability to see a problem from a new perspective; an obstacle to problem solving.

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

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

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.

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.

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

clinging to one's initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited.

the way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments.

the ability to produce new and valuable ideas.

narrowing the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution.

expanding the number of possible problem solutions; creative thinking that diverges in different directions.

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

in a language, the smallest distinctive sound unit.

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

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.

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

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

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

early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram—"go car"—using mostly nouns and verbs.

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

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

a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression; usually in the left temporal lobe.

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