Cognition Ap Psych

Question: Cognition

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

Question: Concept

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

Question: Prototype

Answer: a mental image or best example of a category. Matching new items to the prototype provides a quick and easy method for including items in a category (as when comparing feathered creatures to a prototypical bird, such as a robin).

Question: Algorithm

Answer: 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.

Question: Heuristic

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

Question: Insight

Answer: a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem; it contrasts with strategy-based solutions

Question: Confirmation Bias

Answer: a tendency to search for information that confirms one's preconceptions.

Question: Fixation

Answer: the inability to see a problem from a new perspective; an impediment to problem solving

Question: Mental Set

Answer: A tendency to approach a problem in a particular way, especially a way that has been successful in the past but may or may not be helpful in solving a new problem

Question: Functional Fixedness

Answer: the tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions; an impediment to problem solving

Question: Representativeness Heuristic

Answer: judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes; may lead one to ignore other relevant information

Question: Availability Heuristic

Answer: estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory; if instances come readily to mind, we presume such events are common

Question: Overconfidence

Answer: the tendency to be more confident than correct--to overestimate the accuracy of one's beliefs and judgments

Question: Framing

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

Question: Belief Bias

Answer: the tendency for one's preexisting beliefs to distort logical reasoning, sometimes by making invalid conclusions seem valid, or valid conclusions seem invalid

Question: Belief Perseverance

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

Question: Artificial Intelligence

Answer: the science of designing and programming computer systems to do intelligent things and to simulate human thought processes suchs as reasoning and understanding language

Question: Computer Neural Networks

Answer: Computer circuits that mimic the brain's interconnected neural cells, performing tasks such as learning to recognize visual patterns and smells

Question: Language

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

Question: Phoneme

Answer: in a spoken language, the smallest distinctive sound unit

Question: Morpheme

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

Question: Grammar

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

Question: Semantics

Answer: the set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences in a given language; also, the study of meaning

Question: Syntax

Answer: the rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language

Question: Babbling Stage

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

Question: One-word Stage

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

Question: Two-word Stage

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

Question: Telegraphic Speech

Answer: early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram--'go car'--using mostly nouns and verbs and omitting 'auxiliary' words