Thinking and Language Vocab

Question 1

cognition

Answer 1

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

Question 2

concept

Answer 2

mental groupings of similar objects, events, ideas, or people

Question 3

prototype

Answer 3

a mental image or best example of a category

Question 4

creativity

Answer 4

the ability to produce new and valuable ideas

Question 5

convergent thinking

Answer 5

narrowing the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution

Question 6

divergent thinking

Answer 6

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

Question 7

algorithm

Answer 7

a methodical, logical rule or step-by-step procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem

Question 8

heuristic

Answer 8

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

Question 9

insight

Answer 9

a sudden realization of a problem’s solution

Question 10

confirmation bias

Answer 10

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

Question 11

fixation

Answer 11

the inability to see a problem from a new perspective

Question 12

mental set

Answer 12

a tendency to approach situations the same way because that way worked in the past

Question 13

intuition

Answer 13

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

Question 14

representativeness heuristics

Answer 14

estimating the likelihood of events in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes

Question 15

availability heuristics

Answer 15

estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory

Question 16

overconfidence

Answer 16

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

Question 17

belief perseverance

Answer 17

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

Question 18

framing

Answer 18

the way an issue is posed

Question 19

language

Answer 19

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

Question 20

phoneme

Answer 20

in a language, the smallest distinctive sound unit

Question 21

morpheme

Answer 21

in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning

Question 22

grammar

Answer 22

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

Question 23

babbling

Answer 23

beginning around 4 months, the stage of speech development in which an infant spontaneously utters various sounds

Question 24

one-word

Answer 24

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

Question 25

two-word

Answer 25

mostly nouns and verbs… “want juice”

Question 26

telegraphic speech

Answer 26

the two-word stage produces sentences in which a child speaks like a telegram - using mostly nouns and verbs

Question 27

Wernicke’s area

Answer 27

brain area involved in language comprehension and expression

Question 27

Broca’s Area

Answer 27

helps control language expression, directs the muscle movements involved in speech

Question 28

linguistic determinism

Answer 28

proposed that language controls th way we think and interpret the world around us

Question 29

linguistic influence

Answer 29

the idea that language affects thought (this our thinking and world view is relative to our cultural language)

Question 30

Robert Sternberg

Answer 30

developed a testing instrument to identify people who are gifted in ways that other tests don’t identify.

Question 31

Wolfgang Kohler

Answer 31

Insight learning

Question 32

Noam Chomsky

Answer 32

the concept of universal grammar

Question 33

Carl Wernicke

Answer 33

discovery of the area in the cerebrum responsible for receptive language/speech phenomena in the superior gyrus of the temporal lobe (Wernicke aphasia).

Question 33

Paul Broca

Answer 33

discovery of the speech production center of the brain

Question 34

Benjamin Lee Whorf

Answer 34

widely known for his ideas about linguistic relativity, the hypothesis that language influences thought.