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| concept | A mental category that groups objects, relations, activities, abstractions, or qualities having common properties. |
| basic concepts | Concepts that have a moderate number of instances and that are easier to acquire than those having few or many instances. |
| prototype | An especially representative example of a concept. |
| proposition | A unit of meaning that is made up of concepts and expresses a single idea. |
| cognitive schema | An integrated mental network of knowledge, beliefs, and expectations concerning a particular topic or aspect of the world. |
| mental image | A mental representation that mirrors or resembles the thing it represents; mental images can occur in many and perhaps all sensory modalities. |
| subconscious processes | Mental processes occurring outside of conscious awareness but accessible to consciousness when necessary. |
| nonconscious processes | Mental processes occurring outside of and not available to conscious awareness. |
| reasoning | The drawing of conclusions or inferences from observations, facts, or assumptions. |
| algorithm | A problem-solving strategy guaranteed to produce a solution even if the user does not know how it works. |
| heuristic | A rule of thumb that suggests a course solving but does not guarantee an optimal solution. |
| deductive reasoning | A form of reasoning in which a conclusion follows necessarily from certain premises; if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. |
| inductive reasoning | A form of reasoning in which the premises provide support for a conclusion, but it is still possible for the conclusion to be false. |
| dialectical reasoning | A process in which opposing facts or ideas are weighed and compared, with a view to determining the best solution or to resolving differences. |
| availability heuristic | The tendency to judge the probability of a type of event by how easy it is to think of examples or instances. |
| comfirmation bias | The tendency to look for or pay attention only to information that confirms one's own belief. |
| mental set | A tendency to solve problems using procedures that worked before on similiar problems. |
| hindsight bias | The tendency to overstimate one's ability to have predicted an event once the outcome is known; the"I knew it all along" phenomenon. |
| cognitive dissonance | A state of tension that occurs when a person simultaneously holds two cognitions that are psychologically inconsistent, or inconsistent, or when a person's belief is incongruent with his or her behavior. |
| intelligence | An inferred characteristic of an individual, usually defined as the ability to profit from experience, acquire knowledge, or adapt to changes in the environment. |
| factor analysis | A statistical method for analyzing the intercorrelations among various measures or test score; clusters of measures or scores that are highly correlated are assumed to measure the same underlying trait, ability, or aptitude (factor). |
| g factor | A general intellectual ability assumed by some theorists to underlie specific mental abilities and talents. |
| psychometrics | the measurement of mental abilities, traits, and processes. |
| mental age (MA) | A measure of mental development expressed in terms of the average mental ability at a given age. A child with a mental age of 8 performs on a mental ability at the level of the average 8-year old. |
| intelligence quotient (IQ) | A measure of intelligence originally computed by dividing a person's mental age by his or her chronological age and multiplying by 100; now derived from norms provided for standardized intelligence tests. |
| learning disability | A difficulty in the performance of a specific mental skill, such as reading or arithmetic; sometimes linked to perceptual or memory problems. |
| tacit knowledge | strategies for success that are not explicitly taught but that instead must be inferred. |
| metacognition | The knowledge or awareness of one's own cognitive processes. |
| cognitive ethology | The study of cognitive processes in nonhuman animals. |
