| A | B |
|---|
| cognition | all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. |
| concept | a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people. |
| prototype | 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). |
| algorithm | 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 |
| heuristic | a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone than algorithms. |
| insight | a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem; it contrasts with strategy-based solutions. |
| creativity | the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas |
| confirmation bias | a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence. |
| fixation | the inability to see a problem from a new perspective, by employing a different mental set. |
| mental set | a tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past. |
| functional fixedness | the tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual uses or purposes; an impediment to problem solving. |
| representativeness heuristic | judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to match particular prototypes; may lead us to ignore other relevant information. |
| availability heuristic | estimating the likelihood of events based on their presence in our memory; if instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), we presume such events are common. |
| overconfidence | the tendency to be more certain than correct—to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments |
| belief perseverance | clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited. |
| intuition | an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning. |
| framing | the way an issue is posed; how an issue is presented can significantly affect decisions and judgments. |
| language | our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning. |
| phoneme | in language, the smallest distinctive sound unit. |
| morpheme | in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or a part of a word (such as a prefix). |
| grammar | in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others. |
| semantics | the set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences in a given language; also, the study of meaning. |
| syntax | the rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language. |
| babbling stage | 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. |
| one-word stage | the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words. |
| two-word stage | beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly statements made up of only a couple of words. |
| telegraphic speech | early speech stage in which a child speaks using mostly nouns and verbs such as “go car”. |
| linguistic determinism | Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think |
