Psych 7B

  1. Algorithm
    a set of instructions for solving a problem or completing a process, often used in math. The steps in this are very precise and well-defined.
  2. Availability heuristic
    refers to how easily something that you've seen or heard can be accessed in your memory. People tend to think of things they remember as more important than things they don't remember as easily. A romantic relationship may grow because a person you've seen comes to mind after you've left them, leading you to assume this person must be important. In the same way, new friendship possibilities might have been overlooked because a person you've met several times has never seemed familiar, or they didn't make an impression on you. This phenomenon is what makes the marketing process of "branding" work. A company makes a memorable slogan or logo and shows it to you over and over again, until that company easily to your mind. You may not have any particular preference for the brand, but the marketing people count on your familiarity with the name alone to sell the product.
  3. Cognition
    All the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, and remembering. As you can tell, any of your ideas, thoughts, memories, etc., are all types of this word's processes. What you are doing (reading and learning this explanation) is a type of this word.
  4. Concept
    A mental grouping of similar things, events, and people that is used to remember and understand what things are, what they mean, and what categories or groups they belong to. For example, if I say to you, "think of a car," the WORD, "car" will evoke some ideas in your head about what a car is and what types of characteristics it contains -- does your WORD of a car have black tires, two doors, four doors, is it red, white, black, etc.?
  5. Confirmation bias
    a tendency for a person to search for information that confirms one's preconceptions.
  6. Creativity
    the ability to produce new ideas.
  7. Fixation
    refers to an inability to adopt any different or new perspective on a problem. OR refers to when a person is "stuck" in one stage of psychosexual development.
  8. Framing
    they are presented in different ways and under different pretenses.
  9. Functional fixedness
    People are often very limited in the ways they think about objects, concepts, and people. This type of thinking is narrow and limited, often inhibiting the problem solving process.
  10. Grammar
    the study of the way the sentences of a language are constructed; morphology and syntax.
  11. Heuristic
    which is a rule-of-thumb strategy for making more efficient decisions.
  12. Hindsight bias
    the tendency to believe, once the outcome is already known of course, that you would have forseen it...that even though it's over and you know the outcome, you knew it all along.
  13. Insight
    the sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem. This is the opposite type of solution to trial-and-error solutions.
  14. Language
    is a formal system of communication which involves the combination of words and/or symbols, whether written or spoken, as well as some rules that govern them.
  15. Language acquisition device
    a hypothesized innate mental faculty present in infants that enables them to construct and internalize the grammar of their native language on the basis of the limited and fragmentary language input to which they are exposed.
  16. Linguistic determinism
    is the idea that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought.
  17. Mental set
    a tendency to approach situations the same way because that way worked in the past.
  18. Morpheme
    The smallest units of speech that convey meaning.

    work/working
  19. One-word stage
    the stage in which children speak mainly in single words.
  20. Phoneme
    sets of basic sounds (in fact, the smallest set of sounds) that are the building blocks to all spoken language.
  21. Prototype
    cognitive representation of something within a certain category. WORD are used to enhance memory and recall, since you can keep a WORD of something and then match new, similar things to the WORD in order to identify, categorize, or store this new thing.
  22. Representative heuristic
    a cognitive bias in which an individual categorizes a situation based on a pattern of previous experiences or beliefs about the scenario. It can be useful when trying to make a quick decision but it can also be limiting because it leads to close-mindedness such as in stereotypes.
  23. Schema
    is a cognitive system which helps us organize and make sense of information.
  24. Script
    the letters or characters used in writing by hand; handwriting, especially cursive writing.
  25. Semantics
    concerns the meanings of words, signs, symbols, and the phrases that represent them. More specifically, it is the study of meanings through the relationships of words, how they are used, and how they are said. If I tell you I'm going to eat a piece of cake, you would interpret it literally. Maybe you would even ask for a piece. If instead, I told you my homework was a piece of cake, you would interpret that I meant it was easy, unless of course, I'm taking cooking classes.
  26. Syntax
    the rules that specify how words should be ordered in a sentence to make the sentence meaningful. Of course, these rules vary according to language (English is different than Russian, for example). For example, if you want to tell someone that you ran to the store, you know to put the verb "ran" before the noun "store" to form the sentence "I ran to the store" as opposed to saying "I store ran".
  27. Telegraphic speech
    peech that sounds very much like a telegram, has words arranged in an order that makes sense, and contains almost all nouns and verbs.
  28. Two-word stage
    During this stage children start using two-word sentences more than just using single words for everything.
Author
makayxocourt
ID
124634
Card Set
Psych 7B
Description
psych
Updated