Psychology Ch.7 Vocab
Terms
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- The mental activities involved in aqcuiring, retaining, and using knowledge.
- cognition
- The manipulation of mental representations of information in order to draw inferences and conclusions.
- thinking
- A mental representation of objects or events tha are not physically present.
- mental image
- A mental category of objects or ideas based on properties they share.
- concept
- A mental category that is formed by learning the rules of features that define it.
- formal concept
- A mental category that is formed as a result of everyday experience.
- natural concept
- The most typical instance of a particular concept.
- prototype
- Individual instances of a concept or category, held in memory.
- exemplars
- Thinking and behavior directed toward attaining a goal that is not readily available.
- problem solving
- A problem-solving strategy that involves attempting attempting different solutions and eliminating those that do not work.
- trial and error
- A problem-solving strategy that involves following a specific rule, procedure or method that inevitably produces the cirrect solution.
- algorithm
- A problem-solving strategy that involves following a general rule of thumb to reduce the number of possible solutions.
- heuristic
- The sudden realization of how a problem can be solved.
- insight
- Coming to a conclusion or making a judgement without conscious awareness of the thought processes involved.
- intuition
- The tendency to view objects as functioning only in their usual or customary way.
- functional fixedness
- The tendency to persist in solving problems with solutions that have worked in the past.
- mental set
- A strategy in which the likelihood of an event is estimated on the basis of how readily available other instances of the event are in memory.
- availability heuristic
- A srategy in which the likelihood of an event is estimated by comparing how similar it is to the prototype of the event.
- representativeness heuristic
- A system for combining arbitrary symbols to produce an infinite number of meaningful statements.
- language
- The hypothesis that differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers.
- linguistic relativity hypothesis
- The study of animal learning, memory, thinking, and language
-
animal cognition
also called
comparative cognition - The global capacity to think rationally, act purposefully, and deal effectively with the environment.
- intelligence
- A measurement of intelligence in which an individual's mental level is expressed in terms of the average abilities of a given age group.
- mental age
- A measure of general intelligence derived by comparing an individual's score with the scores of others in the same age group.
- intelligence quotient (IQ)
- A test designed to measure a person's level of knowledge, skill, or accomplishment in a particular area.
- achievement test
- A test designed to assess a person's capacity to benefit from education or training.
- aptitude test
- The administration of a test the a large, representative sample of people under uniform conditions for the purpose of establishing norms.
- standardization
- A bell-shaped distributioin of individual differences in a normal populationin which the most scores cluster around the average score.
-
normal curve
or
normal distribution - The ability of a test to produce consistent results when administered on repeated occasions under similar conditions.
- reliability
- The ability of a test to measure what it is intended to measure.
- validity
- The notion of a general intelligence factor that is responsible for a person's overall performace on tests of mental ability.
-
_g_ factor
or
general intelligence - Sternberg's theory that there are three distinct forms of intelligence: analytic, creative, and practical.
- triarchic theory of intelligence
- The percentage of variation within a given population that is due to heredity.
- heritability
- A psychological predicament in which fear that you will be evaluated in terms of a negative stereotype about a group to which you belong creates anxiety and self-doubt, lowering performance in a particular domain that is important to you.
- stereotype threat
- A group of cognitive processes used to generate useful, original, and novel ideas or solutions to problems.
- creativity