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| the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. |
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| a mental grouping similar objects, events, ideas, and people |
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| 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). |
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| 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. |
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| a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgements and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error prone than algorithms |
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| a sudden realization of a problem's solution; contrasts with strategy-based solutions. |
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| a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence. |
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| a tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past. |
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| an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling of thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning. |
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| estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory; if instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), we presume such events are common. |
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| the tendency to be more confident tan correct- to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments. |
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| clinging to one's initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited. |
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| the way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments. |
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| the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas. |
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| narrows the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution. |
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| expands the number of possible problem solutions (creative thinking that diverges in different directions). |
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| our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to comunicate meaning. |
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| in a language, the smallest distinctive sound unit |
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| in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or part of a word ( such as a prefix). |
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| in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others. In a given language, semantics in the set of rules for deriving meaning from sounds, and syntax is the set of rules for combining words into grammtically sensible sentences. |
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| beginning at about 4 months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utter various sounds at first unrelated to the household language. |
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| the stage in speech development, from about 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words. |
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| beggining about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly in two-word statements. |
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| early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram- "go car" - using mostly nouns and verbs. |
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| impairment of language, usually caused by left-hemisphere damage either to Broca's area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke's area (impairing understanding). |
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| controls language expression- an area of the frontal love, usually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech. |
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| controls language reception-a brain area involved in language conprehension and expression; usually in the left temporal lobe. |
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| Whorf's hypothesis that language determines the way we think. |
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| mental quility consisting of the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations. |
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| a general intelligence factor that, according to Spearman and others, underlines specific mental abilities and is therefore measured by every task on an intelligence test. |
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| a condtion in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computation or drawing. |
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| the ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions. |
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| a method for assessing an individual's mental aptitudes and comparing them with those of others, using numerical scores. |
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| a test designed to predict a person;s future performance; aptitude is the capacity to learn. |
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| a measure of intelligence test performance devised by Binet; the chronological age that most typically corresponds to a given level of perfomance. Thus, a child who does as well as an average 8-year-old is said to have a mental age of 8. |
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| the widely used America revision of Binet's original intelligence test. |
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| Intelligence quotient (IQ) |
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| defined originally as the ratio of mental age (ma) to chronological age (ca) multiplied by 100 (thus, IQ= ma/ca x 100). On contemporary intelligence tests, the average performance for agiven age is assigned a score of 100. |
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| Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) |
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| the WAIS is the most widely used intelligence test; contains verbal and performance (nonverbal) subtests. |
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| defining uniform testing procedures and meaningful scores by comparison with performance of a pretested group. |
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| the bell-shaped curve that describes the distribution of many physical and psychological attributes. Most scores fall near the average, and fewer and fewer scores lie near the extremes. |
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| the extent to which a test yields consistent results, as assessed by consistency of scores on two halves of the test, or on retesting. |
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| the extent to which a test measures or predicts what it is supposed to. |
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| the extent to which a test samples the behavior that is of interest. |
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| the success with which a test predicts the behaviour it is designed to predict; it is assessed by computing the correlation between test scores and the criterion behavior. |
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| Crystallized intelligence |
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| our accumulated knowledge and verbal skills; tends to increase with age. |
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| our ability to reason speedily and abstractly; tends to decrease during late adulthood. |
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| a condition of limited mental ability, indicated by an intelligence test score of 70 or below and difficulty in adapting to demands of life (formerly reffered to as mental retardation) |
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| a condition of mild to severe intellectual disability and associated physical disorders caused by extra copy of chromosome 21. |
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| the proportion of variation among individuals that we can attribute to genes. The heritability of a trait may vary, depending on the range of populations and environments studied. |
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| a self-confirming concern that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype. |
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