·      a desired state; provides the direction for problem-solving behavior

·      a goal undertaken in the service of another goal

operator

·      an action that changes one problem state into another.

protocol analysis

·      based on transcripts of subjects asked to “think aloud” while solving problems.

problem space

·      the set of possible states that could be generated by applying all available operators to the current state, repeating for all the resulting states, and so on until the goal state is reached.

initial state

·      representation of the situation at the start of solving a problem

current state

·      representation of the present situation in a problem solving task

goal state

·      representation of the desired situation in a problem-solving task

solution path

·      a sequence of states through a problem space leading from the initial state to the goal state.

production rule

·      represents operators in the form of condition-action rules.

exhaustive search

·      searching for a goal state by generating the entire problem space

difference reduction

·      a problem solving strategy in which operators are selected to decrease the difference between the current state and the goal state.

means-ends analysis

·      a problem solving strategy in which blocked operators lead to the creation of new subgoals.

functional fixedness

·      a tendency to see the conventional uses of familiar objects, and to fail to see novel uses.

set effects

·      a tendency to continue using a familiar procedure to solve new problems, which may interfere with discovering more efficient procedures.

productivity

·      refers to the fact that an infinite number of utterances are theoretically possible in any human language.

·      refers to the fact that languages are structured and rule-governed.

·      a system of rules for describing a particular language; consists of phonology, morphology, and syntax.

·      smallest unit of speech sound.

·      smallest part of a word that carries independent meaning.

·      rules describing how words may be combined to make acceptable utterances in a given language.

·      the study of meaning, e.g., the meanings of words and whole sentences.

·      something that stands for or represents something else, without physically resembling it, i.e., the relation is arbitrary.

·      a coherent unit of syntax within a sentence.

phrase structure

·      the structure of sentences as analyzed into their constituent phrases.

noun phrase

·      consists of a noun or pronoun plus modifiers.

verb phrase

·      consists of a verb plus modifiers.

·      the “language of the mind”; abstract, nonperceptual, nonverbal representation of meaning, e.g., propositional code.

mental lexicon

·      the “dictionary in the mind” which contains information about the meanings and syntactic categories of all the words a person knows.

·      the process by which words in a sentence are transformed into a mental representation of their combined meaning

discourse

·      connected speech or text.

garden path sentence

·      a sentence in which we make the wrong interpretation initially and must go back and correct ourselves.

situation model

·      representation of the events or relations described in a text/discourse; may be non-propositional (e.g., mental imagery)

induction

·      learning or reasoning based on specific examples.

availability heuristic

·      judging the probabilities of events based on how easy it is to recall examples of each.

simulation heuristic

·      judging the likelihood of an outcome based on how easy it is to imagine a plausible series of events leading to that outcome.

gambler’s fallacy

·      a failure to appreciate the independence of random events, e.g., to believe that if tossing a coin yields 10 “heads” in a row, then the next toss is more likely to yield a “tails”.

conjunction fallacy

·      believing that a subset can exceed the size of the set that contains it, i.e., that the probability belonging to categories A and B can exceed that of  belonging to category A.

base rate

·      the prior probability of a given event before any further information is provided, e.g., the probability that some random person is an engineer, without knowing anything specific about them.

framing effects

·      a tendency to make different choices among the same alternatives, depending on how the problem is worded.