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| The mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating |
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| A mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people. |
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| A mental image or best example of a category. Matching new items to the prototype provides a quick and easy method for including items in a category ( 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 judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error prone than algorithms. |
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| A sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem; it contrasts with strategy based solutions. |
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| A tendency to search for information that confirms one’s preconceptions. |
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| The inability to see a problem from a new perspective; an impediment to problem solving. |
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| A tendency to approach a problem in a particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past. |
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| The tendency to think of things only in terms of the usual functions; an impediment to problem solving. |
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| Representativeness Heuristic |
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| Judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes; may lead one to ignore other relevant information. |
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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 than correct- to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs and judgments. |
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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 tendency for one’s preexisting beliefs to distort logical reasoning, sometimes by making invalid conclusions seem valid, or valid conclusions seem invalid. |
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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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| Mental quality consisting of the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations. |
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| A statistical procedure that identifies clusters of related items (called factors) on a test; used to identify different dimensions of performance that underlie ones total score. |
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| A general intelligence factor that according to spearman and others underlies specific metal abilities and is therefore measured by every task on an intelligence test. |
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| A condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computing or drawing. |
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| The ability to produce novel and valuable ideas. |
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| A method for assessing an individual’s mental amplitudes and comparing them with those of others, using numerical scores. |
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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 performance. Thus, a child who does as well as the average 8 year old is said to have a mental age of 8. |
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| The widely used American revision (by Terman at Stanford University) 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 to chronological age multiplied by 100. On contemporary intelligence tests, the average performance for a given age is assigned a score of 100. |
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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 test designed to assess what a person has learned. |
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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 meaningful scores by comparison with the performance of a pretested standardization group. |
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| The symmetrical 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 the consistency of scores on the two halves of the test, on alternate forms 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 (such as a driving test that samples driving tasks). |
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| The behavior (such as future college grades) that a test (such as the ACT) is designed to predict; thus, the measure used in defining whether the test has predictive validity. |
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| The success with which a test predicts the behavior it is designed to predict; it is assessed by computing the correlation between test scores and the criterion behavior. (Also called criterion-related validity.) |
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| A condition of limited mental ability, indicated by an intelligence score of 70 or below and difficulty in adapting to the demands of life; varies from mild to profound. |
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| A condition of retardation and associated physical disorders caused by an extra chromosome in one’s genetic makeup. |
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