front 1 | back 1 the mental activities associated with thinking, knowledge, remembering, and communicating |
front 2 | back 2 a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people |
front 3 | back 3 a mental image of 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 prototype-typical bird, such as a robin) |
front 4 | back 4 a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrast with the usually speedier – but also more error-prone – use of heuristics |
front 5 | back 5 a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone than algorithms |
front 6 | back 6 a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to the problem; it contrast with strategy-based solutions |
front 7 | back 7 a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence |
front 8 | back 8 the inability to see a problem from a new perspective, by employing a different mental set |
front 9 | back 9 a tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past |
front 10 | back 10 judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes; may lead us to ignore other relevant information |
front 11 | back 11 estimating the likelihood of events based on their ability in memory; if instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), we presume such events are common |
front 12 | back 12 the tendency to be more confident than correct – to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments |
front 13 | back 13 clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited |
front 14 | back 14 an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning |
front 15 | back 15 the way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments |
front 16 | back 16 our spoken, written, or signed words and the way we combine them to communicate |
front 17 | back 17 beginning at about 4 months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language |
front 18 | back 18 the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words |
front 19 | back 19 beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly two-word statements |
front 20 | back 20 early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram – “go car” – using mostly nouns and verbs |
front 21 | back 21 Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think |
front 22 | back 22 mental quality consisting of the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations |
front 23 | back 23 a general intelligence factor that, according to Spearman and others, underlie specific mental ability and is therefore measured by every task on an intelligence test |
front 24 | back 24 a statistical procedure that identifies clusters of related items (called factors) on a test; used to identify different dimensions of performance that underlie a person’s score. |
front 25 | back 25 a condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computation drawings |
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front 27 | back 27 the ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions |
front 28 | back 28 a method of assessing an individual’s mental aptitude and comparing them with those of others, using numerical scores |
front 29 | back 29 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 an average eight year old is said to have a mental age of 8 |
front 30 | back 30 the widely used American revision (by Terman at Stanford University) of Binet’s original intelligence test. |
front 31 | back 31 defined originally as the ratio of mental age (ma) to chronicle age (ca) multiplied by a 100 (thus IQ = ma/ca x 100). On contemporary intelligence tests, the average performance for a given age is assigned a score of 100 |
front 32 | back 32 the WAIS is the most widely used intelligence test; contains verbal and performance (nonverbal) subtests |
front 33 | back 33 defining meaningful scores by comparison with the performance of a pretested group |
front 34 | back 34 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 extreme |
front 35 | back 35 the extent to which a test yields consistent results, as assessed by the consistency of scores on two halves of the test, or on retesting |
front 36 | back 36 the extent to which a test measures or predicts what is supposed to. |
front 37 | back 37 the extent to which a test samples the behavior that is of interest |
front 38 | back 38 a condition of limited mental ability, indicated by an intelligence score of 70 or below and difficulty in adapting to demands of life; varies from mild to profound |
front 39 | back 39 a condition of mild to severe intellectual disability and associated physical disorder caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21 |
front 40 | back 40 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 |
front 41 | back 41 the proportion of variation among individuals that we can attribute to genes. The heritability of a trait may vary, depending on the range of the population and environmental studied |
front 42 | back 42 A self-confirming concern that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype |