psych 9b // chapter 8

• Cognition refers to all of the mental activities associated with thinking, including knowing, remembering, solving problems, making judgments and decisions, and communicating.
• Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental activities associated with thinking and how they operate.
• A mental representation is an internal mental symbol that stands for some object, event, or state of affairs in the world.
• A concept is a mental category that groups similar objects, ideas, or people.
• Family resemblance structure is the idea that categories or concepts often lack clear-cut definitions but instead exhibit a network of overlapping features and family resemblances.
• A prototype is a best example or average member of a concept that incorporates most of the features most commonly associated with it.
• Hierarchies are systems of organization in which items or concepts are arranged in levels or tiers based on their degree of generality or specificity.
• Superordinate concepts are the broadest level of categorization within a hierarchy, which encompasses a wide range of subordinate concepts and represents the most general and abstract categories.
• Basic-level concepts are the intermediate level of categorization within a hierarchy, which represents the most natural and commonly used categories for everyday objects and experiences.
• Subordinate concepts are the most specific level of categorization within a hierarchy, which represents the narrowest and most detailed categories.
• Well-defined problems are problems that have clear and unambiguous goals, constraints, and criteria for success.
• Ill-defined problems are problems that have unclear, ambiguous, or open-ended goals, constraints, and criteria for success.
• Trial and error is the process of a person trying actions or strategies at random until they find something that works.
• An algorithim is a step-by-step procedure for solving problems that guarantees a solution.
• Insight is a sudden conscious change in a person’s understanding of some situation or problem.
• A mental set is a mental framework for how to solve a problem based on prior experience with similar problems.
• Functional fixedness is an obstacle to problem solving that includes focusing on an object’s typical function, thus failing to recognize atypical functions that could help solve a problem.
• Restructuring is the process of reorganizing one’s understanding of a problem to facilitate a solution.
• As a person navigates everyday life, they use their thinking capabilities to make hundreds, even thousands, of judgments, or conclusions drawn from evidence.
• Judgments often lead to decisions, or choices that affect one’s behavior.
• A rational decision is a decision that is based purely on reason and logic.
• Proposed by Herbert Simon, bounded rationality refers to the idea that rational decision making is constrained by limitations in people’s cognitive abilities, available information, and time.
• Dual-processing theory is the proposal that people have two types of thinking that they can use to make judgments.
• In dual-processing theory, the controlled system is the slow-acting system that is characterized by conscious, effortful, and deliberate processing of information, and includes cognitive processes that require attention, mental effort, and cognitive resources to execute.
• In dual-processing theory, the automatic system is the fast and effortless system that is characterized by unconscious and intuitive processing of information, and operates rapidly and automatically, often without conscious awareness or deliberate control.
• A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows people to efficiently solve problems and make decisions and judgments.
• The representativeness heuristic is a mental shortcut for judging the likelihood of something based on how well it represents some category.
• The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut for deciding how frequent or probable something is based on how easily examples come to mind.
• Affective reactions are emotional responses or feelings experienced by individuals in response to various stimuli, events, or situations.
• Positive affect is the experience of pleasant emotions, feelings, or moods that are associated with happiness, excitement, and other positive states.
• Negative affect is the experience of unpleasant emotions, feelings, or moods that are associated with sadness, fear, and other negative states.
• The affect heuristic is a mental shortcut for making judgments and decisions that involves relying on affect.
• Moral judgment is the process of evaluating the “rightness” or “wrongness” of actions, behaviors, or decisions based on moral principles, values, or standards.
• Confirmation bias is the tendency for people to look for and weigh evidence that confirms preexisting beliefs more strongly than evidence that is inconsistent with those beliefs.
• Belief perseverance is the tendency for people to resist changing their beliefs, even when faced with disconfirming evidence.
• Framing is the particular way that an issue, decision, or set of options is described, which can change decisions by shifting the decision maker’s reference point.
• Loss aversion is the tendency to make choices, including riskier ones, that minimize losses.
• Overconfidence bias is the tendency to overestimate the accuracy of one’s knowledge and judgments.
• Hindsight bias is the tendency, once some outcome is known, to overestimate the likelihood that one would have predicted that outcome in advance.
• A language is a shared system of symbols, including spoken, written, and signed words and gestures, and a set of rules for how to combine those symbols to communicate meaning.