Concepts & Categories
This term describes the most typical example of a category.
What is a prototype?
These are the smallest units of sound in a language.
What are phonemes?
This effect shows that remember the first and last images in a series better than images in the middle.
What are the primacy and recency effects?
This problem-solving strategy involves reducing the difference between your current state and your goal.
What is means-end analysis?
This form of intelligence increases with age and includes accumulated knowledge.
What is crystallized intelligence?
This model suggests people store individual examples to categorize new stimuli.
What is the exemplar theory?
This feature of speech--including intonation, stress, rhythm, and loudness--helps convey emotion and structure.
What is prosody?
When asked to picture the front of their car, participants take longer to answer questions about the trunk than the front passenger door.
How does mental rotation impact response time?
People often rely on these mental shortcuts, even if it leads to biased reasoning under time pressure.
What is a heuristic?
This describes mental actions we take with full awareness.
What is conscious processing?
This effect explains why people respond faster to “A robin is a bird” than “A penguin is a bird.”
What is the typicality effect?
This phenomenon occurs when people misinterpret sentence structure due to ambiguity.
What is a garden-path sentence?
Recalling highly detailed mental images takes longer than simple images, suggesting we don't store images in full detail.
How are images stored in long term memory?
This phenomenon occurs when a previous way of thinking about a problem limits new problem-solving approaches.
What is functional fixedness? (or existing problem-solving set)
People with this condition can respond to visual stimuli without conscious awareness.
What is blindsight?
When people are asked to switch perspectives—like thinking of “Australian spiders” instead of “American spiders”—their judgments of category membership shift.
What is the flexibility of category boundaries?
The belief that language shapes thought is known by this theory?
What is linguistic relativity?
This term refers to using both verbal and visual codes to enhance memory.
What is dual coding?
People ignore base rates and focus only on case-specific information (such as how well it matches a prototype), showing overuse of this heuristic.
What is the representativeness heuristic?
This general factor underlies performance across a variety of cognitive tasks.
What is g?
Although people often rely on typicality to judge category membership, this concept explains why a skunk is still considered an animal even if it’s atypical.
What are essential features (or essentialism)?
This language disorder, caused by brain damage, results in difficulties in speech production or comprehension.
What is aphasia?
When participants view ambiguous images and form mental pictures, they often fail to reinterpret them—unless they first do this.
What is draw the image on paper?
Creativity is often associated with this process, in which the unconscious mind works on a problem outside of awareness.
What is incubation?
The ability to monitor and reflect on one’s own thought processes is called this.
What is metacognition?