the mental activities associated with thinking, knowledge, remembering, and communicating

a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people

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)

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

a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone than algorithms

a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to the problem; it contrast with strategy-based solutions

a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence

the inability to see a problem from a new perspective, by employing a different mental set

a tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past

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

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

the tendency to be more confident than correct – to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments

clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited

an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning

the way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments

our spoken, written, or signed words and the way we combine them to communicate

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

the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words

beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly two-word statements

early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram – “go car” – using mostly nouns and verbs

Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think

mental quality consisting of the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations

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

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.

a condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computation drawings

the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas

the ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions

a method of assessing an individual’s mental aptitude and comparing them with those of others, using numerical scores

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

the widely used American revision (by Terman at Stanford University) of Binet’s original intelligence test.

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

the WAIS is the most widely used intelligence test; contains verbal and performance (nonverbal) subtests

defining meaningful scores by comparison with the performance of a pretested group

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

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

the extent to which a test measures or predicts what is supposed to.

the extent to which a test samples the behavior that is of interest

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

a condition of mild to severe intellectual disability and associated physical disorder caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21

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

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

A self-confirming concern that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype