Exam 7: Section 3: Thinking, Language, and Intelligence

Although researchers once thought that primates were able to demonstrate primitive language skills, contemporary researchers have shown that the primates were simply producing learned responses to nonverbal cues.

A formal concept is a mental category that is formed as a result of everyday experience.

Subtest scores on the WAIS have proven to have practical and clinical value, such as indicating a specific learning disability.

Aptitude test is to measuring level of skill or knowledge as achievement test is to measuring capacity to benefit from education or training.

Theodore Simon was a French psychiatrist who, along with French psychologist Alfred Binet, developed the first widely used intelligence test.

To ensure success, one of the most important steps in problem solving is to identify the problem.

Gifted Asian American female students who were reminded of their identity as Asians scored higher on a difficult math test than a matched group of female Asian American students who took the same test but were reminded of their gender identity. This result provides evidence for the effects of stereotype threat.

All of your cognitive abilities are involved in understanding and producing language.

Forming a mental image of a face or place involves activity in the same brain areas that are activated when people actually perceive a face or a place.

A mental set is sometimes likely to block insight in areas in which you are already knowledgeable and well-trained.

The representativeness heuristic and the availability heuristic are two rule-of-thumb strategies that help us estimate the likelihood of events.

Hundreds of psychological studies have demonstrated that individual performance on fair and objective tests is susceptible to stereotype threat.

In terms of intelligence, identical twins reared together have very similar IQ scores, whereas fraternal twins reared together have scores that are less similar.

An algorithm is a method that always produces the correct solution when it is followed step by step.

Bowers and his colleagues proposed a model of intuition that involves two stages: the exemplar stage and the prototype stage.

The fact that IQ scores have remained relatively stable in the United States and 14 other nations since World War II, despite improvements in nutrition and education, is evidence that supports the idea that higher intelligence is primarily due to genetics.

The intelligence of fraternal twins raised in the same home is more similar than the intelligence of nontwin siblings raised in the same home. This finding provides evidence for the effects of environment on intelligence.

It's now known that environmental factors influence which of the many genes we inherit are "expressed," meaning actually switched on, or activated.

People who are genetically unrelated but are raised in the same home have IQ scores that are more similar than that of genetically unrelated people raised in different homes.

As discussed in the In Focus box on neurodiversity, Dawson's study using the Raven's Progressive Matrices test and Wechsler's intelligence test (WISC) showed that, on average, children with autism scored a full thirty percentile points higher on the Raven's test than they did on Wechsler's intelligence test.