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

Heritability refers to the percentage of variation within a given population that is due to heredity.

Divergent thinking is another name for functional fixedness and is a major obstacle to creative problem solving.

Children of Burakumin who have immigrated to the United States from Japan do as well in school and on IQ tests as other Japanese Americans, but Burakumin children who remain in Japan-where they face social discrimination-score lower on IQ tests than other Japanese children.

The most widely accepted definition of intelligence is "the global capacity to think rationally, act purposefully, and deal effectively with the environment."

The additive model of decision making involves generating a list of factors that are most important, then using an arbitrary rating scale to rate each alternative on each factor, and finally adding these ratings together for comparison purposes.

A worldwide survey of intelligence test scores showed that there were significant gains in average IQ scores in 14 nations in just one generation. These results provide support for environmental influences on IQ scores because the amount of time involved is far too short for genetically influenced changes to have occurred.

Nonhuman animals communicate with members of their own species, but there is no valid research to support the idea that nonhuman animals demonstrate comprehension of syntax or concepts.

Psychologists have found that virtually everyone possesses the intelligence and cognitive processes needed to be creative.

Alfred Binet believed that intelligence was too complex to describe with a single number, and that performance on his tests of mental ability could be affected by many factors, including motivation.

Rather than focusing on whether nonhuman animals can develop human capabilities such as language, many comparative psychologists study the specific cognitive capabilities that different species have evolved to best adapt to their ecological niche.

A normal distribution is a bell-shaped distribution of scores on a graph in which most scores cluster around the mean.

Both David Wechsler and Alfred Binet developed tests that were based on their belief that intelligence involves a variety of distinct mental abilities.

When we use the availability heuristic, we estimate the likelihood of an event occurring on the basis of how readily available other instances of the event are in our memory.

The availability heuristic is sometimes most likely to block insight in areas in which you are already knowledgeable or well-trained.

The "two pots" analogy is used to explain the relationship between cultural values, the development of agriculture, and the evolution of linguistic and analytical intelligence.

Every language has a unique syntax, or set of rules for combining words.

A decision-making strategy in which the choice among many alternatives is simplified by basing the decision on a single feature is called the elimination-by-aspects model.

Reliability refers to the ability of a test to produce consistent results when administered on repeated occasions under similar conditions.

The intelligence quotient or IQ score is derived by dividing a person's mental age by his or her chronological age and multiplying the result by 100.

Eleanor Rosch found that even though Dani-speaking people in New Guinea have words for only two colors in their language, they seemed to remember and perceive color in much the same way as English-speaking people from the United States.