Cognitive Key Terms Exam 1

Front 1

Cognitive psychology

Back 1

The study of mental operations that support people’s acquisition and use of knowledge is _______________.

Front 2

Sensory store

Back 2

That part of memory that holds unanalyzed sensory information for a fraction of a second, providing an opportunity for additional analysis following the physical termination of a stimulus is ____________.

Front 3

Human information processing

Back 3

__________________ is the psychological approach that attempts to identify what occurs during the various stages (attention, perception, short-term memory) of processing information.

Front 4

Pattern recognition

Back 4

__________________ is the stage of perception during which a stimulus is identified.

Front 5

Filter

Back 5

That part of attention in which some perceptual information is blocked (filtered) out and not recognized, while other information receives attention and is subsequently recognized is ______________.

Front 6

Selection stage

Back 6

The stage that follows pattern recognition and determines which information a person will try to remember is __________.

Front 7

Short-term memory (STM)

Back 7

____________________ is memory that has limited capacity and that lasts only about 20-30 seconds in the absence of attending to its content.

Front 8

Long-term memory (LTM)

Back 8

______________ is memory that has no capacity limits and lasts from minutes to an entire lifetime.

Front 9

Bottom-up processing

Back 9

_____________ is the flow of information from the sensory store toward LTM.

Front 10

Top-down processing

Back 10

Flow of information from LTM toward the sensory store is _____.

Front 11

Stimulus-response

Back 11

____________ is the approach that emphasizes the association between a stimulus and a response, without identifying the mental operations that produced the response.

Front 12

Artificial intelligence

Back 12

A branch of computer science that attempts to produce computer programs that can perform intellectually demanding tasks is _____.

Front 13

Plan

Back 13

________ is a temporally ordered sequence of operations for carrying out some task.

Front 14

Cognitive science

Back 14

______ is the interdisciplinary attempt to study cognition through such fields as psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology.

Front 15

Cognitive neuroscience

Back 15

______ is the study of the relation between cognitive processes and brain activities.

Front 16

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

Back 16

______ is a diagnostic technique that uses magnetic fields and computerized images to locate mental operations in the brain.

Front 17

Positron-emission tomography (PET)

Back 17

______ is a diagnostic technique that uses radioactive tracers to study brain activity by measuring the amount of blood flow in different parts of the brain.

Front 18

Event-related potential (ERP)

Back 18

______ is a diagnostic technique that uses electrodes plafed on the scalp to measure the duration of brain waves during mental tasks.

Front 19

Tachistoscope

Back 19

_____ is a box that presents visual stimuli at a specified duration and level of illumination.

Front 20

Template

Back 20

An unanalyzed pattern that is matched against alternative patterns by using the degrees of overlap as a measure of similarity is _______.

Front 21

Interstimulus interval

Back 21

The amount of time between the end of a stimulus and the beginning of another stimulus is called __________.

Front 22

Feature theory

Back 22

The _______ is a theory of pattern recognition that describes patterns in terms of their parts, or features.

Front 23

Distinctive feature

Back 23

_________ is a feature present in one pattern but absent in another, aiding one’s discrimination of the two patterns.

Front 24

Caricature

Back 24

An exaggeration of distinctive features to make a pattern more distinctive is _____________.

Front 25

Perceptual confusion

Back 25

________ is the measure of the frequency with which two patterns are mistakenly identified as each other.

Front 26

Structural theory

Back 26

_________ is a theory that specifies how the features of a pattern are joined to other features of the pattern.

Front 27

Geons

Back 27

Different three-dimensional shapes that combine to form three-dimensional patterns are called _________.

Front 28

Whole-report procedure

Back 28

___________ is a task that requires observers to report everything they see in a display of items.

Front 29

Partial-report procedure

Back 29

___________ is a task in which observers are cued to report only certain items in a display of items.

Front 30

Visual information store

Back 30

______ is a sensory store that maintains visual information for approximately one-quarter of a second.

Front 31

Rehearsal

Back 31

Repeating verbal information to keep it active in STM or to transfer it into LTM is called ___________.

Front 32

Auditory information store

Back 32

In Sperling’s model the _____________ maintains verbal information in STM through rehearsal.

Front 33

Serial processing

Back 33

Carrying out one operation at a time, such as pronouncing one word at a time is called ________.

Front 34

Parallel processing

Back 34

Carrying out more than one operation at a time, such as looking at an art exhibit and making conversation is called ______________.

Front 35

Scan component

Back 35

The _________ is the attention component of Sperling’s model that determines what is recognized in the visual information store.

Front 36

Detection paradigm

Back 36

_________ is a procedure in which observers have to specify which of two possible target patterns is present in a display.

Front 37

Word superiority effect

Back 37

The finding that accuracy in recognizing a letter is higher when the letter is in a word than when it appears alone or is in a nonword is called _____.

Front 38

Interactive activation model

Back 38

____________ is a theory that proposes that both feature knowledge and word knowledge combine to provide information about the identity of letters in a word.

Front 39

Excitatory connection

Back 39

___________ is a reaction to positive evidence for a concept, as when a vertical line provides support for the possibility that a letter is a K.

Front 40

Inhibitory connection

Back 40

__________ is a reaction to negative evidence for a concept, as when the presence of a vertical line provides negative evidence that a letter is a C.

Front 41

Parallel distributed processing (PDP)

Back 41

_________ is when information is simultaneously collected from different sources and combined to reach a decision.

Front 42

Neural network model

Back 42

________ is a theory that uses a neural network as a metaphor in which concepts (nodes) are linked to other concepts through excitatory and inhibitory connections.

Front 43

Nodes

Back 43

____ is the format for representing concepts in a network.

Front 44

Activation rule

Back 44

______ is a rule that determines how inhibitory and excitatory connections combine to determine the total activation of a concept.

Front 45

Selectivity

Back 45

_____ is the focusing of aspects of attention – we pay attention to some aspects of our environment and ignore other aspects.

Front 46

Bottleneck theory

Back 46

__________ is a theory that attempts to explain how people select information when some information processing stage becomes overloaded with too much information.

Front 47

Concentration

Back 47

Investing mental effort in one or more tasks is _________.

Front 48

Mental Effort

Back 48

______ is the amount of mental capacity required to perform a task.

Front 49

Capacity Theory

Back 49

_____ is a theory that proposes that we have a limited amount of mental effort to distribute across tasks, so there are limitations on the number of tasks we can perform at the same time.

Front 50

Automatic Processing

Back 50

Performing mental operations that require very little mental effort is called __________.

Front 51

Filter Model

Back 51

________ is the proposition that a bottleneck occurs at the pattern recognition stage and that attention determines what information reaches the pattern recognition stage.

Front 52

Limited-capacity perceptual channel

Back 52

_________ is the pattern recognition stage of Broadbent’s model, which is protected by the filter (attention) from becoming overloaded with too much perceptual information.

Front 53

Shadowing

Back 53

________ is an experimental method that requires people to repeat the attended message out loud.

Front 54

Contextual Effect

Back 54

The influence of the surrounding context on the recognition of patterns is called ________.

Front 55

Threshold

Back 55

_________ is the minimal amount of activation required to become consciously aware of a stimulus.

Front 56

Attenuation

Back 56

________ is a decrease in the perceived loudness of an unattended message.

Front 57

Late-selection Model

Back 57

The __________ is the proposal that the bottleneck occurs when information is selected for memory.

Front 58

Allocation of Capacity

Back 58

_________ is when a limited amount of capacity is distributed to various tasks.

Front 59

Arousal

Back 59

________ is a psychological state that influences the distribution of mental capacity to various tasks.

Front 60

Enduring Dispostion

Back 60

_________ is an automatic influence where people direct their attention.

Front 61

Momentary intentions

Back 61

_______ is a conscious decision to allocate attention to certain tasks or aspects of the environment.

Front 62

Multimode theory

Back 62

_______ is a theory that proposes that people’s intentions and the demands of the task determine the information processing stage at which information is selected.

Front 63

Subsidiary task

Back 63

______ is a task that typically measures how quickly people can react to a target stimulus in order to evaluate the capacity demands of the primary task.

Front 64

Stroop effect

Back 64

________ is the finding that it takes longer to name the color of the ink a word is printed in when the word is the name of a competing color (for example, the word red printed in blue ink).

Front 65

Incidental learning

Back 65

________ is learning that occurs when we do not make a conscious effort to learn.

Front 66

Working memory

Back 66

_________ is the use of STM as a temporary store for information needed to accomplish a particular task.

Front 67

Interference theory

Back 67

Proposal that forgetting occurs because other material interferes with the information in memory is called _____________.

Front 68

Decay theory

Back 68

The proposal that information is spontaneously lost over time, even when there is no interference from other material is called ___________.

Front 69

Retroactive interference

Back 69

___________ is forgetting that occurs because of interference from material encountered after learning.

Front 70

Proactive interference

Back 70

__________ is forgetting that occurs because of interference from material encountered before learning.

Front 71

Release from proactive interference

Back 71

Reducing proactive interference by having information be dissimilar from earlier material is _____________.

Front 72

Memory span

Back 72

The number of correct items that people can immediately recall from a sequence of items is _______________.

Front 73

Absolute judgment task

Back 73

Identifying stimuli that vary along a single, sensory continuum is _______.

Front 74

Chunk

Back 74

A _________ is a cluster of items that has been stored as a unit in LTM.

Front 75

Acoustic code

Back 75

A memory code based on the sound of the stimulus is the _______.

Front 76

Semantic code

Back 76

_________ is a memory code based on the meaning of the stimulus.

Front 77

Acoustic confusion

Back 77

______ is an error that sounds like the correct answer.

Front 78

Phoneme

Back 78

_________ is any of the basic sounds of a language that are combined to form speech.

Front 79

Lexical alteration

Back 79

________ is substituting a word with similar meaning for one of the words in a sentence.

Front 80

Semantic alteration

Back 80

_______ is changing the order of words in a sentence to change the meaning of the sentence.

Front 81

Paraphrase

Back 81

Using different words to express the same ideas in a sentence is ________.

Front 82

Memory set

Back 82

________ is a set of items in STM that can be compared against a test item to determine to determine if the test item is stored there.

Front 83

Self-terminating search

Back 83

_________ is a search that stops as soon as the test item is successfully matched to an item in the memory set.

Front 84

Exhaustive search

Back 84

_________ is a search that continues until the test item is compared with all items in the memory set.

Front 85

Encode

Back 85

To _____ is to create a visual or verbal code for a test item so it can be compared with the memory codes of items stored in STM.

Front 86

Scan

Back 86

To ____ is to sequentially compare a test item with items in STM to determine if there’s a match.

Front 87

Slope

Back 87

_____ is a measure of how much response time changes for each unit of change along the x-axis (memory set size).

Front 88

Phonological loop

Back 88

________ is a component of Baddeley’s working memory model that maintains and manipulates acoustic information.

Front 89

Visuospatial sketchpad

Back 89

The _________ is a component of Baddeley’s working memory model that maintains and manipulates visuospatial information.

Front 90

Central executive

Back 90

_________ is a component of Baddeley’s working memory model that manages the use of working memory.

Front 91

Multimodal code

Back 91

_________ is an integration of memory codes such as combining visual and verbal codes.