Cognitive Psychology Final Exam

Front 1

introspection

Back 1

self-examination: the detailed mental examination of your own feelings, thoughts, and motives

Front 2

subvocalizatoin

Back 2

covert speech, in which one goes through the motions of speaking, or perhaps forms a detailed motor plan for speech movements, but withouth making any sound.

Front 3

amygdala

Back 3

almond-shaped structure in the limbic sysyem that play a central role in emotion and in the evaluation of stimuli

Front 4

hippocampus

Back 4

a structure in the temporal lobe that is involved in long-term mempory and spatial memory.

Front 5

ERP

Back 5

Exposure and Response Prevention. The method is predicated on the idea that a therapeutic effect is achieved as subjects confront their fears and discontinue their escape response. An example would be of a person who repeatedly checks light switches to make sure they're turned off.

Front 6

agnosia

Back 6

a disturbance in a person's ability to identify familiar objects.

Front 7

serial processing

Back 7

a system in which only one step happens at a time (and so the steps go on in a series).

Front 8

parallel processing

Back 8

a system in which many steps are going on at the same time.

Front 9

the "what" system

Back 9

the system of visual circuits an pathways leading from the visual cortex to the temporal lobe an especially involved in object recognition.

Front 10

word frequency effect

Back 10

high-frequency words are produced and recognized faster than low-frequency words

Front 11

repetition priming

Back 11

a pattern of priming that occurs simply because a stimulus is presented a second time; processing is more efficient on the second presentation.

Front 12

word superiority effect

Back 12

the data pattern in which research participants are more accurate and more efficient in recognizing words than they are in recognizing individual letters.

Front 13

response threshold

Back 13

the quantity of information, or quantity of activatoin, needed in order to trigger a response.

Front 14

geons

Back 14

basic shapes proposed as the building blocks of all complex three-dimensional forms. geons take the form of cylinders, cones, blocks, and the like, and are combined to form "geon assemblies." these are then combined to produce entire objects.

Front 15

prosopagnosia

Back 15

a syndrom in which patients lose their ability to recognize faces and to make other fine-grained discriminations within a highly familiar category, even though their other visual abilities seem relatively intact.

Front 16

inattentional blindness

Back 16

a pattern in which percievers seem literally not to see visual stimuli right in front of their eyes; this pattern is caused by the participats' attending to some other stimulus and not expecting the target to appear.

Front 17

unilateral neglect

Back 17

a pattern of symptoms in which patients ignore all inputs coming from one side of space. patients with this syndrome put only one of their arms into their jackets, eat food from only one side of the plate.

Front 18

Stroop interference

Back 18

a classic demonstration of automaticity in which people are asked to name the color of ink used to print a word, and the word itself is a different color name.

Front 19

automatic processes

Back 19

processes which occur without concious thought

Front 20

primacy effect

Back 20

an often-observed advantage in remembering the early-presented materials within a sequence of materials. This advantage is generally attributed to the fact that one can focus attention on these items, because, at the beginning of a sequence, one is obviously not trying to divide attention between these items and other items in the series.

Front 21

recency effect

Back 21

the tendency to remember materials that occur late in a series.

Front 22

operation span

Back 22

a measuer of working memory's capicity.

Front 23

visuospatial buffer

Back 23

one of the low-level assistants used as part of the working-memory system. this buffer plays an important role in storing visual or spatial representations, including viusal images.

Front 24

phonological buffer

Back 24

a passive storage device that serves as part of teh articulatory rehersal loop. the phonological buffer serves as part of teh mechanisms ordinarily needed for hearing. in rehearsal, however, the buffer is loaded by means of subvocalization. materials within the buffer then fade, but they can be refreshed by new covert speech, under the control of the central executive.

Front 25

peg-word system

Back 25

a type of mnemonic strategy using words or locations as "pegs" on which one "hangs" teh materials to be remembered.