Cognitive Psychology: In And Out Of The Laboratory

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Human- factors engineering

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Applied research that designs equipment and technology suited to human cognitive capabilities.

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Affordance

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Perceptual property of objects that makes clear what action/s the perceiver is permitted when interacting with it.

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Amygdala

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Brain tissue connected to olfactory system and hypothalamus. Involved with mood, feelings, instinct, and ST mem.

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Anchoring

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Decision-making heuristic in which final estimates are influenced by initial value estimates.

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Anterograde Amnesia

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Lack of memory for events that occur after brain damage

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Aphasia

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Disorder of language thought to have neurological causes: disrupts language production, reception, or both

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Artifact

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Concept pertaining to manufactured of human-designed objects.

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Attention

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Cognitive resources, mental effort, or concentration devoted to a cognitive process.

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Attention hypothesis of automatization

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Proposal that attention is needed during the learning phase of a new task

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Attenuation Theory

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A model of attention where unattended perceptual events are still weakly transmitted and not blocked completely before being processed for meaning

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Automatic processing

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Carrying out of a cognitive task with minimal resources. Typically without intention. Interferes with cognitive talks minimally, and may not involve conscience awareness.

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Availability Heuristic

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A strategy in which one estimates the probability or frequency of an event based on the ease with which the mental operations involved occur. Such as the ease with which retrieval or examples can be constructed.

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Basic level of categories

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A hypothesized type of concept thought to be a psychologically fundamental level of abstraction.

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Behaviourism

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A school of psychology that seeks to define psychology research

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Believability Effect

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The tendency to draw or accept conclusions from premises when the content of the conclusion makes intuitive sense, regardless of logical necessity.

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Between-subjects design

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Research paradigm where different experiemental subjects participate in different experiemental conditions

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Bias

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Tendency to follow a certain procedure regardless of the facts of the matter

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Broca's Aphasia

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Disorder causing difficulty in producing speech, using grammar, and finding appropriate words.

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Calibratiob curve

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Plotting of accuracy versus confidence in judgement. The more the curves approaches a 45-degree line, the better the "calibration" or "fit" between the two variables.

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Cognitive capacity

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The total cognitive resources available at a given time

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Categorization

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The organization of information in a coherent and meaningful group

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Category

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A grouping of items sharing one or more similarities

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Central Executive

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The proposed component of working memory that directs information and selects what information to work with. [Baddeley's model of W.mem]

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Change Blindness

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The inability to detect changes in an object or scene, especially when given different views of that object or scene

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Chunking

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Meaning of overcoming short term memory limitations through grouping individual units of information into larger units.

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Classical View of Concepts

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The idea that all examples or instances of a concept share fundamental features

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Clinical Interview

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A research paradigm in which an investigator asks open-ended questions with standardized question follow up.

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Coding

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The form in which information is mentally represented

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Cognitive Economy

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A principle of hierarchical semantic networks such that facts and properties about a node are stored at the highest level possible. Rather than a lower node where the fact applies to many nodes, it is apply to the property is applied at the highest point in categorization.

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Cogntive Illusion

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The systematic errors and biases in human decision-making

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Cognitive Neuropsycology

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School of psych. that investigates the cognitive ability and deficits of people with damaged or unusual brains

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Cognitive Overload

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Breakdown of cognitive processing that occurs when available information exceeds processing capacity

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Cognitive Revolution

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A movement in psychology that culminated after World War II, characterized by a belief in the empirical accessibility of mental states and events.

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Cognitive Science

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A interdisciplinary field drawing on research from cog. psych., computer science, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, anthropology. Investigating the nature of the mind and how info. is acquired, stored, and represented

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Computer metaphor

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The basis for the information-processing view of the brain

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CAT

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Highly focused beams of X-ray passed through the body at many different angles. Different density of the organs result in different deflections of the X-rays, allows visualization of organs

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Concept

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A mental representation of a category

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Confirmation Bias

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Tendency to seek out information that will confirm your hypothesis instead of info. that will negate it.

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Connectionism

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An approach to cognition that emphasises parallel processing of information through immense networks of interconnected nodes.

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Constructivist approach to Perception

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An understanding of perception as a process requiring active construction of a subjective mental representation using external info. as well as info. from long-term memory

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Content Effect

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Performance variability on reasoning tasks that require the same formal reasoning but are dissimilar in superficial content. The superficial content generally aids performance by providing a context that allows experiential knowledge.

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Context Effect

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The effect on a cognitive process (perception) of the info. surrounding the target object or event. The context sets up certain expectations in the mind.

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Contradiction

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A statement that is false by definition of its form

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Controlled Observation

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A research paradigm in which an observer standardizes the conditions of the observation for all participants, often introducing specific manipulations and recording responses.

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Controlled Processing

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The carrying out of cognitive task with deliberate allocation of cognitive resources. Generally applied to difficult or new tasks

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Creativity

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Originality that suits some purpose or a cognitive proposes that employs appropriates novelty.

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Decay

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A hypothesized process of forgetting where information breaks down or fades

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Decision Analysis

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Technology that allows people to gather and integrate information in an optimal way

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Decision Making

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The process by which an individual selects a course of action among alternatives

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Decision Structuring

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The process in decision-making that an individual develops the criteria and options for consideration

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Deductive Reasoning

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Drawing conclusions from only the given premises

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Deductive validity

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A property of deducive reasoning in which it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false

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Demand Characteristics

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A property of certain tasks such that an experiemental subjects's responses are 'cued' by the experiemental task itself