Psychology 331 - Cognition Vocab

Front 1

Accessability

Back 1

the degree to which info can be retrieved from memory

Front 2

Action Slip

Back 2

unintended, typically automatic, actions that are innappropriate for situation

Front 3

Ad hoc categories

Back 3

categories that people can generate on the fly that have all of the qualities of more traditional categories, but are based on situational circumstances

Front 4

Agent

Back 4

person who performs the action

Front 5

Agnosia

Back 5

disruption in ability to recognize objects

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Agraphia

Back 6

disruption in ability to write, caused by brain injury/disease

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Algorithm

Back 7

specific rule that is certain to produce the correct answer if followed correctly

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Retrograde amnesia

Back 8

loss of memory before damage

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Anterograde amnesia

Back 9

loss of memory after damage

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Anaphoric reference

Back 10

using a pronoun or possessive to refer back to a previously mentioned concept

Front 11

Anomia

Back 11

disruption of word finding or retrieval, caused by brain disorder/injury

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Antecedent

Back 12

the concept to which a later word refers (he refers to Bill in "Bill said he was tired")

Front 13

Aphasia

Back 13

loss of language skills caused by brain disorder or damage

Front 14

Apperceptive agnosia

Back 14

individual features cant be intergrated into a whole concept or pattern, basic disruption in perceiving pattern

Front 15

Articulatory loop

Back 15

part of phonological loop involved in active refreshing of info in the phonological store

Front 16

Articulatory suppression effect

Back 16

people have poorer memory for a set of words if they are asked to say something while they are trying to remember

Front 17

Associative agnosia

Back 17

cannot associate pattern with meaning, cannot link the perceived whole with stored knowledge of its identity

Front 18

Attention

Back 18

mental energy or resource neccessary for completeing mental processes, limited in quantity and under control of some executive control mechanism

Front 19

Attention capture

Back 19

spontaneous redirection of attention to stimuli in the world based on physical characteristics

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Attentional blink

Back 20

brief slow down in mental processing due to having processed another very recent event

Front 21

Auditory sensory memory (echoic)

Back 21

encodes incoming auditory info and holds it briefly for further mental processing

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Authorized

Back 22

intended or correct

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Autobiographical memory

Back 23

memories of specific, personally experienced real world info

Front 24

Automatic/Automaticity

Back 24

occurs without concious awareness or intention and consuming little if any of the available mental resources

Front 25

Availability heuristic

Back 25

we judge the frequency or probability of some event on the basis of how easily examples or instances can be recalled or remembered

Front 26

Behaviorism

Back 26

organisms observable behavior was topic of interest, learning of new stimulus-reponse associations, whether by classical conditioning or reinforcement, was deemed the most important type of behavior to study

Front 27

Boundary extension

Back 27

people tend to misremember more of a scene then was actually shown

Front 28

Beta Movement

Back 28

illusary movement that occurs when two or more pictures are viewed in rapid succession

Front 29

Broca's Aphasia

Back 29

severe difficulties in producing spoken speech, as in hesitant, effortful, and distorted phonemically

Front 30

Brown-Peterson Task

Back 30

STM task showing forgetting caused by proactive interference

Front 31

Central executive

Back 31

(baddeleys working model) mechanism responsible for assessing the attentional needs of the different subsystems and furnishing attential resources to those subsystems. any executive or monitoring component of the memory system that is reponsible for sequencing activities, keeping track of processes already completed, and diverting attention from one activity to another can be called an executive controller

Front 32

Central tendency

Back 32

there is some mental core or center to the category where the best members will be found

Front 33

Cerebral lateralization

Back 33

different functions tend to be located in one or the other hemisphere. (motor control of left side of body is lateralized by right side of brain)

Front 34

Change blindness

Back 34

failure to notice changes in visual stimuli when those changes occur during a saccade

Front 35

Channel capacity

Back 35

early analogy for the limited capacity of the human info-processing system

Front 36

Chunk

Back 36

unit or grouping of info stored in STM

Front 37

Clustering

Back 37

grouping of related items druing recall

Front 38

Cognition

Back 38

the collection of mental processes and activites used in perceiving, remembering, thinking, and understanding, and the act of using those processes

Front 39

Conceptually driven processing (top down)

Back 39

guided and assisted by knowledge already in memory

Front 40

Conduction aphasia

Back 40

person unable to repeat what was just heard

Front 41

Confirmation bias

Back 41

the tendency to search for evidence that confirms a conclusion

Front 42

Conjunction fallacy

Back 42

mistaken belief that a compound outcome of two characteristics can be more likely than either of the two characteristics by itself

Front 43

Connectionist (PDP model, neural net model)

Back 43

massive interconnected network, simple connections b/w nodes stored in memory, high levels of parallel processing among the several layers of knowledge

Front 44

Conscious

Back 44

awareness, a slower attentional mechanism especially influenced by top down processing

Front 45

Consequent

Back 45

(then statement)

Front 46

Consolidation

Back 46

more permanent establishment of memories in the neural archetechture

Front 47

Contralaterality

Back 47

control for one side of body is localized in opposite side of cerebral hemisphere

Front 48

Controlled attention

Back 48

deliberate, voluntary allocation of mental effort or concentration

Front 49

Cost

Back 49

a response slower than baseline due to misleading cue

Front 50

Cryptomnesia

Back 50

when a person unconsciously plagerizes something heard or read because they mistakenly take it to be an original idea

Front 51

Cued recall

Back 51

person is presented with part of the info as a cue to retrieve the rest of the info

Front 52

Data driven processing (bottom up)

Back 52

guided by features and elements in the pattern itself

Front 53

Decay

Back 53

loss of info across time, takes place in STM or sensory memory,

Front 54

Declarative memory (explicit memory)

Back 54

LTM knowledge that can be retrieved and reflected on consciously

Front 55

Deep structure

Back 55

meaning of the sentence, most basic and abstract level of representation of a sentence or idea

Front 56

Default vaule

Back 56

common or ordinary value of some variable

Front 57

Defining feature

Back 57

property or feature that is essential to the meaning of that concept

Front 58

Dicriminability effect

Back 58

greater the distance or difference b/w the 2 stimuli, the faster the decision that they differ

Front 59

Displacement

Back 59

ability to talk about times other than the immediate present, displace ourselves in time

Front 60

Dissociation

Back 60

one cognitive process can be disrupted while another remains intact, in double dissociaton, 2 patients show opposite patterns of disruption and preserved function

Front 61

Dual coding hypothesis

Back 61

Concrete words can be encoded into memory twice, once as verbal symbols and once as image based symbols, increasing the likelihood that they will be recalled or remembered

Front 62

dysfluency

Back 62

Error, flaw, or irregularity in spoken speech

Front 63

Elaborative Rehearsal

Back 63

Deeper, more meaningful processing, involves meaning, images, or other complex info from LTM

Front 64

Empiricism

Back 64

Aristotle, observation and observation derived data as basis for all science

Front 65

enactment effect

Back 65

Finding of improved memory for participant performed tasks, relative to those that are not acted out

Front 66

Encoding

Back 66

Input or take into memory, to convert to a usable form, to store into memory

Front 67

episodic buffer

Back 67

Portion of working memory where info from different modalities and sources are bound together to form new episodic memories

Front 68

episodic memory

Back 68

Tulving; portion of LTM in which personally experienced info is stored

Front 69

Erasure

Back 69

Masking or loss of info caused by subsequent presentation of another stimulus (also see masking)

Front 70

Event Related Potentials (ERPs)

Back 70

Minute changes in electrical potentials in the brain, measured by EEG recording devices and related specifically to the presentation of a particular stimulus

Front 71

Exemplar Theory

Back 71

Theoretical view of categorization that assumes that when people think about categories, they are mentally taking into account each experience, instance, or example of the various encounters that have been experienced with members of that category

Front 72

Explicit memory

Back 72

LTM retrieval or performance that entails deliberate recollection or awareness

Front 73

Explicit processing

Back 73

Conscious processing, conscious awareness that a task is being performed, and usually conscious awareness of the outcome of that performance

Front 74

Familiarity bias

Back 74

Availability heuristic in which personal familiarity influences estimates of frequency, probability, etc

Front 75

Fan effect

Back 75

Increase in response time for an increased number of associations with a concept on a study list

Front 76

feature detection (feature analysis)

Back 76

Theoretical approach, common in pattern recognition, in which stimuli are identified by breaking them up into their constituent features

Front 77

feeling of knowing

Back 77

Estimate of how likely it is that an item will be recognized on a later memory test

Front 78

Filtering

Back 78

Esp. in auditory perception, unwanted, unintended messages are filtered/screened out so that only the attended message is encoded into the central processing mechanism

Front 79

Flashbulb memory

Back 79

Specific, emotional event, reported subjectively to be as detailed as a photograph

Front 80

flexibility

Back 80

Allows meaning of language symbol to be changed and enables new symbols to be added to the language

Front 81

focal attention

Back 81

Mental attention directed towards

Front 82

forgetting

Back 82

Stored info in no longer in memory, available in memory system

Front 83

fovea

Back 83

Sensitive region of retina responsible for precise, focused vision, largely consists of cones

Front 84

functional fixedness

Back 84

Inability to think of any but the customary use for objects and tools

Front 85

functionalism

Back 85

James; functions of various mental and physical capacities were studied (contrast with structuralism)

Front 86

garden path sentence

Back 86

An early word or phrase tends to be misinterpreted and thus must be reinterpreted after the mistake is noticed “after the musician played the piano was moved off the stage”

Front 87

generation effect

Back 87

Info you generate or create yourself is better remembered than info you hear or read

Front 88

geons

Back 88

Biederman; recognition by components model, basic primitive 3D geometric forms in the human recognition system

Front 89

grammar

Back 89

Set of rules for forming the words or sentences in a language, complete set characterizes the language such that rules generate only acceptable or legal sentences

Front 90

habituation

Back 90

Gradual reduction of the orientating reflex back to baseline

Front 91

hemi neglect

Back 91

Half the perceptual world (often the left) is neglected or cannot be attended to

Front 92

heuristic

Back 92

Informal rule of thumb for solving problems, faster than algorithm but not guaranteed to furnish correct answer

Front 93

hindsight bias

Back 93

Some completed event was very likely to have had just that outcome

Front 94

icon

Back 94

Brief duration visual image or record of a visual stimulus held in visual sensory memory

Front 95

imagination inflation

Back 95

Increase in false memory for an event when the event has been imagined to have happened

Front 96

implication

Back 96

Unstated connection or conclusion that was nonetheless intended by the speaker

Front 97

implicit memory

Back 97

LTM performance affected by prior experience with no necessary awareness of the influence

Front 98

inattentional blindness

Back 98

Fail to see an object we are looking at directly, even a highly visible one, because our attention is directed elsewhere

Front 99

infantile amnesia

Back 99

Inability to remember early life events and poor memory for life at an early age

Front 100

inference

Back 100

Drawing a conclusion based on some statement as in conversation or reading

Front 101

info processing approach

Back 101

Cognition=the coordinated operation of active mental processes w/in a multicomponent memory system. Mental processing as a sequence of mental operations, each taking in info, manipulating or changing it in some fashion, then forwarding the result to the next stage for further processing

Front 102

inhibition

Back 102

Active suppression of mental representations of salient but irrelevant info so that the activation level is reduced, perhaps below resting baseline

Front 103

input attention

Back 103

Process of getting sensory info into the cognitive system

Front 104

interference

Back 104

Explanation for “forgetting” of some target info in which related or recent info competes with or causes loss of the target info

Front 105

intersection

Back 105

Where activation from 2 separate nodes meet

Front 106

introspection

Back 106

Titchener; subjects look inward to describe their mental processes and thoughts

Front 107

judgement of learning

Back 107

Prediction whether some info learned will be remembered on a later memory test

Front 108

lag

Back 108

Number of intervening trials b/w prime and target

Front 109

language

Back 109

Shared symbolic system for communication

Front 110

lesion

Back 110

damage to brain tissue

Front 111

levels of processing

Back 111

Craik/lockhart; info subjected only to maintenance rehearsal is not being processed deeply, and therefore tends not to be recalled as accurately

Front 112

lexical decision

Back 112

Determine if a string of letters is a word/non word

Front 113

lexical memory

Back 113

Word knowledge, mental dictionary

Front 114

linguistic relativeity hypothesis

Back 114

Whorf; ones language determines what one can think about

Front 115

linguistics

Back 115

Studies language as a formal system

Front 116

LTM

Back 116

Portion responsible for holding info for more than a few sec/mins…virtually permanent

Front 117

MRI

Back 117

Reveals anatomical structure, especially of brain

Front 118

maintenence rehearsal

Back 118

Repeats, recycles, refreshes info w/o deeper processing

Front 119

mapping

Back 119

Gernsbacher; connections b/w words and their meanings to the overall meaning of the sentence, determining the connections b/w 2 sets of elements, including relations in analogical problem solving

Front 120

means end analysis

Back 120

a major heuristic in problem solving, assessing the distance b/w the current and goal states, then applying some operator that reduces the distance

Front 121

memory

Back 121

the mental processes of aquiring and retaining information for later retrieval, mental storage system that enables these processes

Front 122

memory impairment

Back 122

a specific interpretation of early eyewitness memory results in which a subsequent piece of info replaces a memory formed earlier

Front 123

mental lexicon

Back 123

dictionary of long term memory, words and word meanings are stored here

Front 124

method of loci

Back 124

the to-be-remembered items are mentally placed into a set of prememorized locations, retrieval consists of a mental walk through

Front 125

misinformation acceptance

Back 125

tendency to accept info presented after some critical event as being true of the original event itself

Front 126

mnemonic device

Back 126

any mental device or strategy that provides useful rehearsal strategy for storing and remembering difficult material

Front 127

modality effect

Back 127

in sensory memory research, the advantage in recall of the last few items in a list when those items have been presented orally rather than visually

Front 128

modularity

Back 128

theoretical perspective in which different abilities, characteristics, types of cognitive processes, and so forth are theorized to be represented in separate components or modules in memory

Front 129

morpheme

Back 129

smallest unit of meaning in language

Front 130

network

Back 130

structure for info stored in LT semantic memory. in most network models, concepts are represented as nodes that are interconnected

Front 131

neurocognition

Back 131

neurological basis of cognition and the study of the combination of neurological and cognitive factors

Front 132

operator

Back 132

legal move in problem solving

Front 133

orienting reflex

Back 133

redirection of attention towards an unexpected stimuli

Front 134

pandemonium

Back 134

(selfridges) early model of letter identification

Front 135

parse

Back 135

separate words in a sentence into meaningful groupings

Front 136

perception

Back 136

process of interpreting and understanding sensory info

Front 137

perceptual symbols

Back 137

symbolic representations used in memory and grounded in sensory information, the act of sensing then interpreting that info

Front 138

phoneme

Back 138

a sound or set of sounds judged to be the same by speakers of a language

Front 139

phonological loop

Back 139

baddeley, working memory, articulatory loop responsible for recycling verbal material via rehearsal

Front 140

pragmatics

Back 140

aspects of language above and beyond the words, extralinguistic