Cognition, Perception, Memory, and Intelligence

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering cognition, perception, memory systems, encoding and retrieval strategies, forgetting, and intelligence testing concepts.

Perception

How your brain reads the world around you—taking raw stuff from your eyes, ears, and skin and turning it into something that actually makes sense.

Metacognition

Thinking about your own thinking—like realizing mid-study session, "Wait, I'm just rereading the same sentence and not actually absorbing anything."

Schemas

Your brain’s mental folders or templates for how things work based on past experience (like knowing what to expect when you walk into a Chipotle vs. a fancy sit-down restaurant).

Algorithms

Step-by-step formulas or recipes that take longer to follow, but guarantee you get the exact right answer every single time.

Cognitive Biases

Glitches in how your brain processes info that make you jump to the wrong conclusions.

Confirmation Bias

Only paying attention to receipts that prove you’re right and ignoring anything that proves you wrong.

Overconfidence

Thinking you’re going to ace the exam without studying when you’re actually cooked.

Belief Perseverance

Doubling down on a take even after someone shows you hard proof that it’s completely false.

Gambler's Fallacy

Thinking a coin is "due" to land on heads just because it landed on tails five times in a row (spoiler: the coin doesn't remember).

Perception Scavenger Hunt Concepts

The visual cheat codes your brain uses to make sense of what you see—like separating a person from a crowd (figure-ground), grouping similar things together (Gestalt principles), judging how far away something is (depth cues), and knowing a door is still a rectangle even when it's swinging open (perceptual constancy).

Convergent Thinking

Zooming in to find the one right answer (like a multiple-choice test).

Divergent Thinking

Brainstorming a million chaotic, creative possibilities.

Heuristics

Mental shortcuts or "rules of thumb" your brain uses to make fast guesses without overthinking.

Availability Heuristic

Thinking something happens all the time just because it popped up on your FYP five minutes ago.

Representativeness Heuristic

Judging someone or something based on how well they fit a stereotype in your head.

Functional Fixedness

Getting stuck seeing an object for only its normal use—like forgetting you can use a shoe to hammer a nail if you don't have a hammer.

Framing

How wording changes the vibe (saying "90% fat-free" hits different than "10% fat").

Priming

When seeing or hearing one thing subtly puts related ideas in your head without you noticing.

Top-Down Processing

Using what you already know to figure out what you're seeing.

Bottom-Up Processing

Starting completely from scratch with raw sensory details and piecing them together.

Memory

Your brain's ability to save, store, and pull up info later.

Implicit Memory

Muscle-memory stuff you just know how to do without trying to remember (automatic).

Explicit Memory

Facts and life moments you actually have to think about to recall (effortful).

Automatic Processing

Your brain casually recording background info (like where you left your phone or how many times you saw a meme today) on autopilot.

Procedural Memory

Pure muscle memory—like typing on your phone without looking or riding a bike.

Effortful Processing

Actually locking in and focusing to memorize something (like cramming vocab).

Semantic Memory

Random trivia and general facts about the world (like knowing Paris is in France).

Episodic Memory

Highlight-reel memories of things that actually happened to you (like your 16th birthday).

Autobiographical Memory

The whole timeline of your life story—mixing facts about yourself with personal memories.

Prospective Memory

Remembering to do something in the future—like texting someone back at 5:00 PM or taking your meds tonight.

Multi-store Model

The three-step pipeline for how memories get saved: sensory memory, short-term memory (STM), and long-term memory (LTM).

Sensory Memory

A split-second snapshot of everything your senses just picked up before most of it disappears.

Short-Term Memory (STM)

Your brain's temporary scratchpad—holds around 7 things for like 20 seconds before you either save them or lose them.

Long-Term Memory (LTM)

The massive cloud storage in your brain where memories live long-term.

Iconic Memory

A literal flash-frame visual memory that vanishes in under a second.

Echoic Memory

A 3-to-4-second audio echo in your head—why you can say "What?" and still hear what someone just said a second later.

Long-Term Potentiation (LTP)

When brain cells fire together repeatedly, the connection between them gets stronger—basically your brain leveling up a neural pathway so you remember things faster.

Shallow Encoding

Bare-minimum memorizing based on surface stuff, like how a word looks or rhymes.

Deep Encoding

Actually understanding what something means and connecting it to your real life so it sticks.

Chunking

Breaking a massive wall of info into bite-sized pieces (like memorizing a phone number in 3 chunks instead of 10 random digits).

Hierarchies

Organizing notes like folders inside folders, from big main topics down to tiny details.

Method of Loci

A memory hack where you picture walking through your house and mentally "dropping" facts in different rooms so you can find them later.

Retrieval Cues

Little triggers—like a song, a smell, or a keyword—that unlock a buried memory.

Context-Dependent Memory

Remembering things better when you're in the exact same spot where you learned them (like taking a test in the same classroom you studied in).

State-Dependent Memory

Remembering stuff better when you're in the same mood or physical vibe as when you first learned it.

Source Amnesia

Remembering a wild story or fact, but completely forgetting where you heard it (or thinking it happened to you when you actually saw it on TikTok).

Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon

Knowing a word or actor's name 100%, feeling it right there in your brain, and still being totally unable to say it.

Interference

When memories collide—either old habits mess up learning new ones (proactive), or new info overwrites old stuff (retroactive).

Misinformation Effect

When someone tells you fake details after an event happens, and your brain accidentally edits them into your actual memory.

Forgetting Curve

A graph showing that you forget most new info super fast right after learning it unless you review it.

Intelligence

How well you learn from experience, solve problems, and adapt when life throws curveballs.

Nature vs. Nurture (in Intelligence)

The debate over how much of your brainpower comes from your DNA (nature) vs. your environment, schools, and upbringing (nurture).

Achievement Tests

Checks what you already learned in class (like a finals exam or AP test).

Aptitude Tests

Tries to predict how well you'll do in the future (like the SAT or ACT).

Intelligence Tests

Tests meant to measure overall mental ability and compare your score to other people's.

Reliability

Means the test is consistent (you get the same score every time).

Validity

Means the test is actually accurate and measures what it claims to measure.

Test-Retest Reliability

Giving the exact same test twice to see if people get roughly the same score both times.

Predictive Validity

How well a test actually predicts real-world success later on (like whether high school SAT scores actually match up with college grades).

Bias in Standardized Testing

When a test unfairly favors one group over another—either because the questions assume specific cultural background knowledge or the scoring predicts future success differently for different groups.

Flynn Effect

The wild trend where average IQ scores have steadily gone up with every new generation.

Stereotype Threat

Stressing out about proving a negative stereotype about your group right—and that anxiety actually makes you perform worse on a test.

Stereotype Lift

Getting a low-key confidence boost (and scoring higher) because a negative stereotype applies to another group, not yours.

Growth Mindset

Knowing your brain is like a muscle you can train and level up.

Fixed Mindset

Thinking you're just born "smart" or "bad at math" and can never change it.