Unit 5: Cognitive Psychology - Processing, Attention, and Metacognition

Vocabulary flashcards based on Unit 5 lecture notes covering the focuses of cognitive psychology, historic figures, types of processing, and attention.

Cognitive Psychology

The field of psychology that focuses on people’s internal thinking processes.

Processing

A task that an individual can complete with their mind, such as perceiving, remembering, or reflecting; also known as cognition or cognitive function.

Wolfgang Köhler

An early thinker about internal processes and the founder of Gestalt psychology.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

A historic figure in cognitive psychology who focused on how we encode memories.

Francis Galton

A historic figure in cognitive psychology who focused on how to define and measure intelligence.

Noam Chomsky

A historic figure in cognitive psychology who focused on how we learn language.

Effortful Processing

The active processing of information that needs sustained effort, attention, practice, and rehearsal.

Automatic Processing

The unconscious processing of well-learned material, often described as being like “muscle memory,” which can be done without much thought or focus.

Deep Processing

Processing information for its meaning, which leads to better memory and understanding and typically uses elaborative rehearsal.

Shallow Processing

Processing information for surface level information, such as structural (visual) or phonemic (auditory) details.

Selective Attention

The ability to focus your conscious awareness on a particular stimulus while blocking out competing stimuli.

Divided Attention

The ability to focus on multiple stimuli simultaneously during a task, also known as multitasking.

Cocktail Party Effect

An example of selective attention where an individual focuses on one stimulus while ignoring others.

Dichotic Listening Experiments

Experiments in which a subject wears headphones and hears two different sentences spoken at once into different ears.

Attended Input

The information from one side of the headphones that a subject in a dichotic listening experiment focuses on and repeats.

Ignored Input

The information from the side of the headphones that a subject in a dichotic listening experiment tends to disregard.

Metacognition

The ability to control, be aware of, and evaluate your own thoughts, commonly referred to as “thinking about thinking.”