AP Psychology: Unit 5 Cognitive Psychology Flashcards

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering memory processes, biological structures, thinking, problem solving, intelligence, psychometrics, and language acquisition based on AP Psychology Unit 5 notes.

Effortful Processing

The active processing of information that requires sustained effort, attention, and conscious focus to learn.

Automatic Processing

The unconscious encoding of well-learned material and incidental details (such as space, time, and frequency) without requiring conscious thought.

Deep Processing

Processing that involves elaborative rehearsal and meaningful analysis to create stronger memories; associated with prefrontal cortex activity.

Shallow Processing

Encoding on a basic level based on surface characteristics, including structural encoding (visual and physical traits) and phonemic encoding (sound traits); associated with the amygdala.

Sustained Attention

The ability to hold and maintain focus on a stimulus or activity over a prolonged period of time, necessary for learning and listening.

Selective Attention

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

Cocktail Party Effect

The ability to selectively focus on a single speaker's voice within a noisy, distracting environment.

Alternating Attention

The ability to switch or immediately transfer conscious focus back and forth from one activity to another.

Divided Attention

The ability to focus on multiple stimuli or tasks simultaneously, commonly known as multitasking.

Metacognition

The practice of thinking about one's own thinking and learning processes to improve comprehension and performance.

Short-term Memory

Activated memory handled by the frontal lobe that briefly holds a limited amount of information (averaging $7$ items) for about $30$ seconds before it is stored or forgotten.

Implicit Memory

Procedural, non-declarative 'how-to' memory that is independent of conscious recollection and stored via the cerebellum and basal ganglia.

Long-term Memory

The relatively permanent and limitless storehouse of the memory system that includes knowledge, skills, and experiences.

Episodic Memory

A subtype of explicit memory involving personally experienced events and episodes, such as birthdays or vacations.

Flashbulb Memory

A vivid, detailed, and long-lasting recollection of the exact moment a person learns about an emotionally significant, surprising, or shocking event.

Eidetic Memory

The ability to retain and recall vivid, photographic visual detail with high precision.

Prospective Memory

Remembering to perform an intended action at the appropriate time in the future ('remembering to remember').

Echoic Memory

Momentary sensory memory of auditory stimuli that allows sounds and words to be recalled within $3$ to $4$ seconds even if attention was diverted.

Iconic Memory

Momentary sensory memory of visual stimuli; a photographic or picture-image memory lasting no more than a few tenths of a second.

Explicit Memory

Declarative memories of facts and experiences that one can consciously know, recall, and verbalize; encoded and stored through the hippocampus and frontal lobes.

Semantic Memory

A category of explicit declarative memory dedicated to general knowledge, facts, and Jeopardy-like information independent of personal experience.

Long-Term Potentiation (LTP)

A persistent strengthening of synapses and an increase in a cell's firing potential following brief, rapid stimulation, facilitated by glutamate; considered the neural basis for learning and memory.

Memory Trace

The physical, anatomical, or chemical change in a neuron that occurs when memories are formed.

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

Noam Chomsky's proposed innate biological capacity that enables young children to naturally acquire and produce speech according to universal grammar.

The Forgetting Curve

Hermann Ebbinghaus's model showing that memory for novel information decays rapidly and exponentially—falling to approximately $40\%$ within the first few days—before leveling off.

Insight

A sudden, novel realization of a problem's solution ('a-ha moment'), identified by Wolfgang Köhler during chimpanzee problem-solving experiments.

Misinformation Effect

Elizabeth Loftus's finding that a person's recollection of an event can be altered or distorted by misleading post-event information or suggestion.

George A. Miller's Magical Number

The principle that short-term memory capacity is naturally limited to an average of seven items, plus or minus two ($7 \pm 2$).

Karl Lashley

Psychologist who demonstrated through maze-trained rats that memory is distributed across overlapping neural networks in the brain rather than localized to a single storehouse.

Basal Ganglia

Brain structures situated next to the thalamus that control movement and form/store procedural memories and motor skills.

Recall

A measure of retention that requires accessing and reproducing stored information from long-term memory with minimal or no cues (e.g., fill-in-the-blank questions).

Recognition

A measure of retention in which a person identifies previously encountered items or information among choices (e.g., multiple-choice questions).

Relearning

A memory retention measure assessing the amount of time saved when learning material a second time compared to initial acquisition.

Priming

The activation, often unconscious, of particular associations in memory that influences one's perception, memory, or response to subsequent stimuli.

Context-Dependent Memory

The improved retrieval of stored information when recall occurs in the same environmental setting in which the memory was encoded.

State-Dependent Memory

The phenomenon wherein information is retrieved more easily when a person is in the same emotional or physiological state as during encoding.

Mood-Congruent Memory

The tendency to selectively recall memories, thoughts, and details that match one's current emotional state.

Serial Position Effect

The tendency to recall the first items (primacy effect) and the last items (recency effect) in a list better than the items in the middle.

Hyperthymesia

An exceptionally rare neurological condition characterized by an ability to recall virtually every life event in detail without the capacity to forget.

Retrograde Amnesia

The inability to retrieve memories of events that transpired prior to a brain injury or trauma.

Anterograde Amnesia

The inability to encode or form new long-term declarative memories after the onset of brain trauma.

Proactive Interference

Disruptive effect occurring when older, previously learned information interferes with the learning or retrieval of new information.

Retroactive Interference

Disruptive effect occurring when newly learned information impedes the retention or recall of previously stored information.

Repression

Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic concept of motivated forgetting, where anxiety-producing memories are unconsciously buried and blocked from conscious awareness.

Algorithm

A methodical, logical, step-by-step procedure that guarantees the correct solution to a specific problem, though it can be laborious and time-consuming.

Heuristic

A simple, practical thinking strategy or mental shortcut that enables efficient judgments and problem-solving, but is more error-prone than an algorithm.

Availability Heuristic

Estimating the likelihood or frequency of an event based on how readily vivid examples come to mind, such as fearing plane crashes after media coverage.

Representativeness Heuristic

Judging the probability of an event or classifying a person by comparing how closely they match an existing mental prototype.

Affect Heuristic

A mental shortcut in which decisions and choices are driven primarily by current emotional responses.

Mental Set

The tendency to persist in using problem-solving strategies and belief systems that have worked in the past, even when they are ineffective for a new problem.

Functional Fixedness

A cognitive bias limiting a person to perceiving and using an object only in its customary, traditional role.

Confirmation Bias

A tendency to seek out, favor, and interpret evidence that confirms preexisting beliefs while ignoring, dismissing, or discounting contradictory evidence.

Belief Perseverance

The tendency to hold onto an initial conviction or belief even after the evidence supporting it has been thoroughly discredited.

Hindsight Bias

The tendency to overestimate one's ability to have predicted an outcome after it has already occurred ('I knew it all along').

Framing

The specific manner in which an issue, statement, or question is posed or worded to influence individual judgments and decisions.

General Intelligence (g)

Charles Spearman's concept of an overarching cognitive factor that underlies and predicts performance across various mental abilities, supported using factor analysis.

Fluid Intelligence

The ability to reason quickly, think abstractly, and solve novel problems independently of acquired knowledge; tends to decline with age.

Crystallized Intelligence

Accumulated knowledge, vocabulary, and intellectual skills gained through experience and education; tends to increase with age.

Flynn Effect

The observed historical increase in average intelligence test performance across successive generations worldwide.

Stereotype Threat

A disruptive self-evaluative anxiety that one will verify or be judged by a negative societal stereotype regarding their group, impairing performance.

Savant Syndrome

A condition in which a person with developmental limitations or intellectual disability displays an extraordinary, isolated skill in a specific domain.

Triarchic Theory of Intelligence

Robert Sternberg's intelligence model proposing three distinct intelligences: Analytical (problem-solving), Creative (fostering insight), and Practical (adapting to everyday life).

Standardization

The process of administering and scoring a test uniformly to a representative sample, allowing scores to be evaluated on a normal curve with an average of $100$ and a standard deviation of $15$.

Reliability

The extent to which an assessment tool yields consistent, dependable results over time, evaluated via test-retest, inter-scorer, or split-half methods.

Validity

The degree to which a test measures or predicts the precise attribute, knowledge, or construct it was designed to evaluate.

Phoneme

The smallest distinctive unit of sound in a spoken language that distinguishes one word from another.

Morpheme

The smallest linguistic unit that carries meaning, composed of combinations of phonemes, prefixes, or root words.

Syntax

The grammatical set of rules governing word order and structure to assemble sensible phrases and sentences.

Semantics

The linguistic rules utilized to derive meaning from words, morphemes, phrases, and sentences.

Broca's Aphasia

A language impairment characterized by slow, labored speech and grammatical deficits resulting from damage to Broca's area in the frontal lobe.

Wernicke's Aphasia

A language disorder marked by fluent yet meaningless speech and severe comprehension difficulties caused by damage to Wernicke's area in the temporal lobe.

Linguistic Determinism

Benjamin Lee Whorf's hypothesis asserting that the language one speaks determines and limits the boundaries of human thought.