Cognition Textbook Vocabulary Flashcards

Key vocabulary terms, definitions, and core concepts from Cognition (11th Edition) by Thomas A. Farmer and Margaret W. Matlin.

Cognition

The acquisition, storage, transformation, and use of knowledge.

Cognitive Approach

A theoretical orientation in psychology that emphasizes people's thought processes and their knowledge.

Empirical Evidence

Scientific evidence obtained by careful observation and experimentation.

Introspection

A research technique advocated by Wilhelm Wundt in which carefully trained observers systematically analyze their own sensations and report them as objectively as possible under standardized conditions.

Recency Effect

The observation that recall is especially accurate for the final items in a series of stimuli.

Behaviorism

A theoretical perspective focusing on objective, observable reactions to stimuli in the environment, rather than on subjective mental processes.

Operational Definition

A precise definition that specifies exactly how a concept is to be measured in an experiment.

Cognitive Map

An internally represented mental representation of geographic and spatial properties of an environment.

Gestalt Psychology

An approach to psychology emphasizing that humans have basic tendencies to actively organize what they see, and that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Ecological Validity

The degree to which the conditions under which research is conducted are similar to the natural settings where the results will be applied.

Cognitive Science

An interdisciplinary field that tries to answer questions about the inner workings of the mind, including contributions from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, and linguistics.

Information-Processing Approach

An approach arguing that mental processes are similar to the operations of a computer and that information progresses through the cognitive system in a series of stages, one step at a time.

Serial Processing

A type of cognitive processing in which the system must complete one step or processing stage before information can proceed to the next step.

Connectionist Approach

A theoretical framework arguing that cognitive processes can be understood in terms of networks that link together neuron-like processing units, operating in parallel.

Cerebral Cortex

The outer layer of the brain that is essential for cognitive processes.

Cognitive Neuroscience

An approach combining the research techniques of cognitive psychology with various methods for assessing the structure and function of the brain.

Distal Stimulus

The actual object that is present "out there" in the physical environment.

Proximal Stimulus

The information registered on sensory receptors, such as the image created on the retina.

Sensory Memory

A large-capacity storage system that records information from each of the senses with reasonable accuracy for a brief period.

Iconic Memory

Visual sensory memory that preserves an image of a visual stimulus for a brief period after the stimulus has disappeared.

Primary Visual Cortex

The portion of the cerebral cortex located in the occipital lobe concerned with basic processing of visual stimuli.

Vase–Faces Effect

An ambiguous figure–ground relationship where the visual stimulus alternates between a white central vase and two dark profile faces.

Illusory Contours

Visual illusions in which perception fills in edges and boundaries even though no physical lines are present in the stimulus.

Distinctive Feature

A small, specific visual characteristic or component of a stimulus used in feature-analysis theories of object recognition.

Geons

Simple three-dimensional shapes that can be combined to form meaningful complex objects in Biederman's recognition-by-components theory.

Viewer-Centered Approach

A modification of the recognition-by-components theory proposing that people store a small number of specific views of three-dimensional objects in memory rather than a single view.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

A neuroimaging technique that measures brain activity based on changes in oxygenated blood flow while a participant performs a cognitive task.

Bottom-Up Processing

Cognitive processing that emphasizes the physical characteristics of the stimulus registered on sensory receptors.

Top-Down Processing

Cognitive processing that emphasizes how a person's concepts, expectations, and memory influence object recognition and other cognitive tasks.

Word Superiority Effect

The phenomenon in which a single letter is identified more accurately and rapidly when it appears in a meaningful word than when it appears alone or in a meaningless string of letters.

Change Blindness

The failure to detect a change in an object or a scene due to overuse of top-down processing.

Inattentional Blindness

The failure to notice when a new, unexpected but completely visible object suddenly appears in a visual scene.

Prosopagnosia

A neurological disability in which individuals cannot recognize human faces, despite perceiving other objects relatively normally.

Fusiform Face Area

A specific location in the lower portion of the temporal cortex that is specialized for face recognition.

Face-Inversion Effect

The phenomenon in which people are much more accurate and rapid at identifying upright faces compared to upside-down faces.

Phoneme

The basic unit of spoken language, such as the sounds $a$, $k$, and $th$.

Coarticulation

The phenomenon in speech production where the mouth remains in a similar shape as the previous phoneme while preparing to pronounce the next phoneme.

Phonemic Restoration

The perceptual illusion in which listeners fill in a missing phoneme in a spoken word using contextual meaning as a cue.

McGurk Effect

The influence of visual speech cues on speech perception, where individuals integrate conflicting visual and auditory information to perceive a compromise sound.

Special Mechanism Approach

The theory proposing that humans possess a specialized neural device (phonetic module) specifically devoted to decoding speech stimuli quickly and accurately.

General Mechanism Approaches

The perspective proposing that humans process speech sounds using the same general neural mechanisms that handle nonspeech sounds.

Attention

A concentration of mental activity that allows an individual to take in a limited portion of information from the sensory environment and memory.

Divided-Attention Task

A situation in which a person attempts to pay attention to two or more simultaneous messages or tasks at the same time.

Selective-Attention Task

A situation requiring a person to pay attention to certain kinds of information while actively ignoring other present information.

Dichotic Listening

A laboratory technique in which a participant wears earphones presenting a different auditory message to each ear while shadowing one specified message.

Stroop Effect

The observation that people take significantly longer to name the ink color of a word when the word names a conflicting color than when it appears as a solid patch or congruent word.

Emotional Stroop Task

A variant of the Stroop task in which participants name the ink color of emotionally charged words related to a specific disorder or anxiety.

Visual Search

A selective-attention task in which an observer must locate a target item among a visual display of numerous distractor items.

Feature-Present/Feature-Absent Effect

The phenomenon in visual search where locating a feature that is present occurs rapidly and automatically, whereas locating a missing feature requires serial search.

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Scan

A neuroimaging technique that measures blood flow in the brain by tracking an injected low-dose radioactive chemical while a participant performs a cognitive task.

Orienting Attention Network

A neural system located primarily in the parietal lobe responsible for shifting attention to various spatial locations during visual search.

Executive Attention Network

A neural system located in the prefrontal cortex responsible for handling task conflict, inhibiting automatic responses, and executing top-down control.

Bottleneck Theories

Early theories of attention proposing that a narrow passageway in human information processing restricts the flow of incoming information.

Feature-Integration Theory

Anne Treisman's theory proposing that perceptual processing alternates along a continuum between distributed attention (automatic, parallel) and focused attention (serial, binding features).

Illusory Conjunction

An inappropriate combination of features from different objects, occurring when visual attention is overloaded or distracted.

Consciousness

The awareness people have about the outside world and about their perceptions, images, thoughts, memories, and feelings.

Mind Wandering

A phenomenon in which a person's thoughts shift away from the external environment toward internal processing without conscious awareness.

Thought Suppression

The deliberate effort to eliminate specific unwanted thoughts, ideas, or images from consciousness.

Ironic Effects of Mental Control

Daniel Wegner's phrase describing how conscious efforts to suppress or control thoughts can backfire, causing the suppressed thought to occur more frequently.

Blindsight

A condition in which a person with damage to the primary visual cortex claims to be blind in part of the visual field yet accurately reports visual attributes of objects placed there.

Mindfulness Meditation

A form of meditation encouraging individuals to mentally observe their moment-to-moment internal and external experiences in a nonjudgmental manner.

Short-Term Memory

The memory system responsible for holding a small amount of recently acquired environmental information in an active state for a brief duration.

Chunk

A basic memory unit consisting of several strongly associated components.

Serial-Position Effect

The U-shaped relationship between an item's position in a list and its probability of accurate recall, characterized by primacy and recency effects.

Proactive Interference (PI)

The difficulty in learning or recalling new material due to interference from previously learned material.

Release from Proactive Interference

The improvement in recall when the category or semantic nature of items is changed after several trials of proactive interference buildup.

Working Memory

An active, limited-capacity memory system that temporarily holds and manipulates information while a person performs complex cognitive tasks.

Phonological Loop

The component of working memory that stores and processes a limited number of speech-based sounds and subvocalized words for a short period.

Visuospatial Sketchpad

The component of working memory that processes and temporarily stores visual and spatial information.

Central Executive

The component of working memory that integrates information from other subsystems and long-term memory, plans strategies, directs attention, and suppresses irrelevant information without storing data.

Episodic Buffer

A temporary storehouse in working memory that combines and binds visual, auditory, and spatial information with long-term memory representations into integrated units.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)

A noninvasive neuroscience technique that uses a brief magnetic field to temporarily disrupt neural processing in a specific cortical region.

Event-Related Potential (ERP) Technique

A neuroscientific method that records electrical activity fluctuations on the scalp generated by populations of neurons in response to specific sensory or cognitive events.

Long-Term Memory

A high-capacity storage system containing memories for experiences and information accumulated throughout a lifetime.

Episodic Memory

A subcategory of long-term memory that stores personally experienced life events linked to a specific time and place.

Semantic Memory

A subcategory of long-term memory that contains organized, general knowledge about the world, including facts, concepts, and language.

Procedural Memory

A subcategory of long-term memory that contains knowledge about how to perform motor skills and cognitive actions.

Self-Reference Effect

The enhancement of long-term memory when information is processed and encoded in relation to oneself.

Encoding-Specificity Principle

The principle stating that memory recall is most accurate when the context during retrieval matches the context during encoding.

Pollyanna Principle

The general cognitive tendency for pleasant items to be processed more efficiently and accurately than less pleasant or neutral items.

Positivity Effect

The phenomenon in autobiographical memory where unpleasant past memories fade more in negative emotional tone over time than pleasant memories.

Explicit Memory Task

A memory assessment in which participants are directly instructed to consciously retrieve previously learned information.

Implicit Memory Task

A memory assessment that measures memory indirectly by evaluating performance on a task without asking for conscious recall or recognition.

Repetition Priming Task

An implicit memory task in which recent exposure to a word increases the likelihood of generating that word when given an ambiguous prompt.

Retrograde Amnesia

The loss of memory for events and information that occurred prior to brain injury.

Anterograde Amnesia

The inability to form new long-term memories for events occurring after brain injury.

Consistency Bias

The tendency to exaggerate the consistency between past feelings or beliefs and one's current viewpoint in autobiographical memory.

Source Monitoring

The cognitive process of identifying the origin or source of a particular memory or piece of information.

Reality Monitoring

The process of determining whether a remembered event actually occurred in reality or was merely imagined.

Flashbulb Memory

A detailed and vivid memory for the circumstances in which one first learned about a highly surprising and emotionally charged event.

Post-Event Misinformation Effect

The distortion of eyewitness memory caused by misleading information introduced after witnessing an event.

Retroactive Interference

Difficulty recalling older information due to interference from recently acquired new material.

Constructivist Approach

An approach to memory arguing that people actively construct memories by integrating new information with existing knowledge and expectations.

Betrayal Trauma

An explanation for recovered memories proposing that children actively inhibit memories of abuse by a trusted caregiver in order to maintain a necessary attachment.

Total-Time Hypothesis

The proposal that the amount of material learned depends directly on the total amount of time devoted to studying it.

Distributed-Practice Effect

The finding that memory retention is significantly better when learning trials are spaced over time rather than massed into a single session.

Testing Effect

The enhancement of long-term memory retention produced by taking a test on the material rather than simply restudying it.

Mnemonics

Mental strategies and techniques specifically designed to improve encoding, storage, and retrieval in memory.

Keyword Method

A mnemonic strategy in which an individual associates a new word with a similar-sounding familiar word (keyword) and creates an interactive visual image linking the keyword with the new word's meaning.

First-Letter Technique

A mnemonic strategy in which a person composes a word or sentence using the first letters of a list of target words.