Cognitive Psychology: Perception, Cognition, and Memory

Practice vocabulary flashcards defining key psychological concepts covering perception, thinking, and memory systems based on the lecture review.

Bottom Up Processing

Sensory analysis that begins at the entry level with sensory receptors and works up to the brain's integration of sensory information. Example: Touching a hot stove and instinctively pulling your hand away before consciously registering what burned you.

Top Down Processing

Information processing guided by higher-level mental processes, such as expectations, experiences, and prior knowledge. Example: Reading a sentence with scrambled letters and still understanding every word because your mind anticipates the meaning from context.

Schema

A cognitive framework or mental concept that helps organize and interpret information. Example: Having a mental framework for a classroom that leads you to expect desks, chairs, and a whiteboard upon entering.

Perceptual Set

A mental predisposition or expectation that influences what we perceive. Example: After watching a scary movie at night, mistaking a shadow on the wall for an intruder.

Gestalt Psychology

A psychological approach emphasizing that the whole of an experience is different from and greater than the sum of its parts. Example: Recognizing a melody as a cohesive tune rather than a series of isolated musical notes.

Cocktail Party Effect

The ability to attend selectively to a single auditory message while filtering out a complex background of other conversations. Example: Tuning into a friend's voice in a noisy cafeteria and immediately noticing when someone across the room says your name.

Inattentional Blindness

The failure to notice a fully visible, but unexpected object or event because attention is devoted to another task or object. Example: Watching a video to count basketball passes and completely missing a person in a gorilla suit walking across the screen.

Change Blindness

A perceptual phenomenon occurring when a visual change in a stimulus is introduced and the observer does not notice it. Example: Giving directions to a stranger and failing to notice they were swapped with a different person while a door briefly blocked your view.

Retinal Disparity

A binocular depth cue that calculates distance by comparing images from the retinas in the two eyes. Example: Holding a finger in front of your face and blinking one eye at a time, noticing the finger appears to jump horizontally.

Convergence

A binocular cue for perceiving depth based on the inward turn of the eyes when focusing on an object approaching closer. Example: Feeling eye muscle strain as you track a pen moving straight toward the bridge of your nose.

Monocular Depth Cues

Depth and distance cues that require the use of only one eye, such as relative size, interposition, and linear perspective. Example: Looking down parallel train tracks and perceiving distance because the rails seem to meet at the horizon.

Perceptual Constancy

The tendency to perceive objects as unchanging (having consistent color, shape, and size) even as illumination and retinal images change. Example: Seeing an opening door as rectangular even though its image on the retina turns into a trapezoid.

Phi Phenomenon

An illusion of movement created when two or more adjacent lights blink on and off in quick succession. Example: Observing illuminated marquee signs or festive string lights that appear to run in a continuous wave.

Assimilation

Interpreting new experiences and information in terms of existing cognitive schemas. Example: A young child who only knows dogs pointing to a sheep and calling it a puppy.

Accommodation

Adapting or modifying current schemas to incorporate new information that cannot be assimilated. Example: A child creating a new mental category for cats after realizing they do not bark like dogs.

Prototype

A mental image or best typical example that represents a particular cognitive category. Example: Immediately picturing a robin or sparrow when asked to imagine a bird, rather than a penguin.

Algorithm

A methodical, step-by-step procedure or logical formula that guarantees solving a particular problem. Example: Testing every key on a key ring in order until one opens the front door lock.

Heuristic

A simple thinking strategy or mental shortcut that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently, though prone to errors. Example: Choosing a crowded food truck over an empty one under the quick assumption that it must serve better food.

Representativeness Heuristic

Estimating the likelihood of an event by judging how well it matches existing prototypes or stereotypes. Example: Assuming an introverted, glasses-wearing book lover is an English professor rather than a mechanic.

Availability Heuristic

Estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory and how easily instances come to mind. Example: Fearing a plane crash after seeing dramatic airplane accidents on the news, despite statistics showing driving is riskier.

Belief Perseverance

The tendency to cling to one's initial beliefs even after the evidence supporting them has been thoroughly discredited. Example: Believing a fad diet works well even after multiple lab tests show it causes no actual health improvements.

Mental Set

A tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past. Example: Continuously pushing on a stuck door because pushing worked previously, ignoring a visible pull sign.

Functional Fixedness

A cognitive bias that limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used. Example: Looking everywhere for a flathead screwdriver while completely overlooking a coin on your desk that could turn the screw.

Divergent Thinking

A creative thinking process used to generate multiple unique ideas or solutions to a problem. Example: Brainstorming thirty alternative uses for a paperclip during a team creative challenge.

Convergent Thinking

A mode of critical thinking that narrows available problem solutions to find the single best answer. Example: Analyzing clues and math formulas to solve an algebra problem with exactly one correct solution.

Central Executive

The component of the working memory model that coordinates activities, directs focus, and allocates attention to other subsystems. Example: Deciding to tune out television noise while recalculating a monthly budget.

Phonological Loop

The working memory subsystem responsible for processing verbal and auditory information. Example: Mentally repeating a six-digit verification code over and over until you can type it into a phone.

Visuospatial Sketchpad

The working memory subsystem that handles visual and spatial information. Example: Mentally rotating a bookshelf in your mind to decide whether it fits between two bedroom windows.

Long Term Potentiation (LTP)

A persistent strengthening of synapses based on recent patterns of activity, providing a biological basis for learning and memory. Example: Practicing violin scales daily, leading to faster and more automatic finger movements through strengthened neural pathways.

Elaborative Rehearsal

A memory technique that involves thinking about the meaning of information to help store and connect it to long-term memory. Example: Remembering a psychological theory by connecting it directly to a personal family experience.

Method of loci

A mnemonic strategy where a person visualizes moving through a familiar physical space to associate items with specific locations. Example: Imagining grocery items placed at landmarks along your walk through your house to remember a shopping list.

Chunking

Organizing items into familiar, manageable units often to increase short-term memory capacity. Example: Remembering a ten-digit phone number as three groups of digits rather than one long, unbroken string.

Spacing Effect (Distributed Practice)

The phenomenon whereby learning is greater when study sessions are spaced out over time rather than massed together. Example: Reviewing notes for thirty minutes across six days instead of cramming for three continuous hours the night before the exam.

Serial Position Effect

The tendency to recall best the first (primacy effect) and last (recency effect) items in a list. Example: Recalling only the first two and final two names on a lengthy guest list while forgetting the middle names.

Explicit Memory

Memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and declare. Example: Naming the first president of the United States or stating your home address.

Implicit Memory

Retention of learned skills or classically conditioned associations independent of conscious recollection. Example: Typing smoothly on a computer keyboard without glancing down at where the keys sit.

Procedural Memory

A type of implicit memory responsible for knowing how to perform motor skills and actions. Example: Riding a bicycle smoothly years after learning, without having to ponder balance and pedaling.

Prospective Memory

Remembering to perform actions or planned intentions at some future point in time. Example: Remembering to take a prescription pill tonight right after dinner.

Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM)

A rare condition where an individual possesses an extraordinarily detailed memory of their personal past experiences and events. Example: Remembering the exact clothes you wore and what you ate on an unremarkable Tuesday afternoon twelve years ago.

Context-Dependent Memory

The improved recall of information when the retrieval context matches the physical environment where the information was encoded. Example: Scoring higher on a midterm examination when taking it in the same lecture hall where the material was taught.

State-Dependent Memory

The phenomenon through which memory retrieval is most efficient when an individual is in the same state of consciousness as they were when the memory was formed. Example: Remembering lecture concepts better during an exam if you are in the same caffeinated state as when you studied.

Testing Effect

Enhanced memory performance resulting from repeatedly retrieving information through testing rather than simply rereading it. Example: Testing yourself with practice flashcards rather than passively highlighting lines in a textbook.

Tip-of-the-Tongue

The subjective feeling that a target word or concept is known and accessible, accompanied by an inability to retrieve it immediately. Example: Knowing an actor's movies and appearances but being momentarily unable to speak their name.

Forgetting Curve

A graph illustrating the decline of memory retention over time, showing rapid initial loss followed by leveling off. Example: Forgetting roughly half of a newly introduced foreign vocabulary list within 24 hours unless refreshed.

Retrograde Amnesia

An inability to retrieve information and events acquired before the onset of brain injury or trauma. Example: Waking from a concussion unable to recall the car accident or the events leading up to it.

Anterograde Amnesia

An inability to form new long-term explicit memories following the event that caused amnesia. Example: Meeting a nurse daily in a clinic and greeting them as a stranger each morning because new long-term memories cannot form.

Proactive Interference

The disruptive effect of prior learning on the recall of new information. Example: Accidentally typing your old computer password after updating to a new password earlier that day.

Retroactive Interference

The disruptive effect of newly learned material on the recall of previously stored information. Example: Learning your new telephone number and finding yourself unable to remember your childhood home phone number.

Misinformation Effect

The tendency for post-event information to interfere with and alter the original memory of an event. Example: Eyewitnesses recalling broken glass at a collision after hearing a question containing the word 'smashed', even when no glass was broken.

Source Amnesia

Attributing to the wrong source an event we have experienced, heard about, read about, or imagined. Example: Sharing an intriguing scientific fact believing a professor told you, when you actually read it in a social media comment.