AP Psych Unit 5- Cognition (Myers Psychology for AP 3e)

memory

memory

the persistence of learning over time through the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 326)

recall

a measure of memory in which the person must retrieve information learned earlier, as on a fill-in-the-blank test. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 327)

recognition

a measure of memory in which the person identifies items previously learned, as on a multiple-choice test. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 327)

relearning

a measure of memory that assesses the amount of time saved when learning material again. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 327)

encoding

the process of getting information into the memory system— for example, by extracting meaning. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 329)

storage

the process of retaining encoded information over time. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 329)

retrieval

the process of getting information out of memory storage. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 329)

parallel processing

processing many aspects of a problem simultaneously; the brain's natural mode of information processing for many functions. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e pp. 126, 183, 329)

sensory memory

the immediate, very brief recording of sensory information in the memory system. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 329)

short-term memory

activated memory that holds a few items briefly, such as digits of a phone number while calling, before the information is stored or forgotten. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 329)

long-term memory

the relatively permanent and limitless storehouse of the memory system. Includes knowledge, skills, and experiences. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 329)

working memory

a newer understanding of short-term memory that adds conscious, active processing of incoming auditory and visual information, and of information retrieved from long-term memory. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 329)

explicit memory

retention of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and "declare." (Also called declarative memory.) (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 330)

effortful processing

encoding that requires attention and conscious effort. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 330)

automatic processing

unconscious encoding of incidental information, such as space, time, and frequency, and of well-learned information, such as word meanings. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 331)

implicit memory

retention of learned skills or classically conditioned associations independent of conscious recollection. (Also called nondeclarative memory.) (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 331)

iconic memory

a momentary sensory memory of visual stimuli; a picture-image memory lasting no more than a few tenths of a second. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 332)

echoic memory

a momentary sensory memory of auditory stimuli; if attention is elsewhere, sounds and words can still be recalled within 3 or 4 seconds. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 332)

chunking

organizing items into familiar, manageable units; often occurs automatically. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 333)

mnemonics

memory aids, especially those techniques that use vivid imagery and organizational devices. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 333)

spacing effect

the tendency for distributed study or practice to yield better long-term retention than is achieved through massed study or practice. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 334)

testing effect

enhanced memory after retrieving, rather than simply rereading, information. Also sometimes referred to as a retrieval practice effect or test-enhanced learning. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e pp. 20, 335)

shallow processing

encoding on a basic level, based on the structure or appearance of words. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 335)

deep processing

encoding semantically, based on the meaning of the words; tends to yield the best retention. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 335)

semantic memory

explicit memory of facts and general knowledge; one of our two conscious memory systems (the other is episodic memory). (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 340)

episodic memory

explicit memory of personally experienced events; one of our two conscious memory systems (the other is semantic memory). (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 340)

hippocampus

a neural center located in the limbic system; helps process for storage explicit (conscious) memories of facts and events. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e pp. 106, 340)

memory consolidation

the neural storage of a long-term memory. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 340)

flashbulb memory

a clear, sustained memory of an emotionally significant moment or event. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 342)

long-term potentiation (LTP)

an increase in a cell's firing potential after brief, rapid stimulation; a neural basis for learning and memory. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 342)

priming

the activation, often unconsciously, of certain associations, thus predisposing one's perception, memory, or response. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e pp. 165, 345)

encoding specificity principle

the idea that cues and contexts specific to a particular memory will be most effective in helping us recall it. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 345)

mood-congruent memory

the tendency to recall experiences that are consistent with one's current good or bad mood. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 346)

serial position effect

our tendency to recall best the last (recency effect) and first (primacy effect) items in a list. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 347)

anterograde amnesia

an inability to form new memories. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 351)

retrograde amnesia

an inability to retrieve information from one's past. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 351)

proactive interference

the forward-acting disruptive effect of older learning on the recall of new information. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 354)

retroactive interference

the backward-acting disruptive effect of newer learning on the recall of old information. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 354)

repression

in psychoanalytic theory, the basic defense mechanism that banishes from consciousness anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e pp. 355, 581)

reconsolidation

a process in which previously stored memories, when retrieved, are potentially altered before being stored again. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 356)

misinformation effect

occurs when misleading information has distorted one's memory of an event. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 357)

source amnesia

faulty memory for how, when, or where information was learned or imagined. (Also called source misattribution.) Source amnesia, along with the misinformation effect, is at the heart of many false memories. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 358)

déjà vu

that eerie sense that "I've experienced this before." Cues from the current situation may unconsciously trigger retrieval of an earlier experience. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 358)

cognition

all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e pp. 365, 498)

concept

a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 365)

prototype

a mental image or best example of a category. Matching new items to a prototype provides a quick and easy method for sorting items into categories (as when comparing feathered creatures to a prototypical bird, such as a robin). (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 365)

creativity

the ability to produce new and valuable ideas. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 366)

convergent thinking

narrowing the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 366)

divergent thinking

expanding the number of possible problem solutions; creative thinking that diverges in different directions. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 366)

algorithm

a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrasts with the usually speedier—but also more error-prone—use of heuristics. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 370)

heuristic

a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone than an algorithm. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 370)

insight

a sudden realization of a problem's solution; contrasts with strategy-based solutions. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e pp. 304, 370)

confirmation bias

a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 371)

fixation

(1) in cognition, the inability to see a problem from a new perspective; an obstacle to problem solving. (2) in personality theory, according to Freud, a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were unresolved. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e pp. 371, 581)

mental set

a tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 371)

intuition

an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 372)

representativeness heuristic

estimating the likelihood of events in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes; may lead us to ignore other relevant information. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 372)

availability heuristic

estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory; if instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), we presume such events are common. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 373)

overconfidence

the tendency to be more confident than correct—to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 375)

belief perseverance

clinging to one's initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 376)

framing

the way an issue is posed; how an issue is worded can significantly affect decisions and judgments. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 376)

language

our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 381)

phoneme

in a language, the smallest distinctive sound unit. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 381)

morpheme

in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or a part of a word (such as a prefix). (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 382)

grammar

in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others. Semantics is the language's set of rules for deriving meaning from sounds, and syntax is its set of rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 382)

babbling stage

beginning around 4 months, the stage of speech development in which an infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 384)

one-word stage

the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 384)

two-word stage

beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly in two-word statements. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 384)

telegraphic speech

early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram—"go car"—using mostly nouns and verbs. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 384)

aphasia

impairment of language, usually caused by left hemisphere damage either to Broca's area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke's area (impairing understanding). (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 387)

Broca's area

helps control language expression—an area of the frontal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 388)

Wernicke's area

a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression; usually in the left temporal lobe. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 388)

linguistic determinism

the strong form of Whorf's hypothesis—that language controls the way we think and interpret the world around us. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 389)

linguistic influence

the weaker form of "linguistic relativity"—the idea that language affects thought (thus our thinking and world view is "relative to" our cultural language). (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 389)

intelligence

the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 626)

general intelligence (g)

according to Spearman and others, underlies all mental abilities and is therefore measured by every task on an intelligence test. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 626)

factor analysis

a statistical procedure that identifies clusters of related items (called factors) on a test; used to identify different dimensions of performance that underlie a person's total score. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 626)

savant syndrome

a condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computation or drawing. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 627)

grit

in psychology, passion and perseverance in the pursuit of long-term goals. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e pp. 429, 629)

emotional intelligence

the ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 629)

intelligence test

a method for assessing an individual's mental aptitudes and comparing them with those of others, using numerical scores. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 632)

achievement test

a test designed to assess what a person has learned. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 632)

aptitude test

a test designed to predict a person's future performance; aptitude is the capacity to learn. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 632)

mental age

a measure of intelligence test performance devised by Binet; the level of performance typically associated with children of a certain chronological age. Thus, a child who does as well as an average 8-year-old is said to have a mental age of 8. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 633)

Stanford-Binet

the widely used American revision (by Terman at Stanford University) of Binet's original intelligence test. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 634)

intelligence quotient (IQ)

defined originally as the ratio of mental age (ma) to chronological age (ca) multiplied by 100 (thus, IQ = ma/ca × 100). On contemporary intelligence tests, the average performance for a given age is assigned a score of 100. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 634)

Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)

the WAIS and its companion versions for children are the most widely used intelligence tests; they contain verbal and performance (nonverbal) subtests. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 635)

standardization

defining uniform testing procedures and meaningful scores by comparison with the performance of a pretested group. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 635)

normal curve (normal distribution)

a symmetrical, bell-shaped curve that describes the distribution of many types of data; most scores fall near the mean (about 68 percent fall within one standard deviation of it) and fewer and fewer near the extremes. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e pp. 68, 635)

reliability

the extent to which a test yields consistent results, as assessed by the consistency of scores on two halves of the test, on alternative forms of the test, or on retesting. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 636)

validity

the extent to which a test or experiment measures or predicts what it is supposed to. (See also content validity and predictive validity.) (Myers Psychology for AP 3e pp. 56, 636)

content validity

the extent to which a test samples the behavior that is of interest. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 637)

predictive validity

the success with which a test predicts the behavior it is designed to predict; it is assessed by computing the correlation between test scores and the criterion behavior. (Also called criterion-related validity.) (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 637)

cohort

a group of people sharing a common characteristic, such as from a given time period. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 640)

crystallized intelligence

our accumulated knowledge and verbal skills; tends to increase with age. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 640)

fluid intelligence

our ability to reason speedily and abstractly; tends to decrease with age, especially during late adulthood. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 640)

cross-sectional study

research that compares people of different ages at the same point in time. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e pp. 563, 641)

longitudinal study

research that follows and retests the same people over time. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e pp. 563, 641)

intellectual disability

a condition of limited mental ability, indicated by an intelligence test score of 70 or below and difficulty adapting to the demands of life. (Formerly referred to as mental retardation.) (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 644)

Down syndrome

a condition of mild to severe intellectual disability and associated physical disorders caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21. (Myers Psychology for AP 3e p. 644)