Cognitive Psychology Final Exam Review Flashcards

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the key concepts, theories, and phenomena found in the Cognitive Psychology final exam transcript.

Introspectionism

An early approach in cognitive psychology where the mind is studied through self-reporting of internal thoughts, though it faced limitations because the mind is not directly observable.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

A theoretical framework in psychology that categorizes what humans need to achieve different levels of satisfaction and happiness.

Hedonic adaptation

The psychological process where people return to a stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.

Affective forecasting

The process of predicting one's future emotional states, which is often prone to failures such as impact bias.

Impact bias

A failure in affective forecasting where individuals overestimate the intensity and duration of their emotional reactions to future events.

Operationalization

The process of defining a specific variable into measurable factors for the purpose of an experiment.

Mental chronometry

The study of the time course of mental processes, popularized by Donder to measure the duration of stages of informational processing.

Subtractive method

A technique used to measure the duration of a mental stage by subtracting the time of a simpler task from a more complex one; it assumes pure insertion, additivity, and completion.

Pure insertion

An assumption of the subtractive method that adding a new processing stage does not affect the duration of existing stages.

Levels of analysis

The framework for studying cognition comprising the Computational, Algorithmic, and Implementational levels.

Neuron doctrine

The concept that the nervous system is made up of individual, discrete cells called neurons.

Grandmother cells hypothesis

A type of neural representation where a specific neuron is dedicated to responding to a single, specific stimulus, like one's grandmother.

Distributed coding

A neural representation where a specific stimulus is represented by the pattern of firing across a large number of neurons.

BOLD signal

The Blood-Oxygen-Level-Dependent signal measured in fMRI to track changes in blood flow related to neural activity.

Psychophysics

The scientific study of the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they evoke.

Just noticeable difference

The minimum level of stimulation that a person can detect a change between two stimuli.

Weber’s law

The principle stating that the just noticeable difference of a stimulus is a constant proportion despite variations in intensity.

Distal stimulus

The actual object or event in the environment that is the source of sensory stimulation.

Proximal stimulus

The physical energy that reaches the sensory receptors, such as the $2D$ image of an object on the retina.

Inverse problem

The challenge the perceptual system faces in trying to infer a $3D$ world from a $2D$ proximal image.

Perceptual constancy

The ability to perceive objects as unchanging (in size, brightness, or color) even as illumination and retinal images change.

Bayesian inference

A theory of perception suggesting that our estimate of the probability of an outcome is determined by the prior probability and the likelihood of the evidence.

Gestalt laws of perception

A set of principles (Similarity, Proximity, Common Fate, Simplicity, Continuation, Familiarity) describing how we organize visual elements into groups or unified wholes.

Motion parallax

A monocular non-static depth cue where as we move, closer objects appear to move faster than distant objects.

Binocular disparity

A binocular static depth cue based on the slight difference in the images seen by the left and right eyes.

Convergence

An extraretinal depth cue where the brain senses the inward turn of the eyes when focusing on a nearby object.

Binding problem

The challenge of how the brain combines individual features (shape, color, motion) into a single, coherent perception of an object.

Aphantasia

The condition where an individual is unable to form voluntary mental images.

Dual-code hypothesis

The theory that information is represented in long-term memory through both visual images and verbal codes.

Tonotopic mapping

The spatial arrangement of where sounds of different frequencies are processed in the brain and cochlea.

Interaural Time Difference

An auditory spatial cue based on the difference in time it takes for a sound to reach each ear.

McGurk effect

A perceptual phenomenon that demonstrates the integration of vision and hearing, where auditory and visual speech information interact.

Inattentional blindness

A failure to perceive an unexpected stimulus that is in plain sight because attention is focused on another task.

Hemispatial neglect

A neuropsychological condition where after damage to one hemisphere of the brain, a person is unable to attend to or respond to stimuli in the opposite half of their visual field.

Feature Integration Theory

A theory proposing that objects are analyzed into separate features in the preattentive stage and then combined in the focused attention stage.

Iconic Memory

A temporary sensory storage for visual information that has a high capacity but very short duration.

Chunking

The memory strategy of combining small units into larger, meaningful clusters to increase short-term memory capacity.

Phonological loop

A component of working memory that specialized in holding and manipulating speech-based and auditory information.

Systems consolidation

A long-term consolidation process involving the gradual reorganization of neural circuits, characterized by a changing role for the hippocampus.

Linguistic relativity

The hypothesis that the language one speaks influences the way they think about and perceive the world.

Prospect theory

A descriptive model of decision making that suggests people value gains and losses differently, leading to loss aversion.

GI Joe fallacy

The mistaken idea that knowing about a cognitive bias is enough to overcome it.