Cognitive Psychology: Perception, Attention, and Language

Comprehensive practice flashcards covering core concepts in perception (illusions, physiological pathways, Gestalt rules), attention (early/late models, perceptual load, failures of attention), and language (lexical access, parsing, situation models, and music syntax overlap) based on PSY 316 lecture material.

What is the inverse projection problem in visual perception?

The task of determining which real-world object in the environment is responsible for creating a specific two-dimensional image on the retina.

What does viewpoint invariance refer to?

The human ability to recognize a specific object regardless of the viewing angle or perspective from which it is seen.

How do bottom-up and top-down processing differ in perception?

Bottom-up processing originates with sensory signals from the environment that stimulate receptors and travel to brain areas, whereas top-down processing relies on existing knowledge, context, and expectations.

What is the likelihood principle proposed by Hermann von Helmholtz?

The principle stating that we perceive the object that is most likely to have caused the specific pattern of stimuli received by the retina, achieved through unconscious inference.

Why did Max Wertheimer and Gestalt psychologists argue that sensations cannot explain apparent or stroboscopic movement?

Because movement is perceived across the space between flashing stimuli where no physical stimulus exists, demonstrating that the whole perception is different from the sum of its sensory parts.

Which optical illusion is depicted below, where two horizontal lines of equal length appear different due to the orientation of outward- or inward-pointing fins?

The Müller-Lyer illusion.

Which optical illusion is shown here, where two identical horizontal bars appear different in size because of converging perspective lines?

The Ponzo illusion.

What is the oblique effect in environmental regularities?

The perceptual advantage where humans perceive horizontal and vertical orientations more easily and accurately than slanted (oblique) orientations.

What is the light-from-above assumption?

The perceptual heuristic that light typically originates from above, which leads our visual system to interpret shadows as either indentations or outward bumps.

In Ungerleider and Mishkin's ablation studies on monkeys, which task was impaired by removing the parietal lobe?

The landmark discrimination task, demonstrating that the parietal lobe corresponds to the 'where' (dorsal) pathway.

What dissociation did Milner and Goodale identify through their neuropsychological testing of patient D.F.?

D.F. could not orient a card to match the angle of a slot (impaired perception pathway), but could accurately post the card into the slot when taking action (intact action/how pathway).

What role did Iacoboni's fMRI research reveal regarding mirror neurons?

Mirror neurons demonstrated greater neural firing when participants viewed action clips containing context indicating the actor's intention, showing they encode the purpose or 'why' behind actions.

What sequence of stages characterizes Donald Broadbent's filter model of attention?

Incoming sensory messages enter sensory memory, pass through a filter based on physical characteristics, and the attended message reaches a detector that processes meaning before entering memory.

How did Gray and Wedderburn's ($1960$) 'Dear Aunt Jane' experiment challenge Broadbent's early filter model?

Participants shadowed the meaningful message across ears (e.g., hearing 'Dear' in one ear, 'Aunt' in the other, and 'Jane' in the first), showing attention switched based on semantic meaning rather than solely physical characteristics.

Which selective attention model is illustrated below, where an attenuator weakens unattended messages and a dictionary unit assesses words based on activation thresholds?

Anne Treisman's attenuation model of attention ($1964$).

What did Donald MacKay's ($1973$) dichotic listening experiment reveal regarding ambiguous sentences?

Unattended biasing words (e.g., 'river' vs. 'money') presented to the unattended ear influenced participants' interpretation of an ambiguous word in the attended sentence ('They were throwing stones at the bank'), supporting late selection models.

According to Nilli Lavie's load theory of attention, when are task-irrelevant distractors most likely to be processed?

During low-load tasks, because unused perceptual capacity remains available to process irrelevant distractors, whereas high-load tasks consume all processing capacity.

What causes the slowing of response times in the Stroop effect?

Conflict between the automatic reading of a color word and the task demand of naming the ink color when the word and ink color conflict.

What is the difference between overt and covert attention?

Overt attention involves shifting attention accompanied by eye movements (fixations and saccades), while covert attention involves shifting attention without moving the eyes.

What did Michael Posner's ($1978$) precueing experiments demonstrate about spatial attention?

Participants responded faster to a target appearing at a location preceded by a valid cue compared to an invalid cue, showing that information processing is enhanced at attended locations.

What is the same-object advantage demonstrated by Egly and coworkers ($1994$)?

The finding that target detection is faster when the target appears at an uncued location on the same object as the cue compared to an equidistant location on a different object.

What did the $100$-car naturalistic driving study in $2006$ reveal about driver distraction?

Inattention was a factor in crashes and near-crashes, with pushing mobile phone buttons specifically involved in $22\%$ of incidents.

What is inattentional blindness?

The failure to perceive a clearly visible stimulus when attention is directed toward another task or location, as seen when $46\%$ of viewers missed the moonwalking bear.

What is change blindness?

The inability or difficulty in detecting changes between scenes or views when the change occurs during a brief disruption or cut, frequently exemplified by film continuity errors.

How did B.F. Skinner and Noam Chomsky's $1957$ publications disagree on language acquisition?

Skinner (Verbal Behavior) argued language is learned through reinforcement and operant conditioning, whereas Chomsky (Syntactic Structures) asserted language capacity is genetically encoded, noting children produce novel sentences that were never reinforced.

What is the word frequency effect in psycholinguistics?

The finding that people respond faster to and fixate for shorter durations on high-frequency words than on low-frequency words during reading tasks.

What did Pollack and Pickett ($1964$) discover about word identification outside of context?

When individual words were sliced out of recorded conversations and presented in isolation, participants were only able to identify $50\%$ of them.

What is speech segmentation?

The perceptual process of distinguishing individual words within a continuous acoustic speech signal that contains no physical silences between words.

How do biased dominance and balanced dominance differ in lexical ambiguity?

Biased dominance occurs when an ambiguous word has one meaning that is much more frequent than another (e.g., 'tin'), while balanced dominance occurs when the different meanings are roughly equal in frequency (e.g., 'cast').

How does the principle of late closure function in the garden path model of parsing?

The parser assumes any newly encountered word is part of the current grammatical phrase for as long as possible, only restructuring when an inconsistency forces a shift.

How did Tanenhaus and colleagues ($1995$) use the visual world paradigm to support constraint-based parsing?

They showed that non-linguistic scene context immediately influenced syntactic parsing, as eye movements to objects differed instantly when instructions like 'Put the apple on the towel in the box' were presented in one-apple versus two-apple scenes.

Why do object-relative clauses require more cognitive processing time than subject-relative clauses?

Object-relative clauses place greater demands on working memory because the listener must hold the subject in memory across intervening words before integrating it with the verb.

What did Altmann and Kamide find regarding predictive eye movements during language comprehension?

Eye movements shifted toward an edible target object $87\,\text{ms}$ before hearing the word 'cake' after hearing 'eat', but shifted $127\,\text{ms}$ after hearing the word 'cake' when the verb was 'move'.

What are the three main types of inferences made during reading to maintain text coherence?

Anaphoric inferences (connecting people and objects across sentences), instrument inferences (inferring tools or methods used), and causal inferences (concluding that events in one clause were caused by previous events).

Why did participants in Rolf Zwaan's experiments respond faster to the horizontal nail than the vertical nail after reading 'He hammered the nail into the wall'?

Because readers simulate a situation model reflecting the perceptual properties of described events; a nail hammered into a wall is imagined horizontally, facilitating recognition of the matching picture.

What is the given-new contract in conversation?

A conversational agreement where the speaker constructs sentences to include previously known (given) information alongside unfamiliar (new) information, allowing the new information to become given in subsequent turns.

What is syntactic priming in conversational coordination?

The phenomenon where producing a specific grammatical structure increases the probability that the other speaker will immediately adopt that same structure, occurring in approximately $78\%$ of subsequent turns.

What electrophysiological response occurs when expectations of musical syntax are violated?

A large P$600$ event-related potential (ERP) wave, identical to the brain wave observed when linguistic syntax rules are violated.

What does neuropsychological evidence from congenital amusia reveal about the neural overlap between music and language?

It shows incomplete overlap, as individuals with congenital amusia have severe music perception deficits while retaining unimpaired language abilities, and some Broca's aphasics show preserved musical syntax processing.