Cognitive Psychology Review

Comprehensive practice flashcards covering history, brain structure, perception, attention, memory, concepts, imagery, language, thinking, and decision-making based on lecture notes.

Cognition

The mental processes used in acquiring knowledge and comprehension, including thinking, knowing, remembering, judging, and problem-solving.

Empiricism (Nurture)

The philosophical view that knowledge comes from individual experience and the environment, viewing the mind as a blank slate at birth.

Nativism (Nature)

The philosophical perspective emphasizing the role of innate biological or genetic factors in shaping cognitive abilities.

Structuralism

A school of psychology led by Wilhelm Wundt that aimed to discover the laws of immediate conscious experience using introspection.

Functionalism

A school of psychology led by William James that focused on explaining how and why the mind works in real-life situations.

Radical Behaviourism

An approach insisting that references to unobservable subjective mental states and processes should be banished from psychology.

Gestalt Psychology

The assumption that psychological phenomena must be studied in their entirety rather than reduced to simple elements, as the whole structure is apprehended as a unified experience.

Information-Processing Paradigm

A structured, stage-like view of cognition that uses clear experimental methods but is sometimes viewed as overly mechanistic.

Connectionism

A cognitive paradigm focusing on parallel, distributed processing in neural networks that aligns with brain structures.

Hypothalamus

A subcortical structure that regulates basic biological functions including hunger, thirst, temperature, and sexual arousal.

Thalamus

The central relay station for sensory information and memory within the forebrain.

Hippocampus

A critical brain structure involved in learning, memory, and emotion.

Frontal Lobe

The brain region responsible for fine motor movements, movement planning, and executive functions like decision-making and behavior inhibition.

Double Dissociations

Occurs when brain damage and behavior are completely dissociated from each other, showing opposite mirror-image patterns.

Broca’s Aphasia

A major deficit in expressive language or speech production caused by damage to the left frontal lobe.

Wernicke’s Aphasia

A deficit in language comprehension with intact speech production, though the speech is often fluent but meaningless.

Donder’s Subtraction Logic

A method to isolate specific mental processes by comparing two tasks identical in every way except for a single process of interest.

BOLD Function

Stands for blood oxygenation level dependent function; it identifies relationship between neural activity and blood flow in fMRI.

Template Matching

A bottom-up process where a stimulus is compared to stored representations in memory until a physical match is found.

Feature Analysis

A perception model where objects are recognized by identifying their component parts or features and how they are combined.

Prototype Matching

A perception model that matches input to a stored holistic 'best fit' representation rather than requiring an exact match.

Apperceptive Agnosia

A failure at the basic perceptual level where patients struggle to perceive contours or form stable mental images.

Associative Agnosia

An impairment where perception is intact, but the connection to memory is lost, preventing the patient from identifying or naming objects.

Prosopagnosia

The inability to recognize a face as a unit while ability to recognize other visual objects remains preserved.

Capgras Syndrome

A condition where explicit face recognition is preserved, but the person lacks the normal emotional response, leading to claims that loved ones are imposters.

Broadbent’s Filter Theory

An early selection theory of attention proposing that stimuli are selected based on physical characteristics before semantics are processed.

Treisman’s Attenuation Theory

Known as the 'Leaky Filter,' it proposes that unattended information is weakened rather than completely blocked.

Stroop Effect

A phenomenon where automatic processes, such as reading, interfere with the intended task of naming the ink color of a word.

Hemispatial Neglect

A condition caused by right parietal lobe damage where the patient ignores the contralateral (left) visual field.

Iconic Memory

Visual sensory memory that holds a brief 'snapshot' of visual details for a fraction of a second.

Chunking

The process of reorganizing information into meaningful units using long-term memory to expand short-term memory capacity.

Proactive Interference

The disruption of learning new information caused by older memories.

Retroactive Interference

The disruption of recalling old information caused by newer memories.

Encoding Specificity Principle

The theory that memory retrieval is most successful when the context during retrieval matches the context during encoding.

Episodic Memory

Long-term memory for personal, autobiographical experiences organized by time and location.

Semantic Memory

Long-term memory for general world facts, vocabulary, and concepts, organized by meaning.

Anterograde Amnesia

The inability to form new long-term explicit memories after a brain injury.

Maintenance Rehearsal

The act of repeating information in its exact form for temporary holding, resulting in weak long-term memory traces.

Elaborative Rehearsal

Deep processing that involves expanding on the meaning of information and connecting it to existing knowledge.

Schema

A mental framework built from past experiences used to organize and interpret information.

Flashbulb Memories

Vivid, detailed memories of learning about emotionally charged historical events, which remain confident but decay in accuracy over time.

Cognitive Economy

The principle that concepts in a hierarchical network share all characteristics of the broader category unless exceptions are specified.

Method of Loci

A mnemonic technique of associating items with well-known physical locations along a structured route.

Dual Coding Theory

The theory that visual images improve memory because information is stored as both a verbal code and an image-based code.

Phoneme

The smallest unit of sound that changes meaning within a language.

Morpheme

The smallest unit of actual meaning in language, including words, prefixes, and suffixes.

Syntax

The grammatical rules for arranging words into sentences.

Categorical Perception

Processing continuous speech by categorizing sounds into discrete linguistic categories.

Means-Ends Analysis

A problem-solving technique that involves breaking a problem down into manageable sub-goals.

Functional Fixedness

The inability to see novel uses for an object beyond its traditional or primary function.

Confirmation Bias

The tendency to seek out evidence that confirms pre-existing hypotheses while ignoring data that might falsify them.

Availability Heuristic

Estimating the frequency or probability of an event based on how easily examples come to mind.

Expected Utility Theory

A normative model of rational decision-making that seeks to maximize value by multiplying outcome probability by its utility.

Image Theory

A descriptive model suggesting people pre-screen choices using value, trajectory, and strategic images before final decision-making.

HAROLD Model

A model connecting age-related executive function decline to the physical deterioration of the frontal lobes.