Cognitive Psychology: Memory, Concepts, and Language

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering cognitive memory models, neurological substrates, categorization theories, and linguistic frameworks from the lecture notes.

Serial Position Effect

The tendency to have better memory recall for items at the beginning (due to increased rehearsal) and at the end (due to retention in working memory) of a list.

Encoding Specificity Principle

The principle stating that memory retrieval is improved when the retrieval environment closely matches the encoding environment (e.g., context-dependent learning).

Depth of Processing Model

A memory framework proposing that information processed more deeply (such as evaluating its meaning or personal relevance) is retained better than information processed shallowly (such as noting capital or lowercase letters).

Elaborative Encoding

The process of thinking about meaning, constructing stories, imposing order, or adding emotional salience to form multiple associative connections and retrieval paths between nodes in a memory network.

Testing Effect

The finding that memory retention is enhanced when part of the learning time is dedicated to actively retrieving information, such as self-testing.

Proust Effect

The phenomenon wherein olfactory cues (odors) are more effective than visual images at triggering vivid, emotionally charged memories.

Explicit Memory

Conscious, declarable memories that an individual is aware of knowing and can state out loud, encompassing semantic and episodic memory.

Semantic Memory

A subcategory of explicit/declarative memory that involves storing and recalling general knowledge and objective facts.

Episodic Memory

A subcategory of explicit memory that involves recalling personally experienced events or specific autobiographical episodes from one's life.

Implicit Memory

Non-conscious memory systems that influence behavior without deliberate awareness, including procedural memory, priming, and conditioning.

Procedural Memory

A form of implicit motor skill memory involving knowing how to perform tasks, habits, and routines without conscious awareness.

Priming

An implicit memory effect where exposure to a prior stimulus unconsciously increases familiarity and facilitates subsequent processing of related stimuli.

Conditioning

A type of implicit learning where an associative relationship is formed between repeatedly paired stimuli.

Hippocampus

A medial temporal lobe structure essential for the formation and consolidation of new long-term explicit and episodic memories, though not responsible for long-term storage of remote memories.

Basal Ganglia

Subcortical brain structures critical for procedural motor skill learning, habit formation, routines, mirror-reading/drawing tasks, and implicit probabilistic learning.

Anterior Temporal Lobe

The primary cortical region implicated in the organization and long-term storage of semantic memory, category knowledge, and word definitions.

Amygdala

A brain region crucial for processing emotional memories and fear conditioning that modulates hippocampal and basal ganglia activation to enhance memory vividness.

Piriform Cortex

The cortical target for olfactory signals whose anatomical proximity to the amygdala and hippocampus explains the strong emotional and mnemonic potency of smells.

Temporal Gradient of Retrograde Amnesia (Ribot's Law)

The principle that brain damage causes more severe retrograde memory loss for events immediately preceding the injury than for remote, older memories.

Encoding Failure

A cause of forgetting where information is never properly stored in memory because attention was insufficient during initial presentation.

Memory Decay

The spontaneous, exponential fading of memory traces over time in the absence of active rehearsal or retrieval.

Proactive Interference

A memory impediment where previously learned, older information disrupts the acquisition or recall of newly acquired information.

Retroactive Interference

A memory impediment where newly learned information impairs the ability to retrieve previously learned, older information.

Retrieval Failure

The inability to access a memory that is intact and stored in the brain at the moment of recall, such as in the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.

Flashbulb Memories

Exceptionally vivid, highly detailed memories of emotionally significant events driven by amygdala arousal that, despite high confidence, are not necessarily accurate.

Verbal Overshadowing

The impairment of perceptual memory (such as facial recognition) that occurs when an individual produces a verbal description of the stimulus, creating a competing verbal memory trace.

Subthreshold Activation

Partial activation of a node in a semantic or memory network that produces a feeling of familiarity (recognition) without reaching the threshold required for complete recall.

Recognition

Identifying a previously encountered item based on a sense of familiarity when the external stimulus is directly presented.

Recall

The active retrieval of detailed information from memory without the aid of an external prompt or copy of the stimulus.

Illusory Truth Effect

The cognitive bias where repeated exposure to a false statement creates subjective familiarity, leading individuals to misattribute familiarity to truth.

Semantic Priming

The facilitation of processing a target word or concept caused by the prior presentation of a semantically related concept within a mental associative network.

Schema

An organized top-down cognitive framework representing typical features, expectations, and behaviors associated with specific social and environmental contexts.

Illusion of Consistency

A self-perception bias where individuals reconstruct their past attitudes, preferences, and beliefs to seem artificially congruent with their present views.

Turtles All the Way Down

A philosophical phrase illustrating the concept of infinite regress, where every explanation relies on a prior level of identical explanation.

Fuzzy Boundaries

The concept that category borders are graded rather than absolute, meaning category membership exists along a continuum rather than as an all-or-none dichotomy.

Prototype Theory

A model of categorization stating that category representation is organized around an abstract, centralized average or ideal composite of all previously encountered category members.

Basic Level Categories

The cognitively preferred, intermediate tier in a categorical hierarchy, typically designated by simple nouns (e.g., car, dog) that balance commonalities and distinctiveness.

Exemplar Theory

A categorization theory proposing that concepts are represented by storing every specific instance (exemplar) ever experienced, forming a distributed memory cloud.

Ad-hoc Categories

Spontaneous, goal-derived categories created dynamically to meet novel situational demands rather than relying on predefined, fixed property groupings.

Essentialism

The cognitive assumption that natural entities possess fundamental, immutable internal properties that define their true identity, unlike human-made artifacts.

Embodied Cognition

The theoretical perspective that conceptual and category knowledge is fundamentally grounded in sensorimotor neural representations and bodily interactions with the physical world.

Phonetics

The branch of linguistics dedicated to the physical production, acoustic properties, and perception of human speech sounds.

Morphology

The study of the internal grammatical structure of words and the combinations of morphemes that convey meaning.

Syntax

The linguistic rules specifying how words and phrases are hierarchically ordered and structured into well-formed sentences.

Semantics

The study of meaning at the level of individual morphemes, words, phrases, and larger linguistic expressions.

Pragmatics

The study of how context influences language interpretation in real-world communication, including social cues, sarcasm, tone, and figurative expressions.

Phoneme

The smallest contrastive unit of sound in a language that serves to distinguish one word's meaning from another without carrying intrinsic meaning itself.

Minimal Pair

A pair of distinct words in a language that differ by only a single contrastive phoneme (e.g., 'right' and 'light').

Categorical Perception

The psychological phenomenon where continuous acoustic variations are perceived as discrete phonemic categories, suppressing within-category differences while accentuating between-category differences.

Phonotactics

The language-specific structural rules and constraints governing permissible sequences, positions, and combinations of phonemes in words.

Morpheme

The most elementary meaningful unit in a language that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful components.

Syntactic Constituent

A structural phrase or clause unit within a sentence that behaves as a unified grammatical block governed by syntactic formation rules.

Underextension

An early language development error where a child restricts a word's application to an overly narrow set of referents (e.g., using 'doggy' only for the family pet).

Overextension

An early language development error where a child applies a categorical label too broadly to items that share superficial features (e.g., calling all four-legged animals 'doggy').

Aphasia

An acquired loss or impairment of language production or comprehension resulting from brain trauma, typically localized to the left hemisphere.

Anomia

A language deficit characterized by the persistent inability to retrieve and produce the names of objects.

Paraphasia

A speech error typical of fluent aphasias involving unintended syllable, sound, or word substitutions (e.g., producing 'fable' for 'table').

Broca's Area

A frontal region located in the left inferior frontal gyrus and premotor cortex responsible for speech motor planning and syntactic execution.

Wernicke's Area

A posterior cortical region in the left superior temporal gyrus and temporo-parietal junction dedicated to phonological and linguistic speech comprehension.

Broca's Aphasia

A non-fluent language disorder marked by labored, telegraphic speech output and anomia, accompanied by relatively preserved comprehension of simple language.

Wernicke's Aphasia

A fluent language disorder characterized by severely impaired auditory comprehension and nonsensical, grammatically fluent speech output laden with paraphasias (word salad).

Right Hemisphere Language Function

Neural processes in the non-dominant hemisphere that mediate discourse-level comprehension, emotional prosody, humor, metaphor, idioms, and pragmatic conversational interpretation.