Cognitive Psychology Exam 1 Review Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards covering core topics, theories, named researchers, and empirical phenomena from Cognitive Psychology Exam I study material.

Black box metaphor

The view in psychology that mental processes take place inside a hidden box between stimulus and behavior; behaviorists avoid speculating about what is inside, whereas cognitivists try to infer internal processes.

Compromise effect

A choice behavior phenomenon where people prefer a middle option between two attributes (such as features versus price), which becomes more popular when an extreme option is added (shifting choices from 50/50 to 15/70/15).

Attraction effect

Also known as the decoy effect; a choice behavior phenomenon where adding an option that is strictly worse than an existing option in every way increases the choice rate of that existing option (shifting choices to 29/70/1).

Similarity effect

A choice behavior phenomenon where a newly introduced option steals market share primarily from the existing option that is most similar to it (shifting choices from 50/50 to 50/10/40).

Structuralism

A psychological movement (1870–1920) led by Wilhelm Wundt that aimed to break down conscious experience into its basic sensory elements.

Introspection

A research method used by structuralists involving looking inward to describe one's own immediate sensory experiences and stream of consciousness.

Stimulus error

The error committed during introspection when a participant describes the object or its meaning (e.g., 'an apple') rather than the raw sensory experience itself (e.g., 'red, round, shiny').

Behaviorism

A psychological movement (1920–1960) led by Watson and Skinner asserting that psychology should study only observable stimulus-response behavior rather than internal mental events.

Tabula rasa

The empiricist concept embraced by behaviorism that the mind is a 'blank slate' and all behaviors are learned through environment and reinforcement.

Taste aversion

A biological learning phenomenon where animals easily associate taste with illness but not lights with illness, serving as evidence against the blank slate theory.

Cognitive map

An internal mental representation of spatial layout, demonstrated by Edward Tolman's rats navigating mazes via non-rewarded shortcuts rather than simple stimulus-response turn chains.

Cognitivism

A movement in psychology (1956–present) holding that mental processes exist, involve active transformations of internal representations, and can be studied empirically using response times and accuracy.

Representation

An internal symbol that stands for something in the real world, which can be transformed during cognitive processing.

Functional description

An abstract characterization of what an internal process accomplishes (its input-to-output rule) without specifying its physical neural mechanics.

Halo effect

A cognitive bias where an overall impression of a person (e.g., liking a warm teacher) spills over to bias evaluations of unrelated specific traits (e.g., clothes, accent).

Grey matter vs. White matter

Grey matter consists of neuron cell bodies, dendrites, and synapses where processing occurs; white matter consists of myelinated axons acting as connecting wiring between brain regions.

All-or-none action potential

The principle that a neuron fires a full electrical spike once input crosses its threshold, or does not fire at all, with no partial spikes.

Coarse coding

Also known as population coding; a neural representation where information is coded by the overlapping activation pattern across a population of broadly tuned neurons rather than a single dedicated cell.

Graceful degradation

A feature of coarse/population coding where losing some neurons only slightly impairs performance because information is distributed across many cells.

Frontal lobe

A brain region responsible for planning, reasoning, inhibition, and motor control; damage can lead to perseveration, impulsivity, or Broca's aphasia.

Temporal lobe

A brain region responsible for memory, visual object recognition ('what' stream), and auditory processing, including Wernicke's area.

Parietal lobe

An association area linking visual information to spatial coordinates and guiding motor action ('where/how' stream).

Occipital lobe

The brain area containing primary visual cortex and a spatial topographic map of the visual field.

Broca's aphasia

An expressive language disorder caused by frontal lobe damage characterized by halting, effortful speech that retains semantic content but lacks grammatical syntax.

Wernicke's aphasia

A receptive language disorder caused by temporal lobe damage characterized by fluent, effortless 'word salad' that lacks content and severely impairs language comprehension.

Anterograde amnesia vs. Retrograde amnesia

Anterograde amnesia is the inability to form new memories after brain damage; retrograde amnesia is the loss of old memories formed prior to brain damage.

Ventral stream

The 'what' visual path running from occipital to temporal cortex responsible for slow, detailed visual object recognition and identification.

Dorsal stream

The 'where/how' visual path running from occipital to parietal cortex responsible for fast spatial location tracking and visually guided motor actions.

Double dissociation

A research finding where Patient Group 1 is impaired on Task A but not Task B, and Patient Group 2 is impaired on Task B but not Task A, providing strong evidence for separate underlying mental modules.

Visual agnosia

An inability to visually recognize seen objects despite preserved basic vision, language, and the ability to identify objects through other sensory modalities.

Sensation vs. Perception

Sensation is the raw physiological detection of physical energy by receptors; perception is the higher-level organization and interpretation of sensory input into meaningful objects.

Bottom-up vs. Top-down processing

Bottom-up processing is driven entirely by physical stimulus features; top-down processing is guided by internal knowledge, expectations, and contextual context.

McGurk effect

A cross-modal perceptual illusion where visual lip movements modify auditory perception (e.g., hearing 'da' when presented with visual 'ga' and audio 'ba').

Word superiority effect

The finding that a letter is identified faster and more accurately when presented within a real word than when presented alone or within a nonword.

Correspondence problem

The challenge faced by the visual system during apparent motion in deciding which object feature in Frame 1 matches which feature in Frame 2.

Ternus effect

An apparent motion phenomenon where a short inter-stimulus pause produces local dot movement and a long pause produces globally coherent movement of the whole group.

Lateral inhibition

A neural mechanism where neighboring active neurons inhibit one another to accentuate edges and visual contrast, as seen in the Hermann Grid illusion.

Cognitive impenetrability

The property where perceptual interpretations operate automatically and resist modification by conscious knowledge or explicit beliefs.

Tau effect

A perceptual phenomenon where the temporal spacing between physical tactile taps on the skin alters the perceived spatial distance between them.

Template model

A pattern recognition framework proposing that visual inputs are matched directly against stored, photograph-like representations in memory.

Pandemonium model

A bottom-up pattern recognition model designed by Selfridge using feature-detecting 'demons' that scream to signal matches to cognitive and decision demons.

Interactive Activation Model

A visual word recognition model containing feature, letter, and word processing layers with both excitatory, inhibitory, and top-down feedback connections.

Conjunctive search

A visual search task where a target is defined by a combination of two or more features shared with distractors, requiring serial focused attention and displaying reaction times that scale with display size.

Illusory conjunctions

Perceptual errors occurring when visual displays are presented too quickly for attention to bind features, causing features to free-float and recombine incorrectly.

Geon theory

A structural object recognition theory proposing that 3-D objects are represented as spatial arrangements of 36 basic volumetric primitives called geons.

Mental rotation

The cognitive manipulation of spatial mental images where reaction time to determine object identity increases linearly with the required angle of rotation.

Reality monitoring

The metacognitive process of identifying whether a memory originated from external real-world perception or internal mental imagery.

Systematic distortion

Images are distorted by higher-level knowledge. People think Reno is east of San Francisco (it's actually west) because Nevada is east of California. County boundaries bias judgments of city locations (congruent > homogeneous > incongruent). Object models get simplified.

Resistance to reinterpretation

Memorize the ambiguous figure, then mentally rotate it 90° clockwise: people usually can't see the seahorse. If they draw it and physically rotate the paper, they can. The info is in the image, but images = perception + interpretation, so they're hard to reinterpret flexibly.

Why imagery matters

The classic internal mental representation. People are adept at storing and using images. Imagery links perception and abstract cognition. 

Scanning

Memorize an island map, then mentally scan between landmarks: RT increases linearly with distance. Images preserve metric spatial info.

Rotation

Are two 3-D block figures the same? RT increases linearly with the angle of rotation (in both the picture plane and depth). We rotate images like real objects.

Zooming

Details are harder to verify in SMALL images (a rabbit imagined next to an elephant) than in large ones (a rabbit next to a fly): RT drops as image size grows. You have to 'zoom in.'

Property verification

do cats have claws?' (small part, highly associated) vs. 'backs?' (large part, weakly associated). Using the IMAGE: large parts are faster (backs). Answering any way (CONTROL): highly associated parts are faster (claws). Opposite patterns → different representations. 

Interference study

Spatial task: go around an imagined F and classify corners (extreme top/bottom vs. middle). Verbal task: classify each word in a sentence as noun or not. Respond by pointing (spatial) or saying yes/no (verbal). Performance is worst when the task and response use the SAME resource.

shared brain areas

Imagining activates many of the same brain areas as perceiving. ✱ (e.g., visual cortex; patients who neglect the left side of space also neglect the left side of imagined scenes). 

oblique effect

People are better with horizontal/vertical lines than oblique (diagonal) ones, both when perceiving AND when imagining. Similar sensitivity patterns for images and percepts.