Cognitive Psychology: Learning, Memory, Decision-Making, Language, and Development

Comprehensive practice vocabulary flashcards covering classical and instrumental conditioning, sensory and working memory, long-term memory taxonomy, decision heuristics and biases, language processing and aphasias, and developmental milestones.

Habituation

A decrease in the response to a stimulus once the stimulus has become familiar through repeated exposure (such as tuning out the background noise of an air conditioner).

Dishabituation

An increase in responsiveness when a habituated stimulus changes, reflecting the principle that environmental change is informative while constancy is not.

Conditioned Stimulus (CS)

An initially neutral stimulus that, after repeated pairing with an unconditioned stimulus ($\text{US}$), comes to reliably predict the $\text{US}$ and elicit a conditioned response ($\text{CR}$).

Homeostatic Model of Drug Tolerance

A classical conditioning model proposing that contextual drug cues act as conditioned stimuli ($\text{CS}$) eliciting compensatory physiological conditioned responses ($\text{CR}$), creating tolerance; overdoses occur most often when high doses are taken in the absence of familiar context cues.

Spontaneous Recovery

The reappearance of an extinguished conditioned response after a rest period without any additional conditioning trials.

Shaping

An conditioning procedure of reinforcing behaviors that successively predict the target behavior to establish actions.

Stage Theory of Memory

A unifying framework proposing that memory consists of three distinct systems—sensory memory, short-term/working memory, and long-term memory—characterized by different capacities, durations, and forms of encoding, rehearsal, and retrieval.

Iconic Memory

Visual sensory memory with a capacity of approximately $1$ item per spatial location and a duration of roughly $1\,\text{sec}$, represented neuroanatomically in the occipital lobe.

Masking

The experimental phenomenon where presenting a subsequent stimulus at a specific spatial location overwrites or replaces the previous item held in sensory memory at that location.

Subitizing

The rapid, automatic process of encoding the exact number of visual items in sensory memory without serial counting, limited to approximately $4$ or $5$ items.

Chunk

A larger, meaningful unit of information that combines smaller discrete items, enabling verbal working memory to maintain approximately $7 \pm 2$ chunks.

Primacy Effect

Enhanced free recall for words presented at the beginning of a list relative to middle items, resulting from greater opportunities for maintenance and elaborative rehearsal into long-term memory.

Recency Effect

Enhanced free recall for words at the end of a list that remain readily accessible in working memory; this effect is eliminated by an interpolated distraction delay (such as counting backwards for $30\,\text{sec}$).

Retroactive Interference

A mechanism of forgetting in which newly encountered information impairs or blocks the retrieval of previously stored, older memories.

Proactive Interference

A mechanism of forgetting in which older, previously acquired memories interfere with the encoding or retrieval of newly learned items (such as previous parking spots interfering with remembering where one parked today).

Episodic Memory

A subdivision of conscious explicit long-term memory dedicated to personally experienced events situated in specific times and spatial contexts.

Semantic Memory

A subdivision of conscious explicit long-term memory storing general world knowledge, facts, and concepts that are decoupled from any specific time or place of acquisition.

Caudate Nucleus

A subcortical brain structure involved in motor and cognitive skill learning that is $7\text{ to }8$ standard deviations larger in individuals with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory ($\text{HSAM}$).

Spreading Activation

The process within an associative memory network where retrieving or activating a single concept node spreads neural activation across interconnecting pathways to related mental nodes.

Levels-of-Processing Effect

The finding that deep processing oriented toward semantic meaning produces superior long-term retention compared to shallow perceptual or phonological processing (such as judging rhymes).

Repetition Priming

An implicit memory phenomenon in which the recent or frequent presentation of a stimulus increases the speed and likelihood of subsequently identifying or completing that exact stimulus (such as in word-stem completion).

Perceptual Learning

The recalibration and optimization of perceptual processing systems resulting from extensive experience and practice, such as acquiring skill and fluency in reading inverted text.

Relearning Savings

The reduction in time or trials required to reacquire a skill or knowledge set during retraining relative to original training, revealing preserved implicit memory across extended retention intervals.

Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) Procedure

A laboratory paradigm demonstrating false memory where studying lists of words related to an unstated theme produces high rates of false recall (averaging $0.55$) and false recognition for that non-presented critical lure.

Misplaced Familiarity

A memory attribution error (also known as source confusion) in which a suspect appears familiar because the witness saw them in an earlier photo array rather than at the actual crime scene.

Reality Monitoring

The metacognitive process of discriminating whether a remembered event was externally performed in reality or merely internally generated via thought, imagination, or intent.

Anchoring-and-Adjustment Heuristic

A decision heuristic in which quantitative estimates begin from a salient numerical value in the scenario (the anchor) and are insufficiently modified to yield a final judgment.

Availability Heuristic

A cognitive heuristic in which the perceived frequency, probability, or likelihood of an event is evaluated based on the ease with which examples come to mind.

Representativeness Heuristic

A decision heuristic where probability is judged based on how closely an individual, event, or object matches the prototypical characteristics of a given category rather than statistical probability.

Loss Aversion Bias

The cognitive bias whereby the disutility of giving up an owned object is weighed more heavily than the utility of acquiring it, causing sellers to value an item at more than double the price choosers will pay ($\$7.12$ vs. $\$3.12$).

Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex (VPFC)

A prefrontal cortical region receiving direct emotional projections from the amygdala whose damage impairs prioritizing, decision-making, and gut-level risk evaluations despite intact general intelligence ($\text{IQ}$).

Diffusion of Responsibility

A mechanism of the bystander effect wherein an individual fails to intervene during an emergency because the presence of others disperses personal accountability, leading to the assumption that someone else will act.

Pluralistic Ignorance

A social phenomenon in emergency situations where bystanders interpret the visible inaction and calm demeanor of others as informed evidence that no assistance is needed.

Raven's Progressive Matrices

A standardized nonverbal test designed to assess abstract reasoning and fluid intelligence by requiring participants to determine missing geometric components in visual matrices.

Base Rate Fallacy

The reasoning error of ignoring the background prevalence of a condition in the population when evaluating the posterior probability of an outcome following a positive test result.

Syntax

The formal rules and hierarchical structures that govern how grammatical categories (such as noun phrases and verb phrases) assemble into permissible sentences.

Broca's Area

A left frontal lobe region situated near motor cortex that represents syntax and language production; damage yields nonfluent, telegraphic speech with intact comprehension.

Wernicke's Area

A left temporal lobe cortical area adjacent to auditory cortex responsible for representing word meaning and semantic comprehension; damage produces fluent, grammatically effortless speech that lacks semantic coherence.

Over-regularization Errors

Developmental speech errors occurring when children overapply standard grammatical rules to irregular lexical items (e.g., uttering 'drawed' or 'sticked').

Garden Path Sentence

A syntactically ambiguous sentence that initially leads the parsing system down an incorrect interpretation, requiring syntactic backtracking and leaving lingering semantic misinterpretations in memory.

Critical Period for Language

A developmental biological window closing between ages $12\text{ and }15\,\text{years}$ during which first language syntax and native phonological pronunciation can be acquired with qualitative ease.

Inhibitory Control

The executive capacity to suppress an established mental rule or prepotent action in favor of a newly instructed rule, a capability that matures slowly through childhood into the early $20\text{s}$.

Theory of Mind

The cognitive developmental milestone achieved around age $5$ wherein a child understands that other people possess independent minds holding distinct beliefs, desires, and knowledge from their own.

Conservation of Quantity

The developmental understanding emerging around age $5\text{ to }6$ that physical amounts (such as liquid volume) remain invariant under superficial perceptual transformations.

Cross-Sectional Design

A developmental research methodology testing multiple different age groups concurrently at a single time point, which is susceptible to cohort confounds such as historical shifts in income or environmental lead exposure.