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Cognitive Psychology

The scientific study of how the mind works, encompassing how people perceive, learn, remember, and think about information.

Ecological Validity

A measure of how findings from research translate to real-world scenarios, emphasizing the importance of contextual factors in cognitive processes.

Cognitive Ethology

An approach to research that involves carefully observing and describing behavior in its natural setting before conducting laboratory studies.

Parallelism

The theory that mind and brain are two aspects of the same reality, where every mental event corresponds to a neural event.

Epiphenomenalism

The belief that the mind is a byproduct of brain processes and does not have a causal role in behavior.

Information Theory

A model that posits humans process informational content rather than merely reacting to stimuli, with the salience of information being inversely related to its probability of occurrence.

Broadbent's Filter Model

A model of attention that suggests information processing is limited by channel capacity, where input channels filter information based on physical characteristics.

Aphasia

A speech impairment resulting from damage to brain regions, affecting the production or comprehension of speech.

Working Memory

The system that pulls together different types of memory, allowing for dynamic manipulation of information, comprising the central executive, phonological loop, and visuo-spatial sketchpad.

Priming

The process by which exposure to a stimulus influences the response to a subsequent stimulus, either speeding up or slowing down reactions.

Change Blindness

A phenomenon where individuals fail to notice changes in a visual scene, even when deliberately looking for them.

Sensory Memory

The type of memory that captures a large amount of information from the senses momentarily, typically fading quickly.

Long-Term Memory

The system responsible for storing information over extended periods, divided into declarative and procedural memories.

Declarative Memory

A type of long-term memory that contains knowledge capable of being verbalized, including episodic and semantic memory.

Procedural Memory

Memory for the performance of actions or skills, often without conscious awareness of how the actions are executed.

Stroop Task

A cognitive task that measures the interference of automatic processes and response inhibition, typically illustrated by color-word mismatches.

Flanker Task

A cognitive task used to assess selective attention by examining how distractors influence performance on a target task.

Visual Dominance

The hypothesis that the visual system is prioritized over other senses in perceptual processing, often due to limitations in the visual system.

Endogenous Attention

Voluntary attention shifts that are self-directed, as opposed to exogenous attention which is triggered by external stimuli.

Neuroanatomy

The study of the structure and organization of the nervous system, particularly in relation to cognitive functions.