Cognitive Psychology Vocabulary

Flashcards covering key vocabulary from Cognitive Psychology lecture notes.

Cognitive Psychology

The study of the internal thinking mechanisms of the mind.

Modeling (in Cognitive Psychology)

Building a working model of a phenomenon to understand it, such as computer programs simulating studies

World-Relevance

Recognizing how science applies to our lives and the world around us.

Physis

Fundamental substance of which everything is made (Thales posited it was water).

Apeiron

Anaximander's idea of 'boundless primordial mass' as the physis.

Critical Tradition

The concept where everyone pitches in ideas which are discussed and critically evaluated; the best idea survives.

Socratic Method

Answering a question with another question, often causing people to discover the contradictions in their own ideas, vital in a specific way.

Pure Forms/Essences

Plato's theory that all actual instances are imperfect copies of an ideal version.

Rationalism

The viewpoint of looking inside for truth, introspection, and using reason; the sensory world is untrustworthy (Plato).

Empiricism

Discovering truth by generalizing across observed instances in the world, trusting your senses (Aristotle).

Dualism

The belief that the universe consists of nonphysical mind and physical body.

Monism

The belief there is only one kind of thing in the universe and it's all physical.

Pluralism

The belief that there could be many kinds of things (more than 2) in the universe

Model

A mechanistic approximation of something real, at some level, we fully understand cause and effect.

Association by Contiguity

Hume's hypothesis that ideas are associated by togetherness in space and time.

Sensation

Is the experience of having sense organs (eyes, ears, skin, nose, tongue) stimulated.

Perception

The act of interpreting sensations as indicating the presence of familiar objects or situations.

Template Matching Hypothesis

The idea that the mind recognizes objects by searching for a stored template that matches one's current pattern of sensations.

Computational Intractability

Too many images; more than the number of atoms in the universe; it would be impossible to store them all independently in one physical brain.

Gestalt Psychology

A group of psychological thinkers who notice the power of form in visual stimuli.

Pragnanz

A german word for conciseness; we order our experience in a way that is maximally simple.

Recognition by Components (RBC) Model

A model of how the mind recognizes objects that work by putting parts together, the hope is that this will improve on the template matching model.

Geons

Geometric building blocks of our perceptions.

Priming Paradigm

An experiment in which mental preparing plays a role.

Taxonomic Hierarchies

Type-based hierarchies with branching structures.

Constituency Hierarchies

Part-whole hierarchies where something is built from smaller parts.

Top-Down Object Recognition

Object recognition using information about what would make sense or what would be expected in the world, using preexisting knowledge.

Bottom-Up Object Recognition

Object recognition where information comes directly from the stimulus.

Context-Dependent Processing

The influence of context and knowledge on perception, often referring to top-down influences.

Inhibition

A negative signal that discourages a letter or segment.

Excitatory

Neurons in the brain that have positive connections which cause action potentials.

Word Superiority Effect

Challenges pandemonium by showing that letters are recognized faster in the context of a word.

Feedback Connections

Connections that go from high levels to low levels in the brain.

Homunculus Problem

The problem of explaining how the attentional system chooses what to focus on without invoking an internal agent with its own attentional system.

Dichotic Listening

A method where the mind is focused on one thing, but the other information is coming from another source.

Broadbent's Selective Filter Model

A model describing selective filters with core importants components.

Treisman Attenuation Model

An attentional model where unattended channels are not limited to only low-level information, with the addition of attenuating.

Limited Resource Model

The concept that there is only so much the mind can handle at once.

Processing Bottleneck

The argument that there are ability limitations to do things for different spheres, that one would be for speaking or for version, and if you force everything in one of those channels it piles up.

Mental Module

A part of the mind whose job is to process a particular kind of information (e.g. verbal, spatial, olfactory, musical…).

Task-Specific Mental Module

A part of the mind that is responsible for certain specific thinking

Task-General Module

Module that goes around to all modules and gives them jobs to do

Working Memory

A model where the mind works like a desk.

Procedural Memory

Anything to do with things you know how to do; riding a bicycle, don't really need to think/talk about it, your body and mind together know how to do it.

Declarative Memory

Facts, truth, things that are stated.

Semantic/Generic Memory

Knowledge of how things work in your life; general knowledge of the way the world is.

Episodic Memory

Specific experiences that you've had in your life that you remember.

Short Term Memory

Briefly what's going on with us right now in the last few minutes.

Long Term Memory

Any long longer than a couple of minutes.

Maintenance Rehearsal

If you get information and need to hold onto it, you can keep remembering it over and over again, repeating yourself.

Primacy

The first words that they heard are remembered.

Recency

They remember the last words they heard.

Digit Span

List length or which the participants get half the trials right.

Chunking

Organizing items into familiar, manageable units; often occurs automatically.

Active Span

But 'ability to actively manipulate information' in memory.

State-Dependent Learning

People do best when tested in the same conditions in which they were trained.

Encoding Specificity

Encoding specific to the test.

Retroactive interference

Forgetting something because of interference from something that happened AFTER exposure to the item to be remembered

Proactive interference

Forgetting something because of interference from something that happened BEFORE exposure to the item to be remembers

Critical Lure Word

The non-included associated word.

Misinformation Effect

Information provided after an experience can change the memory of the experience.

Semantic Memory

Recollections of general facts without specific experiences.

Episodic Memory

Recollections of specific experiences.

Typicality Effects

People respond more quickly to set membership questions about typical members.

Connectionist Network

Artificial neural network.

Activation Dynamics

Correspond to the mental processes underlying thinking/perceiving/acting.

Learning dynamics

Correspond to the mental process underlying learning (happens more slowly than activation).

Availability Heuristic

To estimate relative frequencies of two events, see how easily you can think of examples of each. Assume that the event for which it is easier to think of examples is more frequent.

Representativeness Heuristic

Basic idea: we tend to assume classes of things are homogeneous. Therefore, the members of the class should show the average traits of the class.

Logics

System for reasoning.

Heuristic

An Approach to solve the problems that may not be fully specified.

Morpheme

The smallest unit of language that carries meaning.

Phoneme

The smallest unit of sound that can distinguish meaning.

Bernoulli Effect

The lowering of fluid pressure in regions where the flow velocity is increased.

Analogy

A mapping between the structure of two domains.

Feedback loop

Cricut to action and perception.

Ecological psychology

Feedback interactions between organism and environment

Attractor

A state to which a dynamical system converges, that it returns to it