Cog Psych Midterm 1: Who's Who Flashcards
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Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the key researchers, experiments, findings, and concepts across History & Intro, Perception & Recognition, and Memory for Cognitive Psychology Midterm 1.
185 Terms
Wundt
Founder of experimental psychology in Leipzig who used introspection with trained observers to analyze their own sensations; introspection had the problem of being inaccurate (e.g., eye movements while reading).
Ebbinghaus
Conducted early systematic memory research using nonsense syllables (e.g., DAX), measured recall, recognition, and savings, and established the forgetting curve and serial position effect.
Calkins
First woman APA president who reported the recency effect and argued that cognition should be studied in real-world settings rather than solely in artificial lab tasks.
William James
Proponent of functionalism and author of Principles of Psychology (1890) who described the stream of consciousness and the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.
Watson
Founder of behaviorism who emphasized only observable behavior and carefully controlled research, mostly through animal studies, and contributed operational definitions.
Tolman
Demonstrated cognitive maps in rats (Tolman & Honzik, 1930) by showing that rats rewarded after days of unrewarded exploration quickly made few errors, challenging strict behaviorism.
Skinner
Studied operant conditioning by associating a learned response with stimuli through consequences during the era when behaviorism dominated from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Piaget
Part of the cognitive revolution (with growing U.S. interest in the late 1950s) who showed that children actively explore the world and change their cognitive strategies with age.
Chomsky
Linguist who argued in 1957 that language structure is too complex for behaviorist explanations and that humans possess an inborn language ability, contributing to the cognitive revolution.
Neisser
Called the father of cognitive psychology; authored the 1967 book that first used the term 'Cognitive Psychology' (with the field's birth dated to 1956).
Miller (1956)
Proposed that short-term memory holds about 7±2 chunks, defining a chunk as a unit of strongly associated components.
Cowan (2005)
Argued that pure short-term memory capacity is about 4 chunks rather than 7±2.
McClelland & Rumelhart
Introduced the connectionist parallel distributed processing (PDP) approach in 1986, featuring networks of neuron-like units, parallel processing, and distributed knowledge.
Aristotle
Referred to as the 'first cognitive psychologist'; emphasized empirical evidence and studied perception, memory, and imagery.
Bruner & Potter (1964)
Showed that beginning an identification task with a very blurry, out-of-focus picture created a mental set that impaired later identification.
Gregory (1966)
Stated that 'perception is a dynamic searching for the best interpretation of the available data,' emphasizing top-down perception.
E. Gibson (1969)
Supported feature-analysis theory via a letter-pair study showing that people are slower to decide that P and R differ than O and L because P and R share many features.
Hubel & Wiesel
Identified feature-detecting neurons in the visual system, providing physiological support for feature-analysis theory.
Biederman
Formulated recognition-by-components theory, stating that objects are arrangements of simple 3-D shapes (geons), about three geons suffice, arrangement matters (e.g., cup vs. pail), and scenes are interpreted in about 101 second.
Reicher (1969)
Demonstrated the word superiority effect, finding that a letter is identified better when presented within a word than alone or in a nonword (e.g., plan vs. pnla).
Rueckl & Oden (1986)
Tested ambiguous letters in contexts like 'bea_s' (bears/beans), showing that both stimulus features (bottom-up) and sentence context (top-down) combine to influence perception.
Simons & Levin
Demonstrated change blindness in the door study, where a stranger asking for directions was swapped while a door passed between them, and only about half of participants noticed.
Rensink et al. (1997)
Utilized the flicker paradigm to demonstrate that detecting important changes (helicopter near vs. far) took 4.0 alternations, whereas unimportant changes (railing height) took 16.2 alternations.
Simons & Chabris (1999)
Demonstrated inattentional blindness using the basketball passing video, in which 46% of participants failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit.
Tanaka & Farah (1993)
Demonstrated holistic face processing by showing that a nose is recognized better in a whole face than alone, whereas an architectural feature like a window is recognized equally well in a house or alone.
Gauthier
Showed that the fusiform face area (FFA) responds to cars and birds in car and bird experts, suggesting that FFA activity reflects visual expertise.
Kemp et al. (1997)
Conducted a supermarket photo credit card study where cashiers accepted the cardholder's own photo 93% of the time but correctly rejected a similar-looking person's fraudulent photo only 36% of the time.
Burton et al. (1999)
Found that police officers were no better than students at matching unfamiliar faces from video clips; students familiar with their professors were accurate, while unfamiliar students and police officers were not.
Pomarol-Clotet (2010)
Found that when matched for IQ, age, and gender, participants with schizophrenia had similar accuracy to controls when judging facial emotion, but were significantly slower.
Warren & Warren (1970)
Demonstrated phonemic restoration using '*eel' (with a cough replacing the initial sound); listeners heard wheel, heel, or peel based on later sentence context (axle, shoe, or orange).
McGurk & MacDonald (1976)
Demonstrated the McGurk effect, where seeing one visual syllable (e.g., 'gag' or GA) while hearing another auditory syllable (e.g., 'bab' or BA) results in reporting a third (e.g., 'dad' or DA); integrated in the superior temporal sulcus.
Roger Shepard
Perception researcher known for the Shepard tone (an auditory illusion that seems to rise forever) and the Shepard table illusion (where identical parallelograms appear different).
Ames
Created the Ames room, a trapezoidal room constructed to appear rectangular through a peephole, making individuals inside appear to change size.
Adelson
Created the checker-shadow illusion, showing that squares A and B are the exact same shade because the brain compensates for the shadow using lightness/color constancy.
Whipple (1914)
Investigated the span of apprehension, finding that participants reported only about 4-5 letters, which conflicted with their subjective experience of having seen all of them.
Sperling
Developed the partial report paradigm for visual sensory (iconic) memory; a post-array tone cued row recall, revealing that about 9 letters were available (vs. ~4 in full report) and that the trace decays in about 1 second.
Di Lollo
Developed the missing dot technique using two successive halves of a 5×5 dot matrix (24 of 25 dots) separated by a brief pause to study visual persistence as a purely perceptual phenomenon.
Darwin, Turvey & Crowder (1972)
Tested echoic memory using partial report across left, right, and center auditory channels, finding an estimate of 5.4 available items versus 4.4 in full report, with a decay of about 4 seconds.
Haber
Questioned the function of sensory memory, arguing that it appears primarily when a stimulus is followed by an artificial dark blank screen, whereas in real life new input masks it.
Brown / Peterson & Peterson
Tested short-term memory by presenting consonant trigrams followed by counting backward by threes to prevent rehearsal; found that about half of the letters were lost after 5 seconds and that proactive interference accumulated across trials.
Wickens et al. (1976)
Demonstrated release from proactive interference: after three trials in one category, switching to fruits on Trial 4 produced improved recall, with occupations showing the best release and fruits (control) the worst.
Atkinson & Shiffrin (1968)
Proposed the modal model of memory consisting of sensory memory (≤2s), short-term memory (about 30 s without rehearsal), long-term memory, and control processes.
Rundus (1971)
Had participants rehearse aloud to show that rehearsal frequency predicted the primacy effect and the asymptote, but did not explain the recency effect.
Craik & Tulving
Tested the depth of processing framework (appearance vs. rhyme vs. meaning) using incidental learning tasks, demonstrating that semantic processing yielded the highest surprise recall.
Craik & Watkins
Showed that the number of repetitions (maintenance rehearsal) did not improve later memory performance in an incidental learning task, posing a problem for the modal model.
Morris, Bransford & Franks
Formulated transfer-appropriate processing, showing that memory performance depends on the match between encoding and retrieval conditions rather than depth alone.
Baddeley & Hitch (1974)
Introduced the working memory model with the phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, and central executive; the episodic buffer was added around 2000 (about 25 years later).
Conrad & Hull (1964)
Demonstrated acoustic confusions in short-term recall; phonologically similar letter sequences (e.g., CTDGVB) were harder to recall than dissimilar ones (e.g., CWQKRX), supporting the phonological loop.
Brandimonte (1992)
Showed that repeating 'la-la-la' (articulatory suppression) blocked verbal naming, forcing participants to use visual coding, providing evidence for the visuospatial sketchpad.
Teasdale (1995)
Demonstrated that daydreaming made random number generation less random, providing evidence for the involvement of the central executive.
Daneman & Carpenter (1980)
Demonstrated that working memory capacity (specifically phonological loop capacity) strongly correlates with reading ability.
Christopher & MacDonald (2005)
Documented working memory deficits in depression across all three components: phonological loop (3.4 vs. 5.3) and central executive tasks (2.8 vs. 4.9 and 3.2 vs. 7.4).
Hayes et al. (2008)
Found that in generalized anxiety disorder, worry consumed working memory resources, making generated random key-press sequences significantly less random.
Klados et al. (2015)
Used event-related potentials (ERPs) to show that high math anxiety individuals exhibited less neural engagement during arithmetic and number working memory tasks.
Brooks
Tested participants visualizing the letter F, finding that verbal responding was easier than pointing because physical pointing competes with the visuospatial sketchpad.
H.M., Clive Wearing, and J.B.
Neurocognitive patients demonstrating a double dissociation between memory stores: H.M. (studied by Milner) and Clive Wearing could not form new long-term memories but had intact STM, whereas J.B. (studied by Shallice & Warrington) showed intact LTM with impaired STM.