Cognitive Psychology Lecture Notes

A set of vocabulary flashcards derived from lecture notes on cognitive psychology, focusing on key concepts and terms.

Cognition

The collection of mental processes and activities used in perceiving, remembering, thinking, and understanding.

Nativism

The philosophical view that certain skills or abilities are 'native' or hard-wired into the brain at birth.

Empiricism

The theory that knowledge arises from sensory experience and emphasizes the role of evidence in the formation of ideas.

Behaviorism

The psychological approach that defines psychology as the scientific study of observable behavior, ignoring internal mental states.

Cognitive Revolution

The period from 1956 to 1967 that marked the development of cognitive psychology as a new branch of experimental psychology.

Signal Detection Theory

A framework for understanding how individuals make decisions under uncertainty by analyzing the accuracy of responses.

Response Time

The amount of time taken to respond to a stimulus, often used in cognitive psychology experiments to measure cognitive processing speed.

Serial Processing

A type of cognitive processing in which tasks are completed one at a time in a sequence.

Parallel Processing

A type of cognitive processing in which multiple tasks are carried out at the same time.

Implicit Cognition

Mental processes that occur below the level of conscious awareness.

Explicit Cognition

Mental processes that are conscious and involve deliberate thought.

Donders’ Subtraction Method

A technique used to estimate the duration of mental processes by comparing response times across different types of tasks.

Lexical Decision Task

A timed task used in cognitive psychology to assess how quickly individuals recognize words versus nonwords.