PSYC 230 Unit 1 - Introduction to Cognitive Psychology

Vocabulary flashcards covering foundational concepts, methodologies, neural structures, perceptual theories, and visual imagery from PSYC 230 Unit 1.

Cognition

The mental processes involved in acquiring, processing, storing, and using information.

Cognitive psychology

The scientific study of mental processes including sensation, perception, attention, memory, language, and decision making.

Experimental psychology

The study of mental processes through observable behavior, primarily measuring accuracy and reaction time.

Reaction time

The measured duration between stimulus presentation and behavioral response, indicating the amount of internal cognitive processing required.

Cognitive neuropsychology

The study of how brain damage or neurological impairment alters cognitive function to infer normal brain operation.

Analytic introspection

Wundt's method of attempting to analyze conscious experience by having trained individuals describe their conscious mental experiences.

Behaviorism

A psychological approach advocated by Watson and Skinner that focuses exclusively on observable behavior rather than unobservable internal mental processes.

Dendrites

Neuronal branching structures that primarily receive incoming chemical or physical signals from other neurons or stimuli.

Cell body (Soma)

The central component of a neuron that integrates incoming signals and contains the nucleus.

Axon

The neuronal extension that conducts an electrical action potential away from the soma toward the axon terminals.

Axon terminals

Structures at the end of an axon that release chemical neurotransmitters into the synaptic gap when an action potential arrives.

Resting potential

The membrane potential of a neuron at rest, typically measuring between $-60\,\text{mV}$ and $-80\,\text{mV}$ relative to the extracellular environment.

Action potential

A rapid electrical impulse that propagates down an axon and maintains a constant strength throughout its travel.

All-or-none law

The principle that individual action potentials maintain a uniform characteristic strength and do not change in magnitude based on stimulus intensity.

Refractory period

The brief recovery phase following an action potential during which a neuron cannot fire another action potential.

Intensity coding

The mechanism by which stimulus strength is encoded in the nervous system using the rate or pattern of action potentials.

Feature detectors

Neurons that respond selectively to specific features of visual stimuli, such as line orientation.

Specificity coding

The proposal that a single specific neuron is dedicated to responding to a single specific stimulus.

Sparse coding

The representation of a specific stimulus by the pattern of activation across a small group of neurons.

Population coding

The representation of a stimulus through a distributed pattern of activation across many neurons.

Single-cell recording

An invasive direct recording technique using a microelectrode to measure the firing rate of an individual neuron with high temporal and spatial precision.

Event-Related Potential (ERP)

A neuroimaging method derived by averaging stimulus-locked segments of raw EEG data to isolate specific cognitive responses.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

A non-invasive neuroimaging technique measuring changes in blood hemoglobin oxygenation to assess functional brain activity with high spatial resolution.

Frontal lobe

The cortical lobe responsible for motor control, executive functions, higher-order thinking, and decision making.

Parietal lobe

The cortical lobe responsible for processing somatosensory information and spatial location.

Temporal lobe

The cortical lobe involved in auditory processing, language comprehension, and visual object recognition.

Occipital lobe

The cortical lobe primary responsible for visual processing.

Precentral gyrus

The gyrus located in the frontal lobe that serves as the primary motor cortex.

Postcentral gyrus

The gyrus located in the parietal lobe that serves as the primary somatosensory cortex.

Broca's area

A region in the frontal lobe associated with language production; damage leads to slow, non-fluent, and ungrammatical speech despite intact comprehension.

Wernicke's area

A region in the temporal lobe associated with language comprehension; damage leads to fluent but meaningless speech and poor comprehension.

Transduction

The process of converting physical sensory energy from the environment into electrical neural signals.

Bistable image

A single physical image that can produce two alternating perceptual interpretations.

Bottom-up processing

Perceptual processing driven directly by incoming sensory data, moving sequentially from sensory receptors toward the brain.

Top-down processing

Perceptual processing guided by prior knowledge, expectations, contextual information, and past experience.

Inverse projection problem

The ambiguity inherent in visual perception where a 2D image projected onto the retina can be produced by an infinite number of different 3D objects.

Viewpoint invariance

The ability to recognize an object as identical across varying viewing angles and perspectives.

Habituation

The phenomenon in which repeated exposure to a stimulus leads to decreased attention or physiological response.

Placebo effect

A beneficial perceptual or physiological response produced by positive expectations regarding a treatment.

Nocebo effect

An increased perception of pain or negative outcome driven by negative expectations.

Pain Expectation Study Results

Experimental findings showing that positive expectations reduce pain ratings to 39, compared to 55 with no expectation, whereas negative expectations increase pain ratings to 64.

Endorphins

Endogenous opioids produced by the body that inhibit pain-signaling neurons.

Unconscious inference

Helmholtz's hypothesis that our perceptual system automatically and unconsciously uses past experience to interpret sensory input.

Likelihood principle

The principle stating that we perceive the object or layout that is most likely to have generated the observed sensory pattern.

Modal completion

The perceptual phenomenon of inferring complete boundaries or shapes even when sensory information is partially missing.

Schema

An organized body of knowledge regarding what objects or features typically exist in a specific type of scene.

Bayesian inference

A theoretical framework stating that perception depends on combining prior probability with current sensory likelihood.

Law of simplicity (Prägnanz)

Gestalt principle asserting that every stimulus pattern is perceived in a way that yields the simplest, most regular, and symmetrical interpretation.

Selective rearing

An experimental technique testing neural development by rearing animals in environments restricted to specific visual features, demonstrating cortical plasticity.

Monkey Lesion Double Dissociation

Experimental proof that temporal lobe lesions produce deficits in object discrimination but not landmark discrimination, whereas parietal lobe lesions produce deficits in landmark discrimination but not object discrimination.

Double dissociation

A neurophysiological situation where damage to area X impairs function A but spares function B, and damage to area Y spares function A but impairs function B, demonstrating independent systems.

Agnosia

A severe impairment in visual object recognition despite intact sensory vision, as observed in Patient D.F.

Optic ataxia

An inability to use vision to accurately guide physical reaching and grasping movements toward objects, caused by bilateral parietal damage as observed in Patient R.V.

Ventral pathway

The visual 'WHAT' pathway projecting to the temporal lobe, dedicated to conscious visual perception and object recognition.

Dorsal pathway

The visual 'WHERE/HOW' pathway projecting to the parietal lobe, dedicated to spatial processing and visually guided action execution.

Visual imagery

The subjective experience of creating mental sensory representations in the absence of external sensory stimulation.

Aphantasia

The complete absence or severe reduction of voluntary internal visual imagery.

Spatial / Depictive representation

A model asserting that mental imagery retains picture-like spatial layout properties, preserving distance, size, and spatial relationships.

Propositional representation

Pylyshyn's theory proposing that mental imagery is stored using abstract symbolic semantic relationships rather than visual mental images.

Tacit-knowledge explanation

The argument that experimental findings in mental scanning occur because participants implicitly use real-world physical knowledge to simulate natural timing rather than scanning an internal spatial map.