PSCL 357 Exam 1 critical terms

Vocabulary flashcards covering core concepts in cognitive psychology, neurology, methods of study, and visual perception.

Nativism

The philosophical position that certain types of knowledge or abilities are innate or inborn.

Empiricism

The philosophical view that all knowledge is acquired through experience and observation.

Structuralism

An early school of psychology that aimed to analyze the basic elements or structure of conscious experience.

Functionalism

A school of psychology focused on how mental processes help organisms adapt, survive, and flourish.

Behaviorism

The psychological approach that limits its study to observable behavior, excluding mental states and internal processes.

Channel capacity

The limit on the amount of information that a system can process or transmit in a given amount of time.

Serial processing

An information processing mode where only one piece of information is handled at a time.

Parallel processing

The simultaneous processing of multiple pieces of information or different aspects of a task.

Cascade processing

A processing model where later stages of processing begin before earlier stages have finished.

LOGIC THEORIST

An early artificial intelligence program designed to mimic human mathematical problem-solving.

Turing Test

A test designed to determine if a machine can exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human.

Searle’s Chinese Room

A thought experiment used to argue that symbols can be processed without any actual understanding of their meaning.

Reductionism

The attempt to understand a complex system by breaking it down into its simpler constituent parts.

Ecological Validity

The extent to which experimental results can be generalized to real-world environments.

Dissociation

A situation where a brain injury or experimental manipulation impairs one cognitive function while leaving another intact.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation

A non-invasive technique that uses magnetic fields to temporarily disrupt or stimulate neural activity in the brain.

Event-related potential

The measure of electrical brain response that occurs as a direct result of a specific sensory, cognitive, or motor event.

P600 component

An event-related potential ($P600$) associated with the processing of syntactic violations or linguistic complexity.

fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging)

A neuroimaging technique that measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood oxygenation and flow.

Dendrites

The branching extensions of a neuron that receive chemical signals from other neurons.

Soma

The cell body of a neuron which contains the nucleus and maintains life-sustaining functions.

Axon

The long, threadlike extension of a neuron that transmits electrical impulses away from the cell body.

Action potential

The rapid electrical impulse that travels down an axon once the neural firing threshold is reached.

All-or-none principle

The principle that a neuron either fires completely with its full strength or does not fire at all.

Synapse

The gap between neurons where neurotransmitters are released to facilitate communication.

Neocortex

The outermost layer of the brain involved in higher-order functions like perception, language, and thought.

Corpus callosum

The dense band of nerve fibers that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

Cerebral lateralization

The tendency of some cognitive functions to be processed primarily in one brain hemisphere versus the other.

Contralaterality

The organization of the brain where the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body and vice versa.

Hippocampus

A brain structure within the limbic system critical for the formation of new explicit memories.

Amygdala

A brain structure involved in the processing of emotions, particularly fear and aggression.

Perceptrons

The simplest type of artificial neural network nodes, often used as models for biological neurons.

Connectionism

A framework in cognitive science that models mental processes as activations in networks of interconnected units.

Hidden Units

Layer of units in a neural network between the input layers and output layers that process internal representations.

Embodied Cognition

The theory that cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body's physical interactions with the world.

Conceptually-Driven Processing

Top-down processing where knowledge, expectations, and context influence how information is perceived.

Data-Driven Processing

Bottom-up processing that starts with raw sensory data and constructs a representation.

Lexical Decision Task

An experimental procedure where participants must quickly determine if a string of letters is a valid word.

Word frequency effect

The finding that people recognize and process common words more quickly than rare words.

Orthographic Neighborhood Size

The number of words that can be created by changing a single letter of a target word.

Donders’ Subtraction Method

A method used to measure the time required for specific mental tasks by subtracting the time of a baseline task.

Signal-Detection Theory

A theory describing how people distinguish between meaningful signals and irrelevant background noise.

Diffusion Model

A mathematical model of decision-making that describes evidence accumulation over time toward a threshold.

Global/local precedence

The phenomenon where the overall shape or global features of a stimulus are processed more quickly than individual parts.

Sensation

The physical process of our sensory organs receiving and detecting external stimuli.

Perception

The cognitive process of interpreting and organizing sensory information into meaningful experiences.

Psychophysics

The study of the relationship between physical stimuli and the psychological sensations they produce.

Distance Effect

The phenomenon where it takes less time to discriminate between two stimuli as they become physically more different.

Symbolic Distance Effect

The finding that comparison times decrease as the conceptual difference between two symbols increases.

Semantic Congruity Effect

Faster decision times when the comparative term matches the scale of the items (e.g., 'smaller' for two small objects).

Retina

The light-sensitive inner surface of the eye containing photoreceptor cells.

Rods and cones

Photoreceptors in the retina; rods detect light intensity in low light, while cones detect color and fine detail.

Binocular disparity

A depth cue based on the slightly different images received by the left and right eyes.

Accommodation

The process by which the eye's lens changes shape to focus on objects at various distances.

Interposition

A monocular depth cue that occurs when one object partially blocks the view of another, indicating it is closer.

Motion parallax

A depth cue where closer objects appear to move across the field of view faster than distant objects when the observer moves.

Hue

The specific dimension of color determined by the wavelength of light.

Brightness

The perceived intensity of light reflected from or emitted by a surface.

Saturation

The purity or vividness of a color, representing the amount of white mixed with a hue.

Fovea

The central focal point of the retina responsible for the highest visual acuity.

Agnosia

A neurological condition characterized by the inability to recognize familiar objects despite intact sensory organs.

Fixation

The brief period during which the eyes remain still to take in visual information.

Saccade

The rapid, jumpy movement of the eyes between two fixation points.

Change blindness

The failure to detect a significant change in a visual scene during a brief disruption.

Trans-saccadic memory

The memory system that integrates visual information across successive eye movements.

Partial Report Task

An experimental technique used to show that sensory memory can briefly hold more information than can be reported.

Backward Masking

The inhibition of a stimulus’s perception by presenting a second stimulus immediately after it.

Sensory memory

A very brief storage stage for sensory information, such as iconic (visual) or echoic (auditory) memory.

Modality effect

The finding that recall is typically better for the final items in a list when they are presented auditorily rather than visually.

Suffix Effect

The impairment of memory for the last item in an auditory list when it is followed by an irrelevant speech sound.

Lipread lists

Memory for lists of words perceived by watching lip movements, which often behaves like auditory storage.

Gestalt principles

A set of rules describing how we organize individual parts into meaningful wholes (e.g., similarity, proximity).

Template approach

A pattern recognition theory suggesting that we compare sensory input to stored mental 'stencils'.

Feature-detection approach

The theory that we recognize objects by identifying their individual components, such as lines or curves.

Pandemonium

A hierarchical feature-detection model of letter recognition involving different 'demons' for processing.

Geons

Basic three-dimensional geometric shapes that serve as the building blocks for object recognition.

Word-Superiority Effect

The phenomenon where letters are recognized more accurately when presented within a word than in isolation.