Cognitive Psychology Review: Cognitive Revolution, Neuroanatomy, and Visual Perception

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the Cognitive Revolution, historical foundations, neuroanatomy, brain imaging, action potentials, visual system pathways, Gestalt principles, and visual illusions.

Introspection

A research method initiated in the late 1800s by Wilhelm Wundt and Edward B. Titchener that involves looking within to observe and record one's own conscious thoughts and experiences through systematic training.

Behaviorism

A school of thought that dominated American psychology during the first half of the 20th century, insisting that psychology focus exclusively on observable behaviors and external stimuli rather than unobservable mental events.

Henry Molaison (H.M.)

A famous psychological patient who had his hippocampus removed to treat epilepsy, resulting in an inability to form new explicit memories and a loss of adult self-identity.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

An intellectual figure who advocated for inductive reasoning, which involves generalizing broad theories from specific empirical observations.

René Descartes (1596-1650)

A philosopher and mathematician who proposed using mathematical principles as the foundation of science to express the laws governing the physical world.

Isaac Newton

A scientist who unified inductive and deductive reasoning by asserting that laws are discovered through empirical observation and validated via mathematics.

Reductionism

The philosophical approach stating that complex phenomena can and should be explained by reducing higher-level concepts to simpler, lower-level processes.

Ulric Neisser

Cognitive psychologist known as the father of cognitive psychology, whose 1967 book "Cognitive Psychology" shifted scientific attention toward internal mental processes like perception, memory, and problem solving.

Cognitive Map

A mental representation of spatial surroundings, demonstrated by Edward Tolman using rats in a maze to prove that learning can occur without immediate changes in behavior.

Tolman's Maze

An experimental apparatus used by Edward Tolman in which rats explored a maze without food for 10 days, demonstrating latent learning and rapid navigation once food was added on day 11.

Computational Level

The highest level in David Marr's framework that identifies the purpose or goal of a computation (answering "what" and "why").

Algorithmic Level

The intermediate level in David Marr's framework that specifies the exact representations and processing steps used to execute a task (answering "how").

Implementational Level

The lowest level in David Marr's framework that describes the physical hardware or biological structures (such as neural circuits) executing a computation.

Gestalt Psychology

A European movement in psychology asserting that mental processes and perceptions cannot be understood by breaking them into parts, emphasizing that the perceptual whole is different from the sum of its parts.

Information-Processing Approach

A perspective in cognitive psychology that conceptualizes the human mind using computer terminology and processes, analyzing cognitive operations as software-like procedures.

Cognitive Neuroscience

The interdisciplinary field that studies the brain and nervous system to understand the biological mechanisms underlying mental functioning.

Clinical Neuropsychology

The subfield of psychology that investigates human brain function and cognitive abilities by observing performance deficits in patients with localized brain damage.

Blindsight

A neurological condition resulting from visual cortex damage in which a patient can accurately respond to visual stimuli within their blind field without conscious visual awareness.

Capgras Syndrome

A condition in which a patient correctly identifies the faces of loved ones but insists they are impostors due to disrupted emotional processing stemming from combined amygdala and prefrontal cortex damage.

Amygdala

A limbic system structure in the temporal lobe essential for emotional processing, emotional decision making, and the formation of emotional memories.

Prefrontal Cortex

A region at the front of the frontal lobe critical for executive functioning, analytical reasoning, planning, and inhibiting illogical thoughts.

Cerebellum

The largest structure of the hindbrain, comprising $10\%$ of total brain volume and over $50\%$ of its neurons, primarily involved in balance, coordination, and motor control.

Thalamus

A subcortical forebrain structure that acts as the primary sensory relay station, routing incoming sensory information to appropriate cortical areas.

Hypothalamus

A subcortical forebrain structure located beneath the thalamus that controls behaviors necessary to meet basic biological needs (such as eating, drinking, and temperature regulation).

Contralateral Control

The structural pattern of neural organization where the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex controls and receives input from the right side of the body, and vice versa.

Apraxia

A movement disorder caused by cortical association area damage that impairs an individual's ability to initiate or execute intentional, voluntary motor actions.

Agnosia

A neurological impairment resulting from association area damage that disrupts an individual's ability to recognize or identify objects using a specific sensory modality.

Unilateral Neglect Syndrome

A spatial attention disorder, typically caused by parietal lobe damage, in which an individual completely ignores or fails to attend to stimuli on one side of space.

Aphasia

An impairment of language comprehension or production caused by damage to specialized language regions of the cerebral cortex.

Corpus Callosum

The largest commissure in the brain, consisting of a thick band of nerve fibers connecting the left and right cerebral hemispheres to allow interhemispheric communication.

Positron Emission Tomography (PET)

A functional neuroimaging technique that tracks metabolic activity by measuring glucose consumption across specific brain regions.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

A functional neuroimaging technique that measures oxygenation levels in regional blood flow to index moment-by-moment neural activity.

Fusiform Face Area (FFA)

A specialized region in the temporal lobe that exhibits heightened neural activation when viewing faces.

Parahippocampal Place Area (PPA)

A specialized brain region in the temporal lobe that shows increased neural activation when viewing images of places and spatial scenes.

Electroencephalogram (EEG)

A technique that records broad rhythms and electrical activity of populations of neurons over time, offering exceptional temporal resolution but limited spatial resolution.

All-or-None Law

The physiological principle stating that once a neuron's firing threshold is surpassed, an action potential is generated at a uniform magnitude regardless of stimulus intensity.

Akinetopsia

A rare neuropsychological condition characterized by an inability to perceive motion, causing moving objects to be experienced as static snapshots.

Rods

Photoreceptors in the retina sensitive to low light levels that operate in dim illumination, yield lower visual acuity, lack color sensitivity, and are absent in the fovea.

Cones

Photoreceptors concentrated in and near the fovea that provide high visual acuity and color perception but require higher light levels to function.

Lateral Inhibition

A retinal circuit mechanism in which active photoreceptor and bipolar cells inhibit adjacent cells, enhancing brightness contrast and sharp edges.

(ventral) What System

The visual processing pathway connecting the occipital cortex to the inferotemporal cortex that mediates object identification; damage leads to visual agnosia.

(dorsal) Where System

The visual processing pathway connecting the occipital cortex to the posterior parietal cortex that processes spatial locations and guides movement; damage causes reaching difficulties.

Binding Problem

The challenge of integrating separate visual features (such as color, motion, and form) processed by distinct brain areas into a single coherent visual perception.

Neural Synchrony

A theoretical solution to the binding problem wherein neurons in different regions fire action potentials at the exact same rhythm when processing attributes of the same object.

Navon Effect

A visual processing phenomenon demonstrating that global features of a hierarchical stimulus are perceived before its local component features enter conscious awareness.

Perceptual Constancy

The ability to perceive constant physical properties of objects (such as size, shape, and brightness) despite varying viewing conditions and changing retinal images.

Binocular Disparity

A binocular depth cue arising from the distance between the eyes, resulting in slightly different retinal images that the brain uses to compute depth.

Pop-out Effect

The automatic capture of visual attention by a single target possessing a unique feature, allowing detection speed to remain constant regardless of the number of distractors.

Stroop Effect

A demonstration of cognitive automaticity where naming the physical ink color of a word is significantly slowed when the word spells out a conflicting color name.

Ecological Psychology

An approach to perception originated by J.J. Gibson asserting that organisms perceive environmental affordances directly from spatial patterns in light (such as optic flow) without mental reconstruction.

Prosopagnosia

A neurological disorder characterized by an inability to recognize familiar faces, often caused by damage to the right hemisphere or inherited as a dominant genetic trait.

Kanizsa Triangle

An optical illusion in which aligned Pac-Man shapes and angles lead the visual system to perceive an intact white triangle with illusory contours.