Cognitive Psychology: Multitasking, Executive Function, Attention, and Perception

Vocabulary flashcards covering multitasking neuroscience, executive function, selective attention, visual limits, and object perception across five lecture topics.

Multitasking

The concurrent performance of two or more cognitive tasks requiring two ongoing concurrent streams of active thought.

Digital Natives

A generation that has grown up native to the digital world through early and frequent exposure to smartphones, video games, and electronic communication devices.

Network Function of Thought

The neurocognitive perspective positing that human thought is produced through interactive collaboration and synchronized activation across 20 to 40 specialized cortical centers dynamically assembled based on task demands.

White Matter Myelination

The coating of axon bundles with an insulating material, which increases communication bandwidth and enables high-speed data transmission between collaborative gray matter brain centers.

Underadditivity of Multitasking Activation

The neuroimaging phenomenon where co-performing two tasks activates substantially less total brain volume than the mathematical sum of the brain activations evoked by each task performed individually.

Cell Phone Driving Effect

The cognitive finding from Just et al. (2008) showing that listening to spoken language while driving reduces driving-related brain activation by $37\%$ and leads to significantly degraded lane maintenance.

Broca's-Wernicke's Synchronization Shift

The temporal adaptation observed during sentence dual-listening where Broca's area ($\text{L IFG}$) peaks earlier to synchronize more closely with Wernicke's area ($\text{L STG}$), narrowing their peak activation latency from $1.6\text{--}2.0\,\text{s}$ down to $0.7\,\text{s}$.

Task Automaticity

A state of performance achieved when a skill or behavior no longer requires appreciable strategic or executive control from frontal-parietal brain systems.

Neural Efficiency

The property wherein higher-skilled or trained individuals consume fewer neural resources—measured by a smaller volume or lower magnitude of brain activation—to perform a task at a high level of proficiency.

Executive Control

A set of higher-order cognitive capacities strongly associated with the prefrontal cortex used for planful, goal-directed response selection, planning, and action regulation in complex or irregular situations.

Frontal Lobe Syndrome (FLS)

A clinical condition resulting from damage to the frontal lobes or their connectivity, characterized by preserved overall IQ alongside lost abilities to initiate actions, plan, or coordinate competing desires.

Flanker Task

An experimental task measuring cognitive control and response selection by requiring participants to respond to a central target stimulus flanked by congruent, incongruent, or neutral distractor stimuli.

Working Memory

The 'workspace of the mind' described by Baddeley, which actively holds and manipulates information using an executive controller and specialized subsystems like the phonological loop and visuo-spatial scratchpad.

Goal Maintenance Model

Braver's framework proposing that the executive controller maintains internal representations of goals within the prefrontal cortex to bias response selection against automatic or competing habit responses.

Meta-Cognition

The higher-level capacity to reflect on and regulate one's own thinking, encompassing goal setting, strategy application, self-monitoring, and evaluating strengths and weaknesses.

Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC)

A medial frontal brain region active during No-Go trials and conflict monitoring tasks, critical for response inhibition alongside the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex ($\text{DLPFC}$).

A-not-B Error

A developmental phenomenon in infants who struggle to inhibit a previously rewarded motor response to look for an object at location A, even after watching it be hidden at location B.

Greater Internet Dickwad Theory

A comic rule proposed by John Gabriel asserting that combining a normal person with online anonymity and an audience results in a total loss of social inhibition.

Selective Attention

The attentional mechanism described by William James through which the mind actively takes possession of one out of several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.

Feature Search

A visual search process where a target differs from distractors by a single distinct feature, allowing rapid, parallel automatic processing across the visual field.

Conjunction Search

A visual search task where the target is defined by a combination of two or more features, requiring effortful, serial scanning focused at specific spatial locations.

Feature Integration Theory

Anne Treisman's theory positing that individual visual features are processed automatically and in parallel, while focused attention directed via a master map of locations is required to bind features into unified object files.

Attentional Spotlight

A spatial metaphor for selective attention, depicting it as a spotlight that illuminates a contiguous, bounded region of space to facilitate visual processing within that focal area.

Object-Based Attention

An attentional selection model asserting that attention preferentially selects whole structured objects rather than unorganized spatial locations or individual isolated features.

Visual Neglect

A neurological syndrome following parietal lobe damage wherein a patient fails to attend to, respond to, or visually represent stimuli located on the contralesional (typically left) side of space or objects.

Extinction

A clinical symptom in visual neglect patients who can perceive a stimulus in their neglected visual field when presented alone, but fail to detect it when a competing stimulus is simultaneously presented on the intact side.

Negative Priming

Tipper's experimental phenomenon demonstrating that target processing is significantly slowed when the target was previously presented as an ignored distractor stimulus.

Biased Competition Theory

Desimone and Duncan's neural framework positing that attention biases local competitive neural interactions among competing stimuli in sensory areas using top-down goal signals.

Blind Spot

The area on the retina where the optic nerve exits the eye, completely lacking photoreceptor cells (rods and cones) and producing an unperceived gap in the visual field.

Visual Acuity

The spatial resolution or sharpness of vision, which reaches its peak at the fovea due to dense cone packing and minimal neural convergence, and drops significantly in the periphery.

Inattentional Blindness

The failure to perceive a fully visible, salient object or event because attention is intensely focused on another task or object.

Change Blindness

The inability to notice marked differences between two visual scenes when the change occurs during a brief visual disruption such as a flicker, eye blink, or scene cut.

Synesthesia

A neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary, consistent cross-modal experiences in an unstimulated pathway.

Constructivist Theory of Perception

A theoretical approach asserting that sensory input is underconstrained and ambiguous, requiring the brain to construct perceptual representations using top-down cues, assumptions, and inferences.

Structuralism

Wundt's classical stance in perception claiming that conscious visual perceptions are formed simply by summing elementary, localized sensory elements together.

Gestalt Psychology

An approach to perception asserting that 'the whole is different from the sum of its parts' and that sensory input is organized into meaningful structures according to innate organizational rules like Prägnanz.

Phi Phenomenon

An optical illusion of apparent motion created by rapidly alternating static stimuli presented in sequence, demonstrating that perception contains emergent motion not present in individual sensations.

Geon Theory

Biederman's Recognition-by-Components model proposing that 3D object recognition relies on parsing objects into an alphabet of basic volumetric primitives called geons.

Bayesian Inference in Perception

A mathematical framework for object recognition that calculates the posterior probability $P(S|I)$ of a scene by combining environmental priors $P(S)$ with visual evidence likelihoods $P(I|S)$: $P(S|I) = \frac{P(I|S) \times P(S)}{P(I)}$.