cognative psych exam 1

Donders

Studied mental processes using reaction time and helped establish experimental methods for studying cognition.

Helmholtz

Studied perception and proposed unconscious inference, explaining how the mind uses assumptions to interpret sensory information.

Ebbinghaus

Studied memory and forgetting using controlled experiments.

Wundt

Helped establish psychology as a scientific discipline and created an early psychology laboratory.

William James

Associated with functionalism and focused on the purpose and function of mental processes.

Watson

Helped establish behaviorism and argued that psychology should focus on observable behavior.

Skinner

Studied conditioning and behavior and emphasized how environmental consequences shape behavior.

Tolman

Studied learning and proposed cognitive maps, showing that behavior could not be fully explained by simple conditioning.

Structuralism

An early approach to psychology focused on identifying the basic elements or structures of conscious experience.

Functionalism

An approach focused on the purpose and function of mental processes and behavior.

Behaviorism

An approach that focused on observable behavior and conditioning rather than internal mental processes.

Cognition

Mental processes involved in acquiring, storing, transforming, and using information.

Rise of Behaviorism

A movement toward studying observable behavior and away from studying subjective mental experiences.

Fall of Behaviorism

Behaviorism became limited because conditioning could not explain all learning and behavior, including cognitive maps and language acquisition.

Tolman's Cognitive Maps

Mental representations of environments that provide evidence that learning cannot always be explained through simple stimulus-response associations.

Limitations on Conditioning

Evidence that not everything can be conditioned equally easily, suggesting biological and cognitive factors influence learning.

Skinner vs. Chomsky

Skinner explained language through behavior and conditioning, while Chomsky argued that language could not be adequately explained by conditioning alone.

Cognitive Revolution

A shift back toward studying mental processes such as memory, attention, language, and perception.

Localization of Function

The idea that specific areas of the brain are associated with particular functions.

Frontal Lobe

Associated with functions such as planning, decision-making, and control of behavior.

Parietal Lobe

Associated with processing sensory and spatial information.

Temporal Lobe

Associated with auditory processing, memory, and aspects of language.

Occipital Lobe

Primarily involved in visual processing.

Fusiform Face Area (FFA)

A brain region associated with processing faces.

Parahippocampal Place Area (PPA)

A brain region associated with processing places and scenes.

Extrastriate Body Area (EBA)

A brain region associated with processing bodies and body parts.

Neuron

The basic cell involved in communication within the nervous system.

Cell Body

The part of a neuron that contains the nucleus and maintains the cell.

Dendrites

Structures that receive incoming signals from other neurons.

Axon

The part of a neuron that carries signals away from the cell body.

Action Potential

The electrical signal that travels along an axon.

Excitatory Input

Neural input that increases the likelihood that a neuron will fire.

Inhibitory Input

Neural input that decreases the likelihood that a neuron will fire.

Neurotransmitters

Chemical messengers that transmit signals between neurons.

Neural Communication

Electrical communication occurs within a neuron, while chemical communication occurs between neurons.

Specificity Coding

The idea that individual neurons are specifically tuned to particular stimuli or features.

Population Coding

The idea that information is represented by the activity pattern of a group of neurons.

Sparse Coding

The idea that a small number of neurons within a larger population are active to represent a particular stimulus.

fMRI

A brain-imaging method based on changes in blood flow associated with neural activity.

PET

A brain-imaging method that measures changes related to blood flow and metabolic activity.

Microelectrode

A method for recording electrical activity from individual neurons.

EEG

A method that measures electrical activity from the brain using electrodes placed on the scalp.

Hubel and Wiesel

Researchers who used single-cell recordings from cats' visual cortex to study how neurons respond to visual features.

Feature Detectors

Neurons that respond selectively to particular visual features.

V1

The primary visual cortex where Hubel and Wiesel studied neurons responding to visual features.

Connectome

A map or description of the connections among neurons in the brain.

Neural Networks

Networks of interconnected neurons that work together to process information.

Default Mode Network

A network of interconnected brain regions associated with activity when the mind is not focused on a specific external task.

Sensation

The process of receiving information from the environment through the senses.

Perception

The process of interpreting and organizing sensory information.

Sensation vs. Perception

Sensation involves receiving sensory information, while perception involves interpreting that information.

Bottom-Up Processing

Perception driven by information entering through the senses.

Top-Down Processing

Perception influenced by prior knowledge, experience, and expectations.

Difficulties Creating a Perceiving Machine

Perception is difficult because a system must use both sensory information and prior knowledge to determine what objects or events caused the sensory input.

Inverse Projection Problem

The challenge of determining the three-dimensional object or scene that produced a two-dimensional image on the retina.

Viewpoint Invariance

The ability to recognize an object as the same object despite seeing it from different viewpoints.

Gestalt Rules

Rules describing how people organize individual elements into meaningful perceptual wholes.

Similarity

The tendency to group elements that look similar to one another.

Prägnanz / Simplicity / Good Figure

The tendency to perceive stimuli in the simplest or most organized way possible.

Good Continuation

The tendency to perceive lines or patterns as continuing smoothly rather than changing direction abruptly.

Familiarity

The tendency for familiar patterns or objects to influence perceptual organization.

Speech Segmentation

The process of identifying individual words within a continuous stream of speech.

Transitional Probabilities

The likelihood that one sound or syllable will follow another; these probabilities can help identify word boundaries in continuous speech.

Helmholtz's Unconscious Inference

The idea that perception involves unconscious assumptions or inferences about what is most likely causing sensory information.

Likelihood Principle

The idea that we perceive the object or interpretation that is most likely to have produced the sensory information.

Greeble Experiment

tested how the human brain learns to recognize complex object

Experience-Dependent Plasticity

The idea that experience can change how the brain processes information.

Environmental Regularities

The regular patterns in the environment that people use to help interpret sensory information.

Light-from-Above

The tendency to interpret objects as if light is coming from above, influencing how we perceive shape and depth.

Oblique Effect

The tendency to perceive and process horizontal and vertical orientations more easily than oblique orientations.

Double Dissociation

A pattern in which two abilities can be impaired independently, suggesting that they rely on separate underlying processes or systems.

Mirror Neurons

Neurons that fire both when we perform an action and when we observe someone else performing that same action.

Attention

The process of selectively focusing on particular information while limiting processing of other information.

Why We Need Attention

Attention is necessary because our processing capacity is limited and we cannot fully process all information around us at the same time.

Dichotic Listening Task

A task in which different messages are presented simultaneously to each ear to study selective attention.

Filter Models of Attention

Theories explaining how and when attention selects some information for further processing.

Early Selection

The idea that attention filters information early in processing, before meaning is fully analyzed.

Middle Selection

The idea that selection occurs at an intermediate stage of processing.

Late Selection

The idea that information is processed for meaning before attention determines what reaches awareness or response.

Broadbent

Proposed an early-selection filter model of attention.

Treisman

Developed an attenuation model in which unattended information is weakened rather than completely blocked.

McKay

Provided evidence that unattended information can be influenced by meaning, supporting later selection.

Attention as a Limited Capacity Resource

The idea that attention has a limited amount of processing capacity, so we cannot process all information equally at once.

High-Load Task

A task that uses a large amount of attentional capacity, leaving fewer resources for other information.

Low-Load Task

A task that uses relatively little attentional capacity, leaving more resources available for other information.

Stroop Effect

The difficulty of naming the ink color when the written word represents a different color.

Divided Attention

The attempt to attend to and process multiple sources of information or tasks at the same time.

Schneider & Shiffrin

Researchers whose studies examined controlled and automatic processing and how practice affects attention.

Controlled Processing

Processing that requires conscious attention and effort.

Automatic Processing

Processing that occurs with little conscious attention or effort.

Controlled to Automatic Processing

With sufficient practice, a task that initially requires controlled processing can become increasingly automatic.

Change Blindness

Failing to notice a change in a visual scene when the moment of change is not directly observed.

Inattentional Blindness

Failing to perceive something that is not being attended to, even when looking directly at it.

Change Blindness vs. Inattentional Blindness

Change blindness involves failing to notice a change, while inattentional blindness involves failing to notice an unexpected object or event because attention is focused elsewhere.

Posner Cuing Paradigm

A method used to study covert visual attention by using cues to indicate where a target is likely to appear.

Valid Cue

A cue that correctly signals the location of the upcoming target.

Invalid Cue

A cue that does not correctly signal the location of the upcoming target.

Object-Based Attention

The idea that attention can enhance processing across an entire object rather than only at one specific location.

Egly et al. Study

A study demonstrating object-based attention and showing that attentional benefits can spread throughout an attended object.

Covert Attention

Shifting attention without moving the eyes.