Descartes Critical Terms and Concepts in Cognitive Psychology

These flashcards cover key concepts and terminology from the lecture on cognitive psychology, providing definitions and explanations for essential terms.

Reductionism

Attempting to understand complex events by breaking them down into their components.

Ecological Validity

The generalizability to real-world situations, determining how applicable a study is to real-life situations.

Nativism

The view that certain cognitive abilities and knowledge are innate, present at birth.

Empiricism

The view that knowledge arises primarily from sensory experience and learning.

Structuralism

An early school of psychology that aimed to identify the basic elements of consciousness using introspection.

Functionalism

An approach focused on understanding the purpose or function of mental processes rather than their structure.

Behaviorism

A school of thought that studies observable behavior and rejects the scientific study of internal mental states.

Channel Capacity

Any system processing information has a limited capacity.

Serial Processing

Doing mental tasks one at a time in a series.

Parallel Processing

Doing multiple mental tasks at the same time.

Cascade Processing

A number of mental tasks may start at different times but may overlap.

Turing Test

A test of machine intelligence that determines whether a machine can produce responses indistinguishable from a human's.

Searle's Chinese Room

A thought experiment arguing that symbol manipulation alone does not constitute true understanding.

Dissociation

Evidence that two cognitive functions rely on different mechanisms, with one being impaired while the other is intact.

Trans cranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)

Applying repeated magnetic stimulation at the surface of the skull to temporarily disable a brain region.

Event-related Potential (ERP)

Brain responses measured via EEG that are time-locked to specific cognitive events.

P600 Component

An ERP component associated with syntactic processing and sentence reanalysis.

fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging)

A technique for examining brain function by measuring blood flow and oxygen use.

Dendrites

Branch-like structures that receive signals from other neurons.

Soma

The cell body of a neuron, which integrates incoming signals.

Axon

A long projection that transmits electrical signals to other neurons.

Action Potential

A brief electrical impulse that travels down the axon.

All-or-none Principle

An action potential either occurs fully or not at all.

Synapse

The junction between neurons where neurotransmitters are released.

Neocortex

The outer layer of the brain involved in higher cognitive functions.

Corpus Callosum

A bundle of nerve fibers connecting the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

Cerebral Lateralization

The specialization of functions in one cerebral hemisphere.

Contralaterality

The principle that the receptive and control centers on one side of the brain control the opposite side of the body.

Hippocampus

A structure involved in memory formation and spatial navigation.

Amygdala

A structure involved in emotion processing, especially fear.

Perceptrons

Simple artificial neurons that respond to weighted inputs.

Connectionism

An approach to cognition that models mental processes as networks of interconnected units.

Hidden Units

Units in a neural network that are not directly observable but contribute to processing.

Embodied Cognition

The view that cognition is shaped by the body's interactions with the environment.

Conceptually-Driven Processing

Top-down processing guided by prior knowledge and expectations.

Data-Driven Processing

Bottom-up processing driven by sensory input.

Lexical Decision Task

A timed task in which participants decide whether a letter string is a real word.

Word Frequency Effect

Common words are recognized faster than less common words.

Orthographic Neighborhood Size

The number of words that differ from a target word by one letter.

Donders’ Subtraction Method

A method for estimating the time required for specific mental processes.

Signal-Detection Theory

An approach to measuring accuracy that separates response bias from accuracy.

Diffusion Model

Allows for the analysis of accuracy and response times together, treating information as coming in gradually.

Global/Local Precedence

The tendency to perceive overall structure (global) before details (local).

Sensation

The detection of physical stimuli by sensory receptors.

Perception

The interpretation of sensory information.

Psychophysics

The process of interpreting and understanding sensory information.

Distance Effect

The greater the distance between stimuli being compared, the faster the decision that they differ.

Symbolic Distance Effect

Speed of judgments of differences between symbols affected by distance on some dimension.

Semantic Congruity Effect

Faster judgments when the comparison direction matches the magnitude of stimuli.

Retina

The light-sensitive layer at the back of the eye.

Rods and Cones

Photoreceptors in the eye; rods detect light/dark, cones detect color and detail.

Depth Perception Cues

Factors like binocular disparity and accommodation that aid in perceiving depth.

Hue

Color type (red, blue, etc.).

Brightness

Perceived light intensity.

Saturation

Color purity or vividness.

Agnosia

A failure or deficit in recognizing objects despite unimpaired basic sensory ability.

Fixation

A pause of the eyes on a specific location.

Saccade

A rapid eye movement between fixations.

Change Blindness

Failure to notice changes in stimuli that occur during a saccade.

Memory Systems

Structures involved in the storage and retrieval of information.

Partial Report Task

Sperling’s method demonstrating large-capacity sensory memory.

Backward Masking

A stimulus that interferes with the perception of a prior stimulus.

Sensory Memory

A brief memory store for sensory information.

Modality Effect

Better recall of auditory information at the end of a list.

Suffix Effect

Reduction of modality effect when an irrelevant sound follows a list.

Gestalt Principles of Grouping

Rules describing how elements are perceptually organized.

Template Approach

Object recognition by matching stimuli to stored templates.

Feature-Detection Approach

Classification done by breaking patterns down into features.

Word-Superiority Effect

Letters are recognized more accurately within words than in isolation.