Cognitive Psychology: Foundations, Neuroscience, Sensation, Perception, Attention, and Working Memory

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering introductory cognitive psychology, history, research methodology, neuroanatomy, neural communication, sensation, perception, attention, and working memory models.

Cognitive Psychology

The scientific study of human behavior focused on how the mind is structurally and functionally organized, interconnected, and gives rise to behavior across experience, behavior, and context.

Introspectionism

A mid-to-late 1800s school of thought associated with Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener where trained participants reflect upon their own mental processes to catalog conscious experience by intensity, quality, duration, and extent.

Functionalism

An early 1900s psychological approach associated with James Rowland Angell and William James that focuses on the adaptive functions and purposes of mental processes rather than their static contents.

Behaviorism

An approach championed by John B. Watson, Ivan Pavlov, and B. F. Skinner that restricts psychology to the study of directly observable stimuli, responses, and reinforcements while ignoring the unobservable mind.

Logical Inference

The methodological solution adopted by cognitive psychology and other sciences (such as evolution in biology and quantum mechanics in physics) to infer unobservable underlying processes based on observable empirical consequences.

Information Processing Metaphor

The foundational assumption in cognitive psychology that the human brain operates like a collection of specialized computers taking in stimuli as inputs, executing functional transformations, and generating responses as outputs.

Declarative Memory

Memory for explicit knowledge that can be consciously stated, comprising factual semantic memory and event-based episodic memory.

Procedural Memory

Implicit motor and cognitive memory for knowing how to execute skills, such as reading or playing an instrument.

Action Potential

An all-or-none electrochemical impulse generated when a neuron's membrane potential reaches a threshold of approximately $-55\,\text{mV}$, depolarizing up to $+40\,\text{mV}$ before repolarizing and hyperpolarizing back to a resting state of $-70\,\text{mV}$.

Rate Coding

The neural principle where increasing the intensity of a physical stimulus does not change the speed or amplitude of individual action potentials, but instead increases the frequency at which the neuron fires.

Myelin Sheath

A lipid-based insulating layer surrounding the axon that speeds up the transmission of electrical action potentials along the nerve fiber.

Synapse

The microscopic junction between the terminal button of a presynaptic axon and the dendrite or cell body of a postsynaptic neuron across which neurotransmitters are released.

Phrenology

The debunked 19th-century theory proposed by Franz Joseph Gall positing that specific mental faculties and character traits are localized in distinct brain organs, reflected by measurable bumps on the skull.

Pierre Flourens

A French physiologist who challenged phrenology by lesioning animal brains and mistakenly concluded that brains operate as an undifferentiated whole, giving rise to the myth that humans only use a fraction of their brain when in fact we use over $96\%$ of it.

Broca's Aphasia

A language deficit caused by damage to Broca's area in the left frontal lobe, characterized by slow, halting speech and telegraphic grammar lacking function words, while language comprehension remains largely intact.

Wernicke's Aphasia

A language impairment caused by damage to Wernicke's area in the left temporal lobe, marked by fluent, effortless speech that lacks semantic coherence, contains neologisms, and is accompanied by severe comprehension deficits.

Sensation

The reception of energy by sensory receptor organs and the initial steps taken by the sense organs and brain to detect a physical stimulus.

Perception

The organization, interpretation, and meaningful extraction of sensory input by the brain into conscious mental experiences.

Transduction

The biological process by which sensory receptor cells convert physical stimulus energy into electrical electrochemical signals that can be transmitted across neurons.

Limbic System

A group of subcortical brain structures including the hippocampus (long-term memory), thalamus (sensory relay), hypothalamus (hormone/emotion/drive regulation), and amygdala (fear, panic, basic drives).

Basilar Membrane Frequency Tuning

The tonotopic organization of the inner ear cochlea, where the narrow and stiff base responds best to high-frequency sounds, while the wider and more flexible apex responds best to low-frequency sounds.

Duplex Theory of Vision

The visual principle that the retina utilizes two distinct photoreceptor systems: roughly $120\times 10^6$ rods that operate in low light without color vision, and roughly $7\times 10^6$ cones concentrated at the fovea that provide high acuity and color sensitivity ($64\%$ red, $32\%$ green, $2\%$ blue).

Opponent-Process Theory

A theory of color vision stating that photoreceptor responses are paired into opposing channels (red-green, blue-yellow, and black-white), explaining complementary color afterimages through neural fatigue and rebound.

Lateral Inhibition

An antagonistic neural mechanism where an excited receptor neuron inhibits the activity of its immediate neighbors via interneurons, creating contrast and sharpening edges in visual processing.

Center-Surround Receptive Field

An arrangement in retinal ganglion and LGN cells where illumination of the center region either increases (on-center) or decreases (off-center) neural firing, while illumination of the surrounding ring produces the exact opposite effect.

Magnocellular (M) Cells

Large retinal ganglion cells that make up approximately $10\%$ of the optic tract, feature large receptive fields, respond transiently, and project to the magnocellular layer of the LGN to process motion, location, and gross form.

Parvocellular (P) Cells

Medium-sized retinal ganglion cells constituting approximately $80\%$ of the visual pathway, possessing small receptive fields and sustained responses that project to the parvocellular LGN layer to encode patterns, fine detail, and color.

Simple Cortical Cells

Neurons located in the primary visual cortex (V1) that fire selectively to stationary elongated bars of light possessing a specific orientation, width, and precise retinal location.

Complex Cortical Cells

Visual cortical cells that fire most robustly to oriented bars and edges moving in a specific direction across a broader receptive field.

Hypercomplex Cells

End-stopped visual cortical neurons that respond optimally to moving lines of specific lengths, sharp corners, angles, or gaps.

Dorsal Visual Pathway

The cortical 'where' pathway projecting from the primary visual cortex to the parietal lobe that calculates spatial location, motion, and coordinates visuomotor action.

Ventral Visual Pathway

The cortical 'what' pathway projecting from the primary visual cortex to the temporal lobe specialized for object recognition, face processing, and detailed form identification.

Brunswik's Lens Model of Perception

A perceptual framework illustrating how an external distal stimulus projects ambiguous sensory proximal stimuli onto receptors, which are reconstructed through perceptual filters into a conscious percept.

Distal Stimulus

The actual physical object or event in the environment that reflects or emits energy detected by our sensory receptors.

Proximal Stimulus

The physical pattern of energy (such as the inverted retinal image) that directly stimulates the surface of our sensory receptors.

Paradoxical Correspondence

A phenomenon in which perceptual experience accurately matches the distal physical stimulus despite a mismatched or distorted proximal stimulus, exemplified by size, shape, and color constancies.

Direct Perception

James J. Gibson's ecological approach proposing that the ambient visual environment contains unambiguous, rich information (such as texture gradients and motion parallax) that organisms detect directly without internal cognitive models or computational rules.

Motion Parallax

A monocular depth cue wherein moving observers perceive objects closer than the fixation point as moving rapidly in the opposite direction, while distant objects appear to move slowly in the same direction.

Law of Prägnanz

The foundational Gestalt principle stating that individuals organize visual arrays into the simplest, most regular, and most symmetrical configurations possible.

Gestalt Law of Proximity

A perceptual grouping rule stating that elements located close to one another in physical space are automatically grouped together into coherent visual units.

Gestalt Law of Continuity

A visual grouping principle asserting that intersecting lines or paths are perceived as continuous, smooth curves rather than abrupt angles or disjointed segments.

Gestalt Law of Closure

The perceptual tendency to mentally fill in gaps and perceive incomplete, broken figures as closed, whole geometric shapes.

Müller-Lyer Illusion

A geometric-optical illusion where two lines of equal length appear unequal depending on whether inward-pointing or outward-pointing arrowheads are attached to their endpoints.

Stroop Effect

The finding that naming the font color of an incongruent color word (e.g., the word 'RED' printed in blue ink) is significantly slower and more error-prone than naming congruent color words or neutral stimuli due to automatic word-reading interference.

Cocktail Party Effect

The human capacity to selectively attend to a single conversational speech stream amidst a loud environment of multiple conversations, while still remaining receptive to personally relevant salient cues such as one's own name.

Dichotic Listening Task

An experimental auditory procedure where distinct auditory messages are played simultaneously to each ear via headphones and participants shadow (repeat aloud) the message in one designated attended ear.

Broadbent's Early Selection Filter Model

An early attentional model asserting that all incoming stimuli enter a temporary sensory buffer, where a selective filter completely blocks unattended signals based solely on physical acoustic properties before semantic processing occurs.

Treisman's Attenuation Model

An attention model suggesting that unattended sensory messages are not completely blocked, but rather attenuated (turned down in volume), allowing highly primed or meaningful words (like one's name) to exceed the threshold for conscious identification.

Late Selection Model

An attentional model proposed by Deutsch and Deutsch proposing that all sensory signals are processed to the level of semantic recognition before attentional filtering and memory access take place.

Feature Integration Theory (FIT)

Anne Treisman's two-stage attention framework consisting of an automatic pre-attentive stage that registers individual features in parallel, followed by a focused attentive stage that uses attention as mental glue to bind features together at a specific location.

Conjunction Search

A visual search task requiring the combination of two or more distinct visual features (such as color and shape), characterized by serial, effortful scanning where reaction time increases linearly with set size.

Posner's Spatial Cuing Task

An experimental task measuring covert spatial attention that demonstrates faster reaction times following valid directional cues compared to neutral and invalid cues, illustrating attentional benefits and costs.

Unilateral Visual Neglect

A neuropsychological attentional deficit typically resulting from damage to the right parietal lobe, causing patients to neglect the contralateral (left) half of space and objects due to an inability to disengage attention from the ipsilesional side.

Modal Model of Memory

The multi-store memory framework developed by Atkinson and Shiffrin consisting of high-capacity brief sensory stores (iconic, echoic), a limited short-term store (STM), and a long-term memory store (LTM).

Digit Span

A measure of short-term memory capacity defined as the longest sequence of ordered digits an individual can accurately repeat immediately after presentation, traditionally averaging $7 \pm 2$ chunks.

Brown-Peterson Task

A memory paradigm where participants are presented with three items and must count backward by threes during a delay, demonstrating rapid short-term memory forgetting originally attributed to passive trace decay.

Proactive Interference

The disruptive effect of previously learned older information that interferes with the encoding, retention, or retrieval of newly acquired information.

Serial Position Curve

The U-shaped recall profile across a list of items showing superior performance for early items (primacy effect, mediated by long-term storage) and late items (recency effect, mediated by temporary sensory/working stores).

Working Memory Model (Baddeley & Hitch)

A multi-component memory system comprising a supervisory central executive, a speech-based phonological loop, an imagistic visuospatial sketchpad, and an integrative episodic buffer that supports simultaneous active storage and cognitive manipulation.

Phonological Loop

The working memory subsystem specialized for verbal material, consisting of a passive phonological short-term store whose contents decay within seconds and an active subvocal rehearsal mechanism that refreshes speech traces.

Phonological Similarity Effect

The impairment in short-term recall observed when memorizing lists of items that share acoustic properties (e.g., B, C, P, T, V) compared to acoustically distinct items, regardless of visual similarity or meaning.

Articulatory Suppression

A technique that disables subvocal rehearsal by having participants repeatedly utter an irrelevant sound (e.g., 'the, the, the') during memory encoding, eliminating the word length and phonological similarity effects for visually presented items.

Articulatory Duration Effect

The empirical finding demonstrating that short-term memory capacity is determined by the total duration required to subvocally rehearse the items—specifically what a person can articulate in $1.5$ to $2\,\text{seconds}$—rather than raw syllable counts.

Visuospatial Sketchpad

The slave component of working memory located primarily in right prefrontal, premotor, and occipital brain regions responsible for generating, storing, and manipulating visual images and spatial mental maps.

Central Executive

The attentional control component of working memory that allocates attentional focus, coordinates the subordinate slave buffers, initiates strategy selection, and monitors ongoing cognitive tasks.

Dysexecutive Syndrome

A cluster of behavioral and cognitive impairments resulting from frontal lobe damage characterized by severe distractibility, diminished planning, poor organization, and pathological perseveration.

Cognitive Psychology

The scientific study of human behavior focusing on how the mind is structurally and functionally organized and interconnected to give rise to behavior, examining the bidirectional relationships between experience, behavior, and context.

Introspectionism

A late 19th-century psychological approach developed by Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener that asked trained participants to reflect upon and catalog the components of their own conscious experience (such as sensations with intensity, quality, duration, and extent) in response to visual, auditory, and conceptual stimuli.

Functionalism

An early 20th-century psychological movement associated with James Rowland Angell and William James that focused on understanding the purposes and operations of mental processes rather than documenting the static contents of consciousness.

Behaviorism

A paradigm associated with Ivan Pavlov and B. F. Skinner that defines psychology strictly as the science of observable behavior, intentionally ignoring the unobservable mind and focusing exclusively on predicting behavior via external stimuli, responses, and reinforcement schedules.

Logical Inference

The scientific method of deducing unobservable internal processes and mechanisms from observable reflections and outputs (such as behavior, reaction times, and physiological changes), mirroring methods used in evolutionary biology and quantum mechanics.

Information Processing Metaphor

The foundational cognitive assumption that the human brain functions analogously to a collection of specialized computers, taking in environmental input (stimulus), manipulating internal representations through algorithmic processes, and producing output (behavior).

Declarative Memory

A form of long-term memory representing 'knowing that,' which is subdivided into semantic memory (general facts and world knowledge) and episodic memory (multimodal, event-based autobiographical experiences).

Procedural Memory

A category of non-declarative long-term memory representing 'knowing how' to execute learned motor and cognitive skills, such as reading, speaking, or playing an instrument.

Action Potential

An all-or-none electrochemical nerve impulse initiated when membrane depolarization crosses the threshold level ($-55\,\text{mV}$), characterized by a voltage spike reaching $+40\,\text{mV}$ followed by repolarization, hyperpolarization, and recovery to the resting state ($-70\,\text{mV}$).

Neural Coding of Intensity

The principle that increasing the intensity of a physical stimulus does not change the speed, duration, or voltage peak of an action potential, but instead increases the frequency (rate) at which the neuron fires.

Myelin Sheath

A lipid-rich insulating layer enclosing the axons of neurons that significantly accelerates the propagation speed of electrical action potentials.

Reuptake

A biological process preventing synaptic depletion and prolonged activation in which excess neurotransmitter molecules in the synaptic cleft are drawn back into the presynaptic terminal.

Phrenology

A historical theory introduced by Franz Joseph Gall proposing that the brain is organized into distinct cortical faculties whose developmental degree can be assessed by palpating morphological bumps and ridges on the human skull.

Pierre Flourens

A 19th-century French physiologist who lesioned rat brains to refute phrenology, concluding incorrectly from crude behavioral observation that animals use only a tiny fraction of their brain (whereas modern neuroscience establishes that mammals utilize over $96\%$ of their brain).

Broca's Aphasia

A language disorder caused by focal lesion to Broca's area in the left frontal lobe, characterized by slow, halting speech production, omitted function words, and simplified grammar, while language comprehension remains largely intact.

Wernicke's Aphasia

A fluent aphasia resulting from damage to Wernicke's area in the left temporal lobe, marked by effortless, structurally fluent speech that is semantically meaningless, replete with neologisms and word substitutions, and accompanied by severe comprehension deficits.

Transduction

The neurobiological transformation of physical stimulus energy (such as photons, sound pressure waves, or chemical tastants) into electrical changes within sensory receptor cells.

Limbic System

A core subcortical network mediating emotion, memory, and regulatory drives, containing the hippocampus (long-term memory), thalamus (early sensory relay), hypothalamus (hormonal drives, emotional regulation, pleasure), and amygdala (fear, panic, hunger, sexuality).

Basic Taste Qualities

The five fundamental chemical taste modalities detected by the tongue: salty (sodium $\text{Na}^+$ ions), sour (acids and hydrogen ions indicating spoilage), sweet (sugars), bitter (alkaloids signaling toxicity), and umami.

Basilar Membrane Tonotopic Tuning

The acoustic coding organization along the cochlea: the narrow and stiff base near the oval window resonates to high-frequency sounds, while the wider and more flexible apex responds preferentially to low-frequency sounds.

Duplex Theory of Vision

The organizational division of visual reception into two photoreceptor classes: approximately $120\text{ million}$ rods providing high sensitivity under scotopic conditions without color perception, and $5\text{–}7\text{ million}$ cones concentrated in the fovea providing high-acuity color vision under photopic lighting.

Visual Information Pathway

The progressive hierarchical reduction of retinal signals from approximately $125\text{ million}$ photoreceptors (rods and cones) to $10\text{ million}$ bipolar cells, $1\text{ million}$ retinal ganglion cells, the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), and finally the primary visual cortex.

Opponent Process Theory

The perceptual mechanism explaining complementary color afterimages, whereby color perception is structured into antagonistic channels (red/green and blue/yellow); sustained stimulation fatigues one receptor type, producing a rebound percept of the opposing hue.

Lateral Inhibition

A neural wiring pattern where stimulated receptor cells activate interneurons that inhibit adjacent pathways, suppressing uniform stimulation and accentuating sharp luminance boundaries for edge detection.

Receptive Field

The specific region of a sensory receptor surface (e.g., the retina) that, upon stimulation, modulates the firing rate of a downstream sensory neuron (such as an on-center/off-surround retinal ganglion cell).

Magnocellular (M) Cells

Large retinal ganglion cells constituting approximately $10\%$ of visual output that feature large receptive fields, thick rapidly conducting axons, transient firing profiles, and specialization for motion, coarse spatial location, and gross form.

Parvocellular (P) Cells

Retinal ganglion cells making up approximately $80\%$ of visual output, concentrated in the fovea, characterized by small receptive fields, sustained firing rates, and specialization for fine details, color, and high-resolution patterns.

Simple Cortical Cells

Primary visual cortex neurons (in V1) whose receptive fields possess distinct excitatory and inhibitory zones, responding selectively to stationary bars of light with specific orientations, widths, and retinal positions.

Complex Cortical Cells

Neurons in the visual cortex that respond maximally to straight edges or bars of light oriented in a specific alignment moving in a particular direction across their receptive field.

Hypercomplex Cells

Visual cortex feature-detecting neurons that fire selectively to moving lines of specific lengths, terminating angles, corners, or gaps, demonstrating strong end-stopping inhibition.

Dorsal 'Where' Pathway

The visual processing stream that projects from the primary visual cortex (V1) superiorly into the parietal lobe, dedicated to computing spatial localization, depth, and motion.

Ventral 'What' Pathway

The visual processing stream that extends from the primary visual cortex (V1) inferiorly into the temporal lobe, specialized for object identification, color recognition, and facial discrimination.

Brunswik's Lens Model of Perception

A perceptual framework conceptualizing perception as an active, probabilistic reconstruction where sensory receptors act as an imperfect 'lens,' transforming distant environmental distal stimuli into proximal stimuli to formulate a perceptual hypothesis.

Paradoxical Correspondence

A state in perception where the proximal stimulus does not physically match the properties of the distal stimulus, yet the conscious perceptual experience accurately corresponds to the true physical object (e.g., size, shape, and color constancy).