Cognitive Psychology, Attention, and Perception Vocabulary

Vocabulary flashcards covering core concepts, theoretical perspectives, and major historical figures from the lectures on Cognitive Psychology, Attention, and Perception.

Attention

A cognitive process of selectively concentrating on specific information while filtering out irrelevant stimuli.

Selective Attention

The ability to focus on one stimulus while ignoring competing information.

Sustained Attention

The ability to maintain focus over an extended period of time.

Divided Attention

The ability to attend to more than one task simultaneously, although performance may decrease as task demands increase.

Alternating Attention

The ability to shift attention between different tasks requiring different cognitive demands.

Broadbent's Filter Theory

A theory proposing that information is filtered early based on physical characteristics (e.g., pitch, loudness, location), allowing only selected information to proceed to higher-level processing while the rest is blocked.

Treisman's Attenuation Theory

A theory proposing that unattended information is not completely blocked but weakened (attenuated), allowing important stimuli (such as one's name) to capture attention.

Late Selection Theory

A theory suggesting that all incoming information is processed to some degree before selection occurs, with attention operating after meaning has been extracted.

Cocktail Party Effect

The ability to notice personally meaningful information (such as one's name or a familiar voice) even when focused elsewhere.

Perception

The process of organizing, interpreting, and assigning meaning to sensory information received from the environment.

Selective Perception

The cognitive process through which individuals notice, interpret, and remember information that aligns with their existing beliefs, expectations, experiences, or interests, while ignoring or minimizing contradictory information.

Cognitive Psychology

The study of how people perceive, learn, remember, and think about information.

Dialectic

A developmental process where ideas evolve over time through a pattern of transformation involving a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis.

Thesis

A statement or belief proposed as a starting perspective in a dialectic.

Antithesis

A statement that counters a previous statement of belief in a dialectic.

Synthesis

An integration of the most credible features of two or more opposing views in a dialectic.

Structuralism

The first major school of thought in psychology, founded by Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener, which sought to understand the structure of the mind by analyzing perceptions into constituent components.

Introspection

A deliberate looking inward at pieces of information passing through consciousness.

Functionalism

A school of thought seeking to understand what people do and why they do it by studying the processes of how and why the mind works.

Pragmatists

Thinkers who are concerned not only with knowing what people do, but also with what can be done with knowledge of human behavior.

Associationism

A psychological approach that examines how elements of the mind, like events or ideas, become associated with one another to result in a form of learning.

Rehearsal

The conscious repetition of material to be learned.

Law of Effect

A principle formulated by Edward Lee Thorndike stating that a stimulus will tend to produce a certain response over time if an organism is rewarded for that response.

Behaviorism

A perspective that focuses only on the relation between observable behavior and environmental events or stimuli, asserting all human behaviors are learned through interactions with the environment.

Operant Conditioning

B. F. Skinner's framework proposing that behaviors are strengthened or weakened based on reinforcement (rewards) or punishment.

Gestalt Psychology

A perspective stating that psychological phenomena are best understood when viewed as organized, structured wholes rather than broken down into smaller parts.

Cognitivism

The belief that much of human behavior can be understood in terms of how people think, using precise quantitative analysis to study internal mental processes.