Cognitive Psychology: Attention, Short-Term Memory, and Working Memory

Vocabulary flashcards generated from Cognitive Psychology textbook chapters on Attention and Working Memory.

Attention

The ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations in the environment.

Selective Attention

The focusing of attention on one specific location, object, or message to the exclusion of all others.

Overt Attention

The process of shifting attention from one place to another by moving the eyes.

Covert Attention

Directing attention to a location or stimulus without moving the eyes (seeing out of the corner of the eye).

Divided Attention

The distribution of attention among two or more tasks at the same time.

Dichotic Listening

An experimental auditory procedure in which different messages are presented simultaneously to the two ears.

Shadowing

The procedure of repeating a message out loud as it is being heard in an attended listening ear.

Early Selection Model

A model of selective attention proposing that a filter eliminates unattended information at an early stage based on physical characteristics.

Broadbent's Filter Model of Attention

An early selection model proposing that incoming information passes through sensory memory, a filter, a detector, and short-term memory.

Bottleneck Model

A term for Broadbent's filter model because the filter restricts the large flow of incoming information, similar to the neck of a bottle.

Cocktail Party Effect

The phenomenon where a person selectively listens to one message among many but still detects a distinctive unattended message, such as their own name.

Dear Aunt Jane Experiment

An experiment by Gray and Wedderburn demonstrating that participants switch attention between ears based on the meaning of words.

Attenuation Theory of Attention

Treisman's selective attention theory proposing an attenuator that analyzes incoming messages and a dictionary unit that processes word thresholds.

Attenuator

In Treisman's model, a processing stage that analyzes incoming messages by physical characteristics, language, and meaning, passing both attended and attenuated messages through.

Dictionary Unit

A processing unit in Treisman's attenuation model containing stored words, each with a specific threshold for activation.

Threshold (in Treisman's Model)

The smallest signal strength needed to activate a word in the dictionary unit.

Late Selection Model

A model of attention proposing that most incoming information is processed to the level of meaning before the message to be processed is selected.

Cognitive Resources

The total cognitive capacity a person has available for carrying out various tasks.

Cognitive Load

The amount of a person's cognitive resources required to carry out a particular cognitive task.

Low-Load Tasks

Tasks that use up only a small amount of cognitive resources, leaving remaining resources available for processing task-irrelevant stimuli.

High-Load Tasks

Difficult or unpracticed tasks that use all or most of a person's cognitive resources.

Flanker Compatibility Task

A task requiring participants to focus attention on a target stimulus while ignoring surrounding task-irrelevant flanker stimuli.

Compatible Flanker

A task-irrelevant stimulus associated with the same response as the target stimulus.

Incompatible Flanker

A task-irrelevant stimulus associated with a response different from the target stimulus, causing slower reaction times in low-load conditions.

Stroop Effect

The phenomenon where naming the ink color of printed words is slowed down when the word spells a competing color name.

Consistent Mapping Condition

A task condition in Schneider and Shiffrin's experiment where targets and distractors always come from different categories across all trials.

Automatic Processing

Processing that occurs without intention and at the cost of only a small amount of a person's cognitive resources.

Varied Mapping Condition

A task condition in Schneider and Shiffrin's experiment where target and distractor rules keep changing from trial to trial.

Controlled Processing

Processing that requires close, conscious attention and focused search because a task is difficult or rules keep changing.

100-Car Naturalistic Driving Study

A study by Dingus et al. using video cameras in vehicles that documented driver inattention 3 seconds prior to 80 percent of crashes.

Inattentional Blindness

The failure to notice a clearly visible, unattended stimulus when attention is focused on another task or object.

Change Blindness

Difficulty or failure in detecting changes between two alternating visual scenes or film shots.

Continuity Errors

Unnoticed changes in objects, clothing, or body positions between consecutive shots in films.

Exogenous Attention

Automatic, bottom-up attraction of attention caused by a sudden visual or auditory stimulus.

Endogenous Attention

Consciously determined, top-down direction of attention to specific stimuli or regions.

Fixation

Brief pauses of the eyes on specific points in a visual scene.

Saccadic Eye Movements

Rapid, jerky movements of the eye from one fixation point to another.

Stimulus Salience

Physical properties of a stimulus, such as color, contrast, or movement, that attract bottom-up attention.

Scene Schema

An observer's top-down knowledge about what objects are typically contained in specific visual environments.

Precueing

An experimental procedure where a participant is presented with a cue indicating where a target stimulus is likely to appear.

Location-Based Attention

Directing visual attention to a specific location or region in space.

Object-Based Attention

Directing visual attention to a specific object rather than a general spatial location.

Same-Object Advantage

Faster response times when a target appears within the same object as a preceding visual cue compared to a different object.

Feature Integration Theory

Treisman's theory proposing that object perception involves a preattentive stage of feature analysis followed by a focused attention stage of feature combination.

Preattentive Stage

The initial stage of feature integration theory where an object is automatically analyzed into separate features outside conscious awareness.

Focused Attention Stage

The second stage of feature integration theory where attention combines individual features to perceive a unified object.

Illusory Conjunctions

Perceptual errors in which features from different stimuli are incorrectly combined during brief or unattended presentations.

Balint's Syndrome

A neurological condition caused by parietal lobe damage, characterized by an inability to focus attention on individual objects and frequent illusory conjunctions.

Alerting

An attentional network function involved in achieving and maintaining a state of high sensitivity to incoming stimuli.

Orienting

An attentional network function involved in focusing attention on a specific location where visual targets may appear.

Executive Control of Attention

An attentional network mechanism responsible for resolving conflict between competing responses or stimuli.

Memory

The processes involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no longer present.

Modal Model of Memory

Atkinson and Shiffrin's model proposing three structural stages: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.

Structural Features (Modal Model)

The three main memory stores in the modal model: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.

Control Processes

Active memory processes under conscious control, such as rehearsal, encoding strategies, and selective attention.

Rehearsal

The control process of repeating a stimulus over and over to hold it in short-term memory.

Encoding

The process of storing information into long-term memory.

Retrieval

The process of remembering or transferring information stored in long-term memory back into short-term memory.

Sensory Memory

A brief initial stage of memory that holds all incoming sensory information for seconds or fractions of a second.

Persistence of Vision

The continued perception of a visual stimulus for a fraction of a second after the physical stimulus has ended.

Whole Report Method

Sperling's procedure where participants were asked to report as many letters as possible from a briefly flashed 12-letter array.

Partial Report Method

Sperling's procedure where a tone cued participants to report only a specific row of letters immediately after the array was turned off.

Delayed Partial Report Method

Sperling's procedure where cue tones were delayed for fractions of a second after extinguishing the array to measure sensory memory decay.

Iconic Memory

Brief visual sensory memory that registers all or most visual stimuli and decays within less than one second.

Echoic Memory

Brief auditory sensory memory that lasts for a few seconds after presentation of an auditory stimulus.

Short-Term Memory (STM)

The memory system involved in storing small amounts of information for a brief period of time (15–30 seconds without rehearsal).

Recall Test

A memory test where participants are presented with stimuli and later asked to reproduce as many as possible.

Proactive Interference (PI)

Interference that occurs when information learned previously interferes with learning or recalling new information.

Digit Span

A measure of short-term memory capacity representing the maximum number of digits a person can remember in correct order.

Chunking

The process of combining small units of information into larger, meaningful units or chunks.

Chunk

A collection of elements strongly associated with one another but weakly associated with elements in other units.

Auditory Coding

Representing items in memory based on their sound, as demonstrated by Conrad's letter confusion errors.

Visual Coding

Representing items in memory in terms of visual patterns or images, as shown in Della Sala's matrix recall task.

Semantic Coding

Representing items in memory in terms of their meaning, as shown in Wickens' release from proactive interference experiment.

Release from Proactive Interference

An increase in recall performance that occurs when the category of presented stimuli is changed, eliminating prior interference.

Working Memory

A limited-capacity system for temporary storage and manipulation of information for complex tasks like comprehension, learning, and reasoning.

Phonological Loop

The component of working memory that holds and processes verbal and auditory information.

Phonological Store

The passive component of the phonological loop that has a limited capacity and holds verbal information for a few seconds.

Articulatory Rehearsal Process

The active rehearsal component of the phonological loop that prevents items in the phonological store from decaying.

Visuospatial Sketch Pad

The component of working memory responsible for holding and manipulating visual and spatial information.