Cognitive Psychology: Attention, Perception, Methods, and Learning

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering selective and divided attention, models of visual perception and action, object and face recognition, research methods in cognitive psychology, and cognitive strategies for effective learning.

Retrieval Practice

A learning technique involving self-testing or taking practice tests over to-be-learned material, which consistently improves long-term memory retention relative to restudying.

Spaced Practice

A study schedule that distributes learning or retrieval activities across multiple sessions over time rather than concentrating them into a single massed session.

Metacognition

The act of thinking about one's own thinking, including monitoring and evaluating what one knows and does not know.

Illusions of Knowing

A metacognitive error where learners mistakenly believe they have mastered material due to immediate fluency in short-term memory during massed restudying.

Independent Variable

The variable in an experiment that the researcher systematically manipulates to assess its causal impact on an outcome.

Dependent Variable

The outcome variable measured by researchers to determine the effect of the manipulated independent variable.

Interaction Effect

A pattern in experimental research where the effect of one independent variable on the dependent variable changes depending on the level of another independent variable.

Mental Chronometry

The study of the time course of cognitive processes, typically using Donders subtraction method to infer the duration of internal mental stages by comparing reaction times across tasks.

Event-Related Potentials (ERP)

A continuous electroencephalographic (EEG) measure of electrical scalp activity time-locked to the presentation of a specific stimulus, characterized by high temporal precision but poor spatial localization.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

A neuroimaging method that tracks brain activity by measuring blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) changes in the ratio of oxygenated to deoxygenated hemoglobin, characterized by high spatial localization and low temporal precision.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)

A technique delivering a brief magnetic pulse to the scalp that temporarily inhibits neural activity in a targeted brain area, enabling causal inferences regarding brain region function.

Cognitive Neuropsychology

A subdiscipline that uses observed patterns of cognitive impairment and preserved function following brain injury to make theoretical inferences about intact cognitive architecture.

Single Dissociation

A pattern of neuropsychological performance where a patient exhibits impairment on Task X but demonstrates relatively preserved performance on Task Y.

Double Dissociation

A pattern involving two complementary patients, where Patient B is impaired on Task X but intact on Task Y, while Patient C is impaired on Task Y but intact on Task X, providing strong evidence for separable cognitive subsystems.

Patient K.C.

A famous amnesic patient studied by Endel Tulving who lost all episodic memory for personal life events while retaining intact semantic memory, general knowledge, reading skills, and chess rules.

WEIRD Societies

An acronym coined by Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan (2010) referring to Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic populations, which represent an unrepresentative subset of humanity frequently overgeneralized in behavioral science.

Computational Modelling

The practice of implementing cognitive theories as explicit computer simulations to assess whether the proposed mechanistic architecture produces human-like behavioral performance.

Sensory Transduction

The biophysical process by which specialized sensory receptors convert external physical energy (e.g., light waves, sound waves) into neural signals.

Distal vs. Proximal Stimulus

The distal stimulus is the physical object existing in the outside world, whereas the proximal stimulus is the pattern of physical energy impinging on sensory receptors (such as the two-dimensional retinal image).

Ventral Stream

The visual pathway extending from occipital cortex to inferior temporal cortex (the 'what' pathway), specialized for processing object form, colour, and enduring perceptual representations.

Dorsal Stream

The visual pathway extending from occipital cortex to parietal cortex (the 'how' or 'action' pathway), specialized for real-time visual control of skilled motor actions such as reaching and grasping.

Visual Form Agnosia

A condition resulting from ventral stream damage (exemplified by Patient DF) characterized by an inability to consciously perceive or match shapes, orientations, and sizes despite intact visually guided action.

Optic Ataxia

A neurological condition resulting from dorsal stream damage (exemplified by Patient VK) characterized by an inability to accurately guide manual actions such as reaching and grasping objects despite intact object recognition.

Size Constancy

The perceptual tendency for the perceived physical size of an object to remain constant despite changes in the size of its retinal image caused by viewing distance.

Ames Room

A specially constructed trapezoidal room that distorts depth cues through a peephole, demonstrating that when assumed distance is held constant, variations in retinal image size are perceived as dramatic differences in physical object size.

Interactive Activation Model

McClelland and Rumelhart's connectionist model of letter and word perception proposing interconnected hierarchical layers (features, letters, words) with bidirectional feedforward and feedback excitatory and inhibitory connections.

Word-Superiority Effect

The finding that an individual letter is recognized faster and more accurately when presented within the context of a real word than when presented in isolation or within a nonword string.

Recognition-by-Components Theory

Irving Biederman's theory stating that visual object recognition proceeds by segmenting objects into combinations of $36$ or fewer basic three-dimensional geometric primitives termed geons.

Geons

Geometric ions; the elementary three-dimensional volumetric shapes (such as cylinders, blocks, and wedges) identified by non-accidental properties that form the building blocks of object recognition.

Prototype Effect

The tendency for observers to demonstrate high recognition confidence for an idealized central prototype of a category, even when that exact prototype was never experienced during the initial study phase.

Phonemic Restoration Effect

A top-down auditory phenomenon described by Warren (1970) where listeners report hearing a missing phoneme in a sentence even when it has been completely replaced by an extraneous noise such as a cough.

Holistic Processing

Perceptual processing that integrates across the entire area of a stimulus, emphasizing the spatial relationships among features rather than treating individual features in isolation.

Face Inversion Effect

The finding that turning images upside down disrupts recognition efficiency disproportionately more for human faces than for other visual stimulus classes like words or houses.

Thatcher Effect

A perceptual illusion where local feature inversions (such as upside-down eyes and mouth) are difficult to detect on an upside-down face because inversion disrupts holistic face processing.

Composite Face Effect

The demonstration of holistic processing where observers find it difficult to identify the top half of a face when it is aligned with an incongruent bottom half, an impairment eliminated when the halves are misaligned.

Prosopagnosia

A category-specific visual agnosia characterized by severe impairment in recognizing familiar faces or learning new faces, occurring despite relatively preserved visual object recognition.

Bruce and Young Model

An influential structural model of face processing separating functional routes for expression analysis, facial speech analysis, directed visual processing, face recognition units (FRUs), person identity nodes (PINs), and name generation.

Akinetopsia

A rare neuropsychological impairment in perceiving visual motion, caused by bilateral damage to cortical area $V5/MT$, leaving stationary object recognition, colour vision, and form perception intact.

Biological Motion

The unique visual motion signature generated by living organisms, rapidly recognizable from dynamic point-light displays even when individual static frames contain no meaningful form information.

Change Blindness

The failure to detect substantial changes across alternating visual scenes when visual transients (e.g., motion signals) are obscured by brief blank fields, eye blinks, or saccades.

Selective Attention

The cognitive mechanism of focusing mental resources onto one or a few tasks, items, or events while attenuating or filtering out competing sensory inputs.

Dichotic Listening Task

An experimental paradigm in which participants receive two distinct auditory messages simultaneously (one in each ear) and shadow the message presented to the attended ear.

Broadbent's Filter Theory

An early-selection model proposing that all sensory inputs enter a buffer, after which an all-or-none bottleneck filter selects one message based solely on low-level physical attributes for semantic analysis.

Cocktail Party Effect

The phenomenon identified by Moray (1959) where personally significant stimuli (such as hearing one's own name) capture attention even when presented in an unattended auditory stream.

Attenuation Theory

Anne Treisman's attention model proposing that unattended messages are not completely blocked, but rather weakened (attenuated); stimuli can still trigger awareness if their mental dictionary units have low activation thresholds.

Overt Orienting

The physical realignment of sensory receptors (such as an eye movement or gaze shift) toward an attended location or object in space.

Covert Orienting

The movement of attention across space to an object or location without any corresponding movement of the eyes, often conceptualized as an internal mental spotlight.

Exogenous Cueing

The reflexive, involuntary, bottom-up capture of spatial attention elicited by an abrupt sensory event (such as a sudden flash) occurring in the visual periphery.

Endogenous Cueing

The voluntary, top-down, goal-directed orienting of spatial attention driven by symbolic central cues (such as an arrow pointing to a likely target location).

Mind Wandering

A shift of executive attention away from an external primary task or environment toward internally generated thoughts and feelings.

Stroop Effect

The robust delay in naming the ink colour of a printed word when the word spells an incongruent colour name (e.g., the word 'RED' printed in blue ink) compared to neutral control stimuli.

Automatic Processes

Cognitive processes that occur without intent, operate rapidly, do not drain conscious attentional capacity, and run ballistically to completion without interruption once initiated.

Controlled Processes

Cognitive operations that require deliberate intention and attention, proceed relatively slowly, operate within conscious awareness, and can be flexibly interrupted or altered.

Multiple Resource Theory

A model of divided attention stating that rather than drawing on a single general pool of cognitive energy, humans possess multiple separate capacity-limited processing pools (e.g., verbal vs. spatial).