Cognition Week 1 Review Flashcards

A set of vocabulary flashcards covering the key people, experiments, and theories from the Week 1 review of Cognition.

Mind

A system that creates and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, emotions, language, deciding, thinking, and reasoning, and creates representations of the world to help achieve goals.

Cognition

Mental processes.

Cognitive psychology

The study of mental processes.

Franciscus Donders

Conducted one of the first cognitive psychology experiments in 1868, measuring reaction time to determine it takes one tenth of a second to make a decision.

Reaction time

How long it takes for a person to react to a stimulus.

Wilhelm Wundt

Founded the first scientific psychology lab at the University of Leipzig in 1879 and developed the approach of structuralism.

Structuralism

An approach postulating that experiences are determined by combining elements or sensations, leading to the creation of a periodic table of the mind.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Interested in memory and forgetting, he used quantitative methodology and nonsense syllables to measure how much information was retained over time.

Nonsense syllables

Items like DAX or LUH used by Ebbinghaus so that memory would not be influenced by the meaning of words.

Savings

A measure used by Ebbinghaus calculated as (original time to learn a list) – (time to relearn the list after a delay) to determine how much was forgotten.

William James

Early American psychologist who taught Harvard's first psychology class and wrote on the nature of attention, withdrawing from some things to focus on others.

John Watson

Founder of behaviorism who rejected analytic introspection and conducted the little albert experiment.

Behaviorism

An approach where observable behaviour rather than consciousness is the main topic of study, focusing on the relation between stimuli and behaviour.

Classical conditioning

How pairing one stimulus with another previously neutral stimulus causes changes in response to the neutral stimulus, exemplified by the little albert experiment.

B.F. Skinner

A behaviorist who introduced operant conditioning and published the book verbal behaviour in 1957.

Operant conditioning

Focuses on how behaviour is strengthened by positive reinforcements like food or social approval or the removal of negative stimuli.

Edward Chase Tolman

An early cognitive psychologist who used rat maze experiments to demonstrate that rats built a cognitive map.

Cognitive map

A mental representation of a physical space, such as a maze, as proposed by Edward Chase Tolman.

Noam Chomsky

A linguist who criticized Skinner's view on language, arguing it is an inbuilt biological process because children use unrewarded phrases and incorrect grammar.

Scientific revolution

A shift from one paradigm to another.

Information processing approach

An approach introduced with computers that traces sequences of mental operations involved in cognition occurring in a number of stages.

Logic theorist

The first AI program, created by Simon and Newell in 1956.

The magical number 7 plus or minus 2

A paper published by George Miller in 1956 suggesting there are limits to a person's ability to process information, capped at about 7 items.

Ulric Neisser

Published the textbook titled "Cognitive Psychology" in 1967.

Atkinson and Shiffrin's model of memory

A 1968 model proposing information progresses through sensory memory, short term memory, and long term memory.

Sensory memory

Holds information for a fraction of a second before passing it to short term memory.

Short term memory (STM)

Information storage with limited capacity that holds information for seconds and involves rehearsal.

Long term memory (LTM)

A high capacity system that can hold information for extended periods of time.

Episodic memory

A type of long term memory for events in your life, such as what you did last weekend.

Semantic memory

A type of long term memory for facts, such as state capitals.

Procedural memory

A type of long term memory for physical movements, such as how to ride a bike.

Neuropsychology

The study of the brain.

Electrophysiology

Measuring electrical responses of the nervous system to listen to the activity of single neurons.

Positron Emission Tomography (PET)

Introduced in 1976, it uses radioactive tracing to see which brain areas are activated during cognitive activity.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

A higher resolution imaging technique that replaced PET and does not involve radioactive tracing.