Unit 2: Cognition, Memory, and Intelligence

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering sensation, perception, cognition, problem solving, decision making heuristics, memory systems, retrieval, forgetting, and intelligence assessment based on Unit 2 lecture notes.

Selective Attention

The tendency to focus mental awareness on a particular stimulus among the many stimuli received from the environment.

Cocktail Party Effect

The ability to focus your auditory attention on a single conversation with friends while still being able to detect your own name spoken across the room.

Inattentional Blindness

Failing to see salient objects that are readily available to be sensed because conscious awareness is focused elsewhere.

Change Blindness

A form of inattentional blindness where individuals fail to notice large changes in their visual environment, as illustrated in 'The Door Study.'

Bottom-Up Processing

Information processing that begins with sensory input from external stimuli to build a complete perception ('What am I seeing?').

Top-Down Processing

Information processing guided by past experiences, beliefs, and expectations where we interpret sensory information through an internal framework ('Is that something I’ve seen before?').

Perceptual Set

A mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another, shaped by internal factors such as schemas and beliefs, as well as external factors like context, culture, motivation, and emotion.

Gestalt

tendency to perceive the whole object / experiences rather than the smaller components. How we organize stimuli into patterns to see the whole picture

Visual Cliff

A laboratory device designed by Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk (1960) with shallow and deep drop-offs under glass to test depth perception in infants.

Retinal Disparity

The difference between the images projecting onto the retina with both eyes.

Convergence

A cue to nearby objects’ distance, by brain combining retinal images and using the degree in which the eyes converge (turn inwards) to focus on an object. This allows for depth perception of objects.

Perceptual Constancy

The ability to recognize that an object maintains its size, shape, color, and brightness even when illumination and retinal images change.

Phi Phenomenon

An illusion of movement created when two or more adjacent lights blink on and off in quick succession. ex). Two or more lights flashing

Stroboscopic Motion

The perception of continuous movement created by rapidly presenting a series of slightly varying still images in quick succession. Still images flipped quickly

Executive Functioning

Cognitive processes that allow individuals to generate, organize, plan, and carry out goal-directed behaviors and engage in critical thinking.

Metacognition

The process of thinking about our own thinking, including monitoring, keeping track of, and evaluating one's mental processes.

Prototype

A mental image or best example that represents a concept category; matching new items to a prototype offers a quick method for classifying information.

Assimilation

Taking in new information and interpreting it using an existing schema without altering the schema itself.

Accommodation

Taking in new information and changing the schema to incorporate the new information.

Convergent Thinking

A mode of thinking that narrows the available problem solutions to determine the single best or correct answer.

Divergent Thinking

A creative thinking strategy that expands the number of possible solutions by generating novel and multiple ideas.

Algorithm

A step-by-step logical procedure or rule that guarantees a solution to a specific problem if carried out correctly. ex). x-5=8

Heuristic

A simple 'rule of thumb' thinking shortcut that allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently, though it is more error-prone than an algorithm.

Mental Set

The tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often using a mindset or solution that has worked successfully in the past.

Functional Fixedness

A cognitive fixation involving the inability to see that an object can be utilized for functions beyond its familiar intended purpose.

Representative Heuristic

Estimating the likelihood of an event or person belonging to a category based on how well they match a particular prototype, which can foster stereotyping. can lead to stereotyping. ex). WHo would make a better politician

Availability Heuristic

Estimating the likelihood or frequency of an event based on how easily examples of it can be retrieved from memory.

Overconfidence

The tendency to be more confident than correct, overestimating the accuracy of one's beliefs, judgments, future leisure time, and income (planning fallacy).

Confirmation Bias

The tendency to search only for evidence that confirms one's preconceptions while ignoring or overlooking contradicting facts.

Belief Perseverance

Clinging to one's initial beliefs even after the factual basis upon which they were formed has been completely discredited.

Priming

The often unconscious activation of specific associations in memory, which influences subsequent perception, memory, or response.

Framing

The way an issue or piece of information is posed or phrased, which can significantly alter decisions and judgments (e.g., 'gun safety' vs. 'gun control').

Hindsight Bias

The tendency to believe, after an outcome has occurred, that one would have foreseen or predicted it all along ('viewing the outcome as inevitable').

Gambler’s Fallacy

The erroneous belief that the occurrence of a random event is influenced by past occurrences (e.g., expecting a coin toss to land on tails simply because heads appeared repeatedly).

Sunk-Cost Fallacy

The tendency to persist in an endeavor once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made, even when abandoning the endeavor would be more beneficial.

Prospective Memory

Remembering to perform an intentional action or task in the future; functions as our mental 'to do' list.

Recall

A measure of memory retention in which a person must reproduce information learned earlier with few clues, such as on an essay test or fill-in-the-blank exam.

Recognition

A measure of memory retention in which a person only needs to identify items previously learned, as in multiple-choice questions or word banks.

Relearning

A measure of memory that assesses the amount of time saved when learning material for a second or subsequent time.

Multi-Store Model of Memory

A computer-like model developed by Atkinson and Shiffrin that describes human memory as encoding, storing, and retrieving information through sensory, short-term, and long-term storage units.

Automatic Processing

Unconscious encoding of incidental information (such as space, time, frequency, or familiar routes) without deliberate awareness.

Effortful Processing

Encoding that requires conscious attention, deliberate effort, and rehearsal to store new information (e.g., learning new psychological terms).

Iconic Memory

A momentary sensory memory of visual stimuli; a photographic or picture-image memory lasting no more than a few tenths of a second.

Echoic Memory

A momentary sensory memory of auditory stimuli; sounds and spoken words that can still be recalled within 3 or 4 seconds, fading more slowly than visual registers.

Working Memory Model

A multi-component memory system consisting of the phonological loop (auditory storage), the visuospatial sketchpad (visual/spatial data), and the central executive which coordinates focus and attention.

Chunking

Organizing individual items into familiar, manageable, and meaningful units (e.g., grouping phone numbers or social security digits) to increase memory capacity.

Method of Loci

A mnemonic device that involves associating items to be remembered with a series of familiar locations along an imagined journey or architectural layout.

Spacing Effect

The tendency for distributed study or practice over time to yield better long-term retention and motor skill performance than massed practice (cramming).

Testing Effect

Enhanced memory performance following repeated self-testing and retrieval practice rather than simply rereading or highlighting material (demonstrated by Roediger and Karpicke, 2006).

Maintenance Rehearsal

Repeatedly verbalizing or thinking about a piece of information to keep it in short-term memory; a form of shallow processing that is easily forgotten.

Elaborative Rehearsal

A deep processing memory technique that involves thinking about the meaning of term and connecting it to existing knowledge already stored in memory.

Self-Reference Effect

The tendency to show superior recall for information that we can relate personally to ourselves or connect to personal experiences.

Explicit Memory

Declarative memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know, declare in words, and intentionally retrieve through effortful processing (includes episodic and semantic memory).

Implicit Memory

Non-declarative retention of learned skills, classical conditioned associations, and habits independent of conscious recollection through automatic processing (includes procedural and emotional memory).

Long-Term Potentiation (LTP)

An increase in a synapse's firing potential following brief, rapid stimulation, providing a neural basis for learning and memory as receptor sites multiply.

Infantile Amnesia

The inability of adults to retrieve episodic memories from the first four years of life, largely due to an underdeveloped hippocampus, lack of prefrontal development, and pre-verbal indexing.

Context-Dependent Memory

The improved recall of specific information when the context present at encoding and retrieval are identical, as shown in Godden & Baddeley's scuba diving experiment.

State-Dependent Memory

The tendency to best recall information when the learner is in the same physiological or chemical state as when the memory was initially formed.

Mood-Congruent Memory

The tendency to recall experiences that are consistent with one’s current good or bad mood (e.g., recalling happier events when in a happy state).

Serial Position Effect

Our tendency to recall best the first items (primacy effect) and the last items (recency effect) in a list, while forgetting or confusing items in the middle.

Forgetting Curve

Hermann Ebbinghaus’s empirical finding that memory retention drops drastically immediately after learning (roughly $50\%$ lost in the first hour and $65\%$ after $2\,\text{hours}$) before leveling off.

Proactive Interference

The disruptive effect of previously learned material on the recall of newly acquired information (e.g., calling a new partner by an ex-partner's name).

Retroactive Interference

The disruptive effect of newly learned information on the recall of previously stored memories (e.g., learning a new phone number and failing to remember an old one).

Retrograde Amnesia

The inability to retrieve information and memories that occurred immediately preceding a traumatic brain injury or illness.

Anterograde Amnesia

The inability to encode and form new explicit long-term memories following an injury or illness, while the capacity for procedural skill acquisition remains intact.

Repression

Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and painful memories from conscious awareness into the unconscious mind.

Reconsolidation

A biological and cognitive process where previously consolidated memories, upon being retrieved, become labile and subject to modification before being stored again.

Misinformation Effect

A memory distortion demonstrated by Elizabeth Loftus in which misleading post-event information impairs the accuracy of an eyewitness's recalled details of an event.

Source Amnesia

Attributing to the wrong source an event we have experienced, heard about, read about, or imagined; a primary mechanism underlying false memories.

Imagination Inflation

The phenomenon in which repeatedly imagining an event or action increases subjective confidence that the imagined event actually occurred in the past.

General Intelligence (g factor)

A general intelligence factor identified by Charles Spearman that underlies all specific mental abilities and is measured by every task on an intelligence test via factor analysis.

Factor Analysis

A statistical procedure that identifies clusters of related items on a test, used by psychometricians to identify different dimensions of performance.

Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory

Robert Sternberg's model proposing three intelligence domains: analytical intelligence (academic problem-solving), creative intelligence (novelty and innovation), and practical intelligence (everyday real-world problem-solving).

Crystallized Intelligence

Our accumulated knowledge, facts, and verbal skills, which tend to increase across the lifespan into older adulthood.

Fluid Intelligence

Our ability to reason speedily, think abstractly, and solve novel problems, which tends to decrease gradually during late adulthood.

Emotional Intelligence

The ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions to facilitate adaptive thought and interpersonal interactions (popularized by Daniel Goleman).

Grit

Passion and long-term perseverance in the pursuit of overarching long-term goals.

Growth Mindset

Carol Dweck's concept that intelligence is malleable and expandable like a muscle, fostered through effort, persistence, and learning from failure.

Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

Originally computed by the formula $\text{IQ} = \frac{\text{Mental Age}}{\text{Chronological Age}} \times 100$, measuring cognitive ability relative to standardized age-matched norms.

Reliability

The consistency and repeatability of test results across administrations, assessed via test-retest methods or split-half correlations (typically target $r \ge 0.90$).

Validity

The extent to which a test measures or predicts what it proposes to measure (including construct validity and predictive validity).

Flynn Effect

The worldwide historical phenomenon demonstrating that average intelligence test performance scores have steadily increased over generations.

Stereotype Threat

A self-confirming concern or anxiety that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype regarding one's group, which can actively undermine testing performance.

Stereotype Lift

A performance boost caused by awareness of an outgroup's negative stereotype, providing an implicit psychological advantage to members of the non-stereotyped group.

Autokinetic Illusion

One light/image with dark or non-centering background.

Relative Clarity

Objects farther away look hazy and blurred; closer are sharper and clear.