PSY 362 - Cognitive Psychology: Imagery, Language, and Development

Flashcards covering the cognitive psychology of imagery, psycholinguistics, and developmental changes in perception and neurology.

Spatial (Depictive) Representation

A mental representation of information that shares some characteristics of the physical item represented, as proposed by Farah & Ratcliff ($1994$).

Propositional Representation

A mental representation where information is converted to concepts or propositions with an arbitrary relationship to the item presented, as proposed by Pylyshyn ($1973$).

Shepard ($1967$) Recognition Study

A study where subjects looked at $612$ photos for $6\,seconds$ each; recognition was $100\%$ after $2\,hours$, $87\%$ after $1\,week$, and over $50\%$ after $4\,months$.

Mental Rotation (Shepard & Metzler, $1971$)

A task where subjects determine if two stimuli are the same; the results showed that decision time correlates strongly with the angle of rotation.

Mental Scanning (Kosslyn et al., $1978$)

An experiment where subjects memorized a map and imagined moving between locations; response times matched the physical distance between items.

Imagery Neurons

Neurons that fire both when a person is visually perceiving a specific object and when they are simply imagining it.

Visual Retrograde Amnesia

A condition associated with damage to the visual cortex where a person can no longer remember or describe visual information from the past, as classified by Rubin & Greenberg ($1998$).

Broca's Aphasia

A language disruption characterized by trouble with speech production and grammatical syntax.

Wernicke's Aphasia

A language disruption characterized by difficulty with comprehension, semantics, naming, reading, and writing.

Conduction Aphasia

A disorder where a person has trouble with the repetition of words and sentences despite having intact Broca's and Wernicke's areas.

Anomia

A condition involving difficulty finding words, specifically retrieving semantic concepts and stating their names.

Semanticity

A modernized key feature of language stating that speech sounds carry specific meanings where other noises do not.

Arbitrariness

A feature of language where there is no inherent connection between units (sounds/words) and their meanings, with onomatopoeias serving as rare exceptions.

Displacement

The ability in language to talk about things outside the present moment, such as the past, future, or abstract ideas.

Productivity

The novelty of language that allows humans to generate an infinite number of sentences and new utterances rather than just repeating them.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (Linguistic Relativity)

The hypothesis that the language one knows shapes or influences how one thinks about events in the world.

Competence

Chomsky's term for the internalized, idealized knowledge of language and its rules that a fully fluent speaker possesses.

Performance

Chomsky's term for the actual, observable language behavior a speaker generates, including errors and dysfluencies.

Longitudinal Study

A research method that assesses the same group of people through time to lower noise from individual differences.

Cross-sectional Study

A research method that assesses different groups of people at different stages simultaneously to gather data quickly.

Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC)

A brain region involved in the executive functioning component of working memory that becomes less effective in older adults.

Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex (VLPFC)

A brain region implicated in emotion and emotional responding that is generally not affected by the aging process.

Precise vs. Approximate Number Sense

Infants use a precise system for small numbers (e.g., $1$ vs $2$) and an approximate system for sets (e.g., $8$ vs $16$).

Lens Hardening

An unavoidable aging process in older adults that alters vision and often leads to the need for reading glasses.

Polysemy

The property of many words having multiple meanings, which can lead to ambiguity during comprehension.