PSYCH 414 All-Notes Master Study Guide

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the core concepts, empirical studies, neural mechanisms, and classic terminology from the PSYCH 414 Master Study Guide.

Exogenous Attention

Bottom-up, stimulus-driven attentional capture triggered automatically by a salient or sudden external event, such as turning toward a sudden bang.

Endogenous Attention

Top-down, goal-directed allocation of attention based on internal intentions and search goals, such as searching through a crowd to find a specific friend.

Spatial Attention

The prioritization of a specific location in space, frequently conceptualized using a spotlight metaphor.

Object-Based Attention

The prioritization of visual processing that spreads across an entire attended object, allowing targets appearing on the same cued object to be detected faster and more accurately than targets on another object.

Early Vision

The initial stage of visual processing responsible for extracting basic features such as edges, orientation, and color.

Mid-Level Vision

The stage of visual processing that organizes basic features into coherent objects and scenes via processes such as figure-ground separation and Gestalt grouping.

Left Visual Neglect

A condition characterized by difficulty attending to the left side of space or objects, commonly associated with right parietal damage and demonstrated on line-bisection tasks.

Extinction (Attention Context)

A neuropsychological deficit where a patient successfully detects a stimulus in an impaired field when presented in isolation, but fails to report it when a competing stimulus appears simultaneously on the opposite side.

Agnosia

Difficulty recognizing objects despite having intact basic sensory input, illustrating a breakdown in identifying what an object is rather than detecting its presence.

Dorsal Stream

The visual pathway summarized as the 'where/how' pathway that supports spatial processing and visually guided motor actions.

Ventral Stream

The visual pathway summarized as the 'what' pathway that supports object identity, recognition, and feature perception.

Translational Invariance

The visual system's capacity to recognize an object correctly regardless of changes in its retinal location.

Size Invariance

The visual system's ability to maintain correct object identification across shifts in retinal size and viewing distance.

Mental Code

A hypothesized internal representational format that the mind uses to encode, represent, and transform information, defined by a limited vocabulary, syntax, and operational processes.

Neural Code

Specific patterns of neural activity that represent information in the brain, exemplified by rate coding and biased competition.

Parsimony

The scientific principle of preferring the simplest possible explanation that adequately accounts for the empirical evidence.

Paivio's Dual-Code Theory

The cognitive theory proposing that verbal and visual information utilize separate representational systems, leading to enhanced memory when verbal material is also encoded visually.

Analog Representation

A mental representation format that is picture-like and structurally similar to the physical stimulus it represents, inherently preserving spatial relationships.

Propositional Representation

An abstract, sentence-like mental representation format that describes facts and relationships symbolically rather than preserving spatial or pictorial properties.

Shepard's Mental Rotation Experiment

An experimental demonstration showing that as the angular difference between rotated shapes increases, response times increase systematically, proving that mental transformations operate in an analog, spatial manner.

Kosslyn's Mental Scanning Experiment

A study demonstrating that scanning across longer imagined distances on a memorized fictional map takes proportionally more time, indicating that mental imagery preserves spatial metric relationships.

Selective Interference

The principle that cognitive interference is maximized when two concurrent tasks compete for overlapping representational codes or sensory modalities, such as visual imagery impairing visual signal detection.

Visual Working Memory (VWM)

A limited-capacity cognitive system that temporarily stores and manipulates visual information, serving as an extension of visual perception and attention.

Capacity Estimate $K$

A mathematical estimate of the number of discrete visual items maintained in visual working memory during change-detection tasks, which characteristically plateaus around roughly $3$ items.

Conjunction Search

A visual search task where a target is defined by a combination of two or more features (e.g., color and shape), producing reaction times that increase with display size and showing a steeper slope for target-absent trials.

Digit Span

A measure of verbal short-term memory capacity, with a historical mean of approximately $7 \ne 2$ items for native English speakers.

Chunk

A meaningful, integrated unit of information used to organize and expand short-term memory capacity beyond isolated elements.

Phonological Similarity Effect

The finding that lists of words or letters that share similar sound structures are more difficult to recall accurately, confirming reliance on a phonological code in verbal memory.

Word-Length Effect

The phenomenon whereby lists of shorter words are remembered better than longer words because long words require more articulation time, leaving traces vulnerable to decay over roughly a couple of seconds.

Articulatory Suppression

The repetition of an irrelevant spoken sound (such as 'the, the, the') during study, which occupies articulatory rehearsal, prevents phonological recoding of visual stimuli, and reduces span from roughly $7 \ne 2$ to $4 \ne 1$.

Incidental Encoding

The acquisition and storage of information into memory without any deliberate or conscious intention to memorize it.

Maintenance Rehearsal

Rote repetition designed to keep information temporarily active in working memory, which does not reliably lead to durable long-term retention.

Elaborative Rehearsal

A form of processing that connects new information to existing knowledge, meaning, and conceptual relationships, fostering strong and durable long-term memories.

Patient H.M.

A celebrated neurological patient who underwent bilateral medial temporal lobe resection, resulting in profound anterograde amnesia for explicit/declarative memories while preserving implicit learning and motor skill acquisition.

Declarative Memory

The category of explicit long-term memory containing facts and personal events that can be consciously recalled, described, and reported.

Nondeclarative Memory

The category of implicit memory revealed through changes in performance, priming, conditioning, or motor skill execution without requiring conscious recollection.

Semantic Memory

General factual knowledge, concepts, and language meanings stored without contextual details of the specific personal learning episode.

Episodic Memory

Memory for personally experienced events bound to their specific temporal and spatial contexts.

Priming

A nondeclarative memory phenomenon in which prior exposure to a stimulus increases its subsequent accessibility or alters processing speed without deliberate recall.

Anterograde Amnesia

An inability or severe impairment in forming new long-term declarative memories following neurological trauma or surgery.

Retrograde Amnesia

The loss of memories for events and information that were acquired prior to the onset of brain injury or surgery.

Hebb's Postulate

The foundational neurobiological proposal that coordinated, repeated firing of interconnected neurons strengthens the synaptic connection between them ('cells that fire together wire together').

AMPA Receptor

An ionotropic glutamate receptor whose activation permits the influx of positive ions, particularly $Na^+$, causing rapid postsynaptic depolarization.

NMDA Receptor

A specialized glutamate receptor functioning as a coincidence detector; it requires both glutamate binding and postsynaptic depolarization to remove a $Mg^{2+}$ block, allowing $Ca^{2+}$ influx.

Long-Term Potentiation (LTP)

A persistent, long-lasting increase in synaptic efficacy measured as an increased EPSP slope following high-frequency electrical stimulation (tetanus).

Long-Term Depression (LTD)

A long-lasting, enduring decrease in the synaptic strength and responsiveness of a neuronal connection.

Latent Learning

Learning that occurs in the absence of reinforcement or explicit incentive, remaining unexpressed in behavior until a relevant reward is introduced, as shown by Tolman's rats.

Sensory Preconditioning

A classical conditioning paradigm where two neutral cues are initially paired ($Tone-Light$), one cue is subsequently paired with a shock ($Light-Shock$), and the first cue ($Tone$) later elicits a conditioned response despite never having been paired with the shock directly.

Extinction (Classical Conditioning)

The reduction or cessation of a conditioned response that occurs when a conditioned stimulus ($CS$) is repeatedly presented in the absence of the unconditioned stimulus ($UCS$).

Spontaneous Recovery

The reappearance of an extinguished conditioned response following a temporal delay without any additional reinforcement trials.

Reinstatement

The recovery of an extinguished conditioned response produced by presenting the unconditioned stimulus ($UCS$) alone in the absence of the conditioned stimulus.

Blocking Effect

The phenomenon in which previous associative conditioning to cue A prevents the acquisition of conditioning to a novel concurrent cue X when the compound AX is reinforced, because the outcome is entirely predicted.

Reward Prediction Error (RPE)

The discrepancy between received and expected outcomes that governs associative learning, signaled by midbrain dopamine neurons as positive bursts, zero-error baseline activity, or negative dips.

Free Recall

A memory retrieval task where participants are presented a list of items and must produce as many as possible in any sequence with minimal external cues.

Recognition

A memory test requiring participants to determine whether a presented probe stimulus was previously experienced (an old/new judgment), supported by recollection or familiarity.

Recollection

The conscious, retrieval-demanding recovery of specific contextual and episodic details accompanying an earlier event.

Familiarity

The fast, context-free subjective assessment that a stimulus has been previously encountered without retrieving specific details of the episode.

Primacy Effect

The superior recall performance observed for items situated at the beginning of a study list, reflecting greater opportunity for rehearsal and consolidation.

Recency Effect

The superior recall performance observed for items located at the end of a study list, which is vulnerable to being eliminated by a filled delay interval.

Proactive Interference (PI)

The disruption of learning or memory retrieval for novel material caused by the competing influence of previously acquired information.

Retroactive Interference (RI)

The disruption of memory retrieval for previously acquired information caused by the encoding and integration of newer material.

Release from Proactive Interference

A recovery in recall accuracy achieved by presenting stimuli from a novel semantic category, which eliminates interference generated by prior related trials.

Consolidation

A post-encoding neurobiological period and process through which unstable memory representations become progressively stabilized and integrated into long-term storage.

Brown–Peterson Task

A cognitive paradigm used to study short-term memory forgetting over brief delays by requiring participants to perform an articulatory or mental distractor task that prevents rehearsal.

DRM Critical Lure

An unpresented target word strongly related semantically to a list of studied words that participants reliably and falsely claim to have encountered.

Loftus Misinformation Effect

The alteration or contamination of an eyewitness's episodic memory report caused by exposure to misleading post-event questions or phrasing (e.g., estimating $41\,\text{mph}$ for 'smashed' vs. $34\,\text{mph}$ for 'hit').

Source Monitoring

The metacognitive decision process involved in tracking, identifying, and attributing the original origin or source of a remembered piece of information.

Source Confusion

An error in memory where a person misattributes the true origin of a retrieved item, such as mistaking an element introduced by leading post-event questioning for an actual visual detail from an accident.

Category Typicality

The degree to which a particular instance represents the central tendency of a category, resulting in faster verification, naming, and production for typical items (such as a robin) than atypical items (such as a penguin).

Prototype Theory

A categorization model proposing that people abstract across category experiences to construct an idealized, central tendency representation against which new exemplars are evaluated.

Exemplar Theory

A categorization model proposing that concepts are represented by storing individual, specific remembered instances, with novel objects categorized based on their similarity to these retrieved examples.

Spreading Activation

The automatic propagation of mental activation through interconnected nodes in a semantic network, facilitating faster access to related concepts (semantic priming).

Content-Addressable Storage

A memory storage architecture where entries are directly queried and retrieved based on their semantic content and meaning rather than by rigid, physical address coordinates.