Cognitive Psych Ultimate Review

behaviorism

only behavior matters, thoughts don’t count

between-subjects design

different people, different conditions

cognitive revolution

the mind makes a comeback

cognitive science

many sciences teaming up to study thinking

connectionism

thinking = networks firing together

ecological validity

does this apply to real life?

empiricism

learn by experience

experiment

change one thing and see what happens

functionalism

why the mind is useful

gestalt psychology

the whole > the parts

information-processing approach

mind = mental computer

introspection

looking inside your own mind

mental representation

brain’s version of reality

nativism

born knowing some things

naturalistic observation

watch without interfering

neural network

brain teamwork

quasi-experiment

a study lacking random assignment

structuralism

breaking the mind into parts

within-subjects design

same people, all conditions

bottom-up processing

perception driven by sensory input from the environment

constructivist approach to perception

view that the brain builds perception using sensory data & prior knowledge

context effects

context changes what you see

direct perception

perception occurs w/o mental inference; you just see it

distal stimulus

the actual object in the environment

face perception

part of the brain for processing faces

feature

building blocks of perception

gestalt principles of perceptual organization

rules describing how elements are grouped into wholes

pattern recognition

spotting familiar patterns

percept

what you experience seeing

perceptual learning

practice makes perception better

prototype

an average representation of a category

proximal stimulus

what image hits your eyes

recognition

knowing you’ve seen it before

stimulus

something you can sense

top-down process

what you expect shapes what you see