Psychology Lecture Notes: Perception, Cognition, and Memory
Concepts of Perception and Organization
Schemas: Defined as a framework designed to assist individuals in the organization, interpretation, and processing of information.
Perceptual Sets: Refers to a mental predisposition to perceive specific aspects of sensory data while simultaneously ignoring others. This process is heavily influenced by top-down processing.
Gestalt Psychology: A school of thought that emphasizes the brain's tendency to organize sensory information into meaningful, organized wholes, often referred to as the "big picture."
Closure: A Gestalt principle where people tend to fill in blanks or gaps to perceive a complete, whole object when external stimuli only partially match that object.
Figure and Ground: The cognitive process of separating a specific object (the figure) from its surrounding environment (the ground).
Proximity: The perceptual tendency to see objects that are physically close to one another as belonging together in a single group.
Similarity: The tendency to perceive complex visual information as consisting of groups of like things or similar items.
Attention and Visual Perception
Selective Attention: The cognitive process of focusing on specific things or stimuli while intentionally ignoring others.
Cocktail Party Effect: A specific example of selective attention involving the ability to focus on one single speaker or stimulus while filtering out all other background noise and stimuli.
Inattentional Blindness: The failure to perceive visible but unexpected objects within the visual field because the individual's attention is focused elsewhere.
Change Blindness: An occurrence where individuals fail to notice significant changes in their visual environment due to their attention being directed toward other tasks or stimuli.
Binocular Depth Cues: Depth cues that require the use of both eyes to perceive distance and three-dimensionality. * Retinal Disparity: The phenomenon where the left and right eyes provide slightly different visual images when focusing on a single object; the brain uses these differences to calculate depth. * Convergence: The extent to which the eyes move inward (converge) when looking at an object. The brain interprets greater muscular strain as an indication that the object is closer.
Monocular Depth Cues: Depth cues that can be perceived using only one eye. * Relative Clarity: Objects that appear hazy or lighter are perceived as being farther away than objects that appear sharp and clear. * Relative Size: If two objects are assumed to be similar in size, the one that casts the smaller retinal image is perceived as being farther away. * Texture Gradient: A surface or field receding in depth appears to have a texture that becomes progressively finer or smoother. * Linear Perspective: The appearance of parallel lines meeting in the distance; the sharper the angle of convergence of these lines, the greater the perceived distance. * Interposition: When one object partially blocks the view of another, we perceive the blocking object as being closer.
Constancies: The brain's ability to perceive familiar objects as unchanging or constant in terms of their size, shape, color, and brightness, even when there are changes in distance, lighting, or the retinal image.
Principles of Cognition and Problem Solving
Prototypes: A mental image representing the best or most "ideal" example of a specific category.
Accommodation: The process of creating a new schema or significantly changing an existing one to incorporate new information.
Assimilation: The process of adding new information into an existing schema without changing the fundamental structure of that schema.
Algorithms: Exhaustive, step-by-step procedures used for problem-solving that guarantee a correct solution if followed appropriately.
Heuristics: Mental shortcuts used for everyday decisions; these are fast, unconscious, and automatic, though they are more prone to errors than algorithms. * Representativeness Heuristic: A mental shortcut where the brain estimates the likelihood of an event or object based on how well it fits a pre-existing mental "picture" or prototype. * Availability Heuristic: A mental shortcut where the significance of an event is judged by how quickly it comes to mind; if it is easily recalled, it is deemed important, sometimes incorrectly.
Mental Set: A barrier to problem-solving that involves fixating strictly on solutions or approaches that have worked in the past.
Framing: The specific way an issue is presented or posed, which can significantly influence decisions and judgments.
Priming: A technique where the introduction of one stimulus influences how an individual responds to a subsequent stimulus by preparing the brain in a certain way.
Gambler's Fallacy: The mistaken belief that the odds of a chance event occurring increase if the event has not happened recently.
Sunk-cost Fallacy: The tendency for individuals to continue an endeavor once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made, even if abandoning the endeavor would be more beneficial.
Memory Systems and Components
Memory: The persistence of learning over time achieved through the storage and retrieval of information.
Explicit Memory: Information and memories that we can consciously declare and work to remember. * Episodic Memory: Memories of specific events and personal experiences from one's life. * Semantic Memory: General knowledge, facts, and information learned over time.
Implicit Memory: Non-declarative memory; information that is remembered effortlessly and unconsciously. * Procedural Memory: Memory related to how to perform specific tasks or actions.
Prospective Memory: The process of "remembering to remember" future tasks or intentions.
Long-term Potentiation (LTP): A pattern of neural firing that strengthens synaptic connections over time. Repeating behaviors and cognitive tasks makes these neural connections stronger.
Working Memory Model: Defines short-term memory as an active system for temporarily storing and manipulating information. * Central Executive: The "boss" of working memory, responsible for planning, coordinating, controlling attention, and switching between tasks. * Phonological Loop: Responsible for briefly storing and manipulating auditory and sound-based information. * Visuospatial Sketchpad: Responsible for briefly storing and manipulating visual and spatial information.
Long-term Memory: A relatively permanent and essentially limitless storage system for skills, experiences, and information.
Multi-store Memory Model: Defines memory through three distinct stages: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. * Sensory Memory: The brief storage of information immediately following sensory input. * Iconic Memory: Visual sensory input. * Echoic Memory: Auditory sensory input. * Short-term Memory: The capacity to hold a limited amount of informational input for a duration of approximately .
Information Processing and Retrieval
Automatic Processing: The unconscious and effortless encoding of incidental information.
Effortful Processing: Encoding that requires deliberate work and conscious attention to remember.
Encoding: The processing of information into the memory system.
Storage: The retention of encoded material over a period of time.
Retrieval: The process of extracting memory from storage.
Levels of Processing Model: Suggests that memory retention depends on the depth of cognitive processing rather than just rehearsal. * Structural: Focuses on the visual appearance of information. * Phonemic: Focuses on the sound of the information. * Semantic: Focuses on the actual meaning of the information (deepest level).
Mnemonic Devices: Aids used to improve memory storage and recall. * Method of Loci: Using imagined physical locations as landmarks to aid the recall of information. * Chunking: Grouping items into familiar, manageable units to reduce the amount of information that must be remembered. * Categories: Grouping concepts together based on shared characteristics. * Hierarchies: Ranking concepts from general to specific.
Serial Position Effect: The tendency to remember the first and last items in a list more accurately than those in the middle. * Primacy Effect: Enhanced recall of items at the beginning of a list. * Recency Effect: Enhanced recall of items at the end of a list.
Maintenance Rehearsal: The constant repetition of information to keep it in short-term memory.
Elaborative Rehearsal: Tying new information to existing knowledge and personal meanings to improve retention.
Memory Loss and Interference
Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory: A rare condition allowing individuals to recall almost every day of their lives with extreme, accurate detail.
Amnesia: Loss of memory due to biological factors. * Retrograde Amnesia: An inability to retrieve information from one's past. * Anterograde Amnesia: An inability to form or remember new events past a specific point in time. * Infantile Amnesia: The inability of adults to retrieve episodic memories from the first few years of their lives.
Alzheimer’s Disease: A degenerative brain disorder characterized by progressive memory loss.
Retrieval Cues: Signals or triggers that assist in recalling a specific memory. * Context-dependent Memory: Memory is more effective when the surrounding context at the time of retrieval matches the context where the memory was first formed. * Mood-congruent Memory: The tendency to recall experiences that are consistent with one’s current emotional state (good or bad). * State-dependent Memory: Information learned in one physiological or psychological state (e.g., mood, pain, sleep deprivation, or drug use) is more easily recalled when in that same state again.
Metacognition: The act of thinking about one's own thinking processes.
Testing Effect: The phenomenon where repeated self-testing and rehearsal of learned material improves long-term retention.
Forgetting Curve: The theory that memories fade over time if they are not used or accessed.
Encoding Failure: When information is never properly processed into the memory system, often due to a lack of attention.
Interference: A blockage that prevents the retrieval of memories. * Proactive Interference: When old memories block the retrieval of new memories. * Retroactive Interference: When new memories block the retrieval of old memories.
Tip-of-the-tongue Phenomenon: A retrieval failure where a memory is elusive despite being stored, often occurring with memories not frequently retrieved.
Repression: A defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from conscious awareness.
Misinformation Effect: The tendency for post-event information to interfere with and alter the original memory of what happened.
Source Amnesia: A memory impairment where the information is remembered but the context (where, when, or how it was learned) is forgotten.
Constructive Memory: The process by which memories are altered by new information, beliefs, or perceptions to fill in gaps in the original memory.
Memory Consolidation: The biological process of turning short-term memories into stable, long-term memories.
Imagination Inflation: An increased tendency to falsely remember having seen an item or performed an action when it was actually only imagined.
Intelligence and Psychometrics
Intelligence: The ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and utilize knowledge to adapt to novel situations.
g - General Intelligence: A single underlying mental capacity proposed to influence performance across all cognitive tasks.
Intelligence Quotient (IQ): A score calculated using the following formula: * Mental Age: A measure of an individual's intellectual development relative to others. * Chronological Age: The actual age of the person in years.
Standardization: The process of establishing set norms or standards for a test to compare individual scores against a larger population.
Validity: The degree to which a test actually measures or predicts what it claims to. * Construct Validity: The extent to which a test successfully measures a theoretical or abstract construct. * Predictive Validity: The success of the test in predicting future performance or behavior.
Reliability: The degree to which a test produces consistent and stable results. * Test-retest Reliability: Measuring stability over time by having the same person take the same test twice. * Split-half Reliability: Checking for internal consistency by comparing the scores on two halves of the same test.
Stereotype Threat: An individual's fear that their behavior will confirm a negative stereotype about their group, which can paradoxically lead to a decrease in performance.
Stereotype Lift: A performance boost seen in non-stereotyped groups when they are aware of negative stereotypes about other groups, leading to increased self-efficacy.
Flynn Effect: The observation that average IQ scores worldwide have been increasing over time.
Achievement Test: A test designed to assess what a person has already learned or their current performance.
Aptitude Test: A test designed to predict a person's future performance or potential.
Fixed Mindset: The belief that intelligence and talent are static, innate traits, often leading to the avoidance of challenges.
Growth Mindset: The belief that abilities can be developed and improved through perseverance and effort.