Cognitive Psych Exam 1

• William Wundt: focused on introspection…criticized for being too subjective 

• Herman Ebbinghaus: tested people on memorizing words like “G5B.”

• Mary Whiton Calkins: recency effect; remembering the word that was said last. 1st female president of the APA 

• William James: principles of psych. ”Tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon 

• The Gestalt Approach: gestalt; gestalt psych…showing figures that look like words, shows them in different fonts, gradients and perspectives. Ex: closure, proximity, continuation, similarity, figure and ground (ree with the letter A)

• Behaviorism: was lead by John B. Watson

• Operational definition: used to make concrete measurements for whatever you’re testing. Ex: B.F. Skinner

• The Cognitive revolution: They were disappointed with the behaviorist approach. Used human research 

• Well known cognitive psychologists: Jean Piaget with his focus on children’s thought processes & Noam Chomsky with linguistics and the concept of universal grammar

• in 1956 came the birth of modern Cognitive Psych 

• Ulric Neisser

• Cognitive Psych in Present Times: Enormous influence on the discipline of psych; issues with ecological validity; study of real life issues.

Cognitive Science:

• Interdisciplinary Field: cognitive psych, neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, linguistics (in some cases), sociology, anthropology, and economics  

Chapter 1

Terms to Know:

● Cognition = mental activity, refers to the acquisition, storage, transformation, and use of knowledge.

● Cognitive Psychology = Synonym for cognition and refers to the cognitive approach in psychology

● empirical evidence = scientific evidence obtained through careful observation and experimentation

● Introspection = carefully trained observers analyzing their own sensations and report them

● Recency Effect = observation that our recall is especially accurate for the final items in a series of stimuli

● Gestalt = an overall quality that transcends the individual elements

● Gestalt Psych = emphasizes we have basic tendencies to organize things and that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts

● Behaviorism = focus on objective observable reactions to stimuli and the environment rather than subjective processes like introspection

● Operational Definition = a precise definition that specifies how a concept is to be measured

● Cognitive Science = an interdisciplinary field that’s principal concern is answering questions about the mind and how it functions

● AI = branch of computer science that seeks to explore human cognitive processes with computer models that show “intelligent behavior” and can accomplish the same tasks that humans do.

○ Pure AI = an approach which designs a program to accomplish a cognitive task as efficiently as possible

○ Computer Modeling = Attempts to take human limitations into account and thus create a program that performs a cognitive task in an analogous way to how humans would solve the problem.

● The Computer Metaphor of the Mind and Information Processing = a metaphor for human cognitive processes that describes them like a computer

● The Connectionist Approach = argues that cognitive process can be best understood in terms of linked networks

● Cerebral Cortex = outer layer of the brain that is essential for your cognitive processes

● Spreading Activation Theory = an analogous model for the association of ideas, memories, and the like, based on the notion that activation of one item stored in memory travels through associated links to activate another item.

● Cognitive Neuroscience = combines research techniques of cognitive psychology with various methods for assessing the structure and function of the brain

● Social Cognitive Neuroscience = uses neuroscience techniques to explore the kind of cognitive processes that we use in our interactions with other people

● Brain Lesions = destruction of the brain in an area most often by strokes, tumors, or blows to the head and other accidents

Theories to Understand and be Able to Compare and Contrast:

● Behaviorism vs Introspection

● The Computer Metaphor of the Mind and Information Processing

● Methods of Cognitive neuroscience

Other Things to Understand:

● Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve

● The Cognitive Revolution

● TMS

● Event-Related Potential Technique

● FMRI

● PET 

●  

Chapter 3

Terms to Know:

● Attention= concentration of mental activity

● Top-down processing = when we concentrate our mental activity because we want to pay attention to some specific stimulus

● Bottom-up processing = when a stimulus from the environment captures our attention and causes us to concentrate our mental activity

● divided-attention task = trying to pay attention to two or more simultaneous stimuli

● Multitasking = trying to accomplish two or more tasks at the same time

● Task switching delays= It takes us time to change tasks, causing us to work more slowly and make more errors during the transitions

● Selective Attention = paying attention to certain kinds of information, while ignoring other ongoing information

● cocktail party effect =  Even if you are paying close attention to one conversation, you may notice if your name is mentioned in a nearby conversation

● working memory capacity = the brief, immediate memory for material that we are currently processing

● Phobic disorder = an excessive fear of a specific object or situation

● attentional bias =  situation/phenomenon in which people pay extra attention to some stimuli or some features

● Cognitive-behavioral approach = psychological problems arise from inappropriate thinking (cognitive factors) and inappropriate learning (behavioral factors)

● Saccadic Eye Movement = series of little jumps of the eye bring the center of the retina (Fovea) over the words being read

● Fixation = period between two saccadic movements where your visual system pauses briefly in order to acquire information that is useful for comprehending the written text

● Perceptual Span = the number of letters and spaces that we perceive during a fixation

● Parafoveal Preview = the fact that readers can access information about upcoming words even though they are currently fixated on a word to the left (in English) of those words

● Regressions = moving your eyes backward to earlier material in the sentence or passage

● Parietal Lobe = an area of the brain which processes your sense of touch and assembles input from your other senses into a form you can use

● Unilateral Spatial Neglect = A condition in which a person ignores part of his or her visual field often as result to damage to the Parietal lobe

● The Orienting Attention Network = a network of brain regions responsible for the kind of attention required for visual search, in which you must shift your attention around to various spatial locations

● The Executive Attention Network = a network of brain regions responsible for the kind of attention we use when a task focuses on conflict (inhibition)

● Split-phrase switching =  in dichotic listening task If you were told to attend to the right ear, you should just repeat that message with no problems, even though it is a confusing sentence. INSTEAD, almost all participants inadvertently switched to shadoring the other ear because that message “finished”

● Consciousness = the awareness people have about the outside world and about their perceptions, images, thoughts, memories, and feelings

● Mindless Reading = Your eyes may move forward in the text, but you do not process the meaning of the material

● Mind Wandering = when your thoughts shift from the external environment in favor of internal processing (off task processing)

● thought suppression = the attempt to eliminate thoughts, ideas, and images related to an undesirable stimulus

● Ironic effects of mental control = a term used by Wegner to describe how our efforts can backfire when we attempt to control the contents of our consciousness

Theories to Understand and be Able to Compare and Contrast:

● Variables that impact visual search tasks

● Each bottleneck theory’s strengths and weaknesses

● Feature Integration Theory

Other Things to Understand:

● Dichotic listening task

● The Stroop task

● Visual search task

● illusory conjunctions

● Blindsight

Chapter 4

Terms to Know:

● Short-term memory = the memory system responsible for holding on to a small amount of information that has been recently taken from the environment

● Long-term memory = memory system that contains experiences and information accumulated throughout one’s lifetime

● Chunk = memory unit consisting of strongly associated components

● rehearsal = repeating the items to remember silently

● Serial Position Effect = The U shape relationship between a words position in a list and its probability of accurate recall.

○ Recency effect = Better recall for items at the end of the list

○ Primacy effect = Better recall for items at the beginning of the list

● Semantics = the meaning of words and sentences

● Proactive Interference (PI) =  When people have trouble learning new material because previous material interferes with new learning

● Sensory Memory = a storage system that records information from each of the senses

● Control Processes = intentional strategies, such as rehearsal, that people may use to improve their memory

● Working Memory = Brief immediate memory for the limited amount of material that you are currently processing

● working-memory approach = Our immediate memory is a multipart system that temporarily holds and manipulates information while we perform cognitive tasks.

● Phonological loop = Working memory system that processes a limited number of sounds for a short period of time

● Acoustic Confusions = when people confuse similar sounding stimuli

● visuospatial sketchpad —processes both visual and spatial information

● Episodic Buffer - temporary storehouse that can hold and combine information from the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketchpad, and long-term memory

● Central Executive - integrates information from the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketchpad, the episodic buffer, and long-term memory

● Episodic Buffer - temporary storehouse that can hold and combine information from the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketchpad, and long-term memory

Theories to Understand and be Able to Compare and Contrast:

● Atkinson and Shiffrin's Model of Information Processing

● Baddeley’s Model of Working Memory

○ Be able to explain the role of each part of the model

○ Be able to apply the model to various examples

● Dr. Oberauer’s Model of working memory

Other Things to Understand:

● The Brown/Peterson & Peterson Technique

● Working memory and academic performance

● Working memory and clinical applications