PSYCH 120A Midterm (Monti)

Neisser's "Cognitive Psychology"

- 1st cognitive psych textbook

Donder's pioneering experiment

- 1st cognitive psychology experiment interest: how long it takes for a person to make a decision (simple reaction time vs. choice reaction time) experiment: presenting a stimulus (the light flashes) causes a mental response (perceiving the light), which leads to a behavioral response (pushing the button) result: mental responses cannot be measured directly but must be inferred from behavior

William James "Principles of Psychology"

- 1st psych textbook - paying attention to one thing involves withdrawing from other things

Gestalt principles of organization

- Gestalt psychologists rejected Wundt's idea that perceptions were formed by adding up sensations - the organizing principles of perception proposed by the Gestalt psychologists

comparing the four approaches of object perception

- Helmholz's unconscious inference, regularities in the environment, and Bayesian inference all have in common the idea that we use data about the environment, gathered through all our past experiences in perceiving, to determine what is out there, assigning top-down processing an important role in perception - Gestalt psychologists, in contrast, emphasized the idea that principles of organization are built in and acknowledged that perception is affected by experience but argued that built in principles can override experience, thereby assigning bottom-up processing a central role in perception

KC and LP

- KC lost episodic memory but has an intact semantic memory - LP lost semantic memory but has an intact episodic memory - double dissociation - memory for these 2 different types of information probably involves different mechanisms

brain imaging

- PET (which areas of brain are activated) --> replaced with fMRI (higher resolution) (revolution with introduction of fMRI)

Setting the stage for the reemergence of the mind in psychology

- Tolman was an early cognitive psychologist and used behavior to infer mental processes -Tolman's experiment: rat was placed at pt A and turned right to get to pt B when placed at pt C, it turned left to get to pt B (food) - Chomsky saw lang. development as an inborn bio program that holds across cultures, no imitation or reinforcement vs. Skinner argued that children learn language through operant conditioning (imitate speech they hear and repeat correct speech because it is rewarded) --> study of cognitive behaviors

object discrimination problem

- a problem in which the task is to remember an object based on its shape and choose it when presented with another object after a delay and it would receive the food reward. - associated with research on the what processing stream

precuing

- a procedure in which participants are given a cue that will usually help them carry out a subsequent task - this procedure has been used in visual attention experiments in which participants are presented with a cue that tells them where to direct their attention - enhances the processing of the target stimulus - attention can enhance our response to objects - when attention is directed to one place on an object, the enhancing effect of that attention spreads to other places on the object

release from proactive interference

- a situation in which conditions occur that eliminate or reduce the decrease in performance caused by proactive interference - increase in performance from leaving a different category of words

delayed response task

- a task in which information is provided, a delay is imposed, and then memory is tested - this task has been used to study short-term memory by testing monkeys' ability to hold information about the location of a food reward during a delay - if PFC is removed, their performance drops to a chance level --> supports idea that PFC is important for holding information for brief periods of time

cued recall

- a testing condition in which people are given an explicit retrieval cue to help them remember - aid memory

automatic processing

- a type of processing that occurs without intention and at a cost of only some of a person's cognitive resources - if task difficulty increases, then automatic processing is not possible even with practice

scene schemas

- an observer's knowledge about what is contained in typical scenes - ex. a printer is not usually in a kitchen - people's attention holds longer at things that seem out of place in a scene because their attention is affected by their knowledge of what is usually found in the scene

attention changes the representation of objects across the cortex

- attention directed to a specific location results in enhanced activity at one place in the cortex - looking for a particular category shifts responding to the category and to additional things related to the category --> attentional warping - the map of categories on the brain changes so more space is allowed to categories that are being searched for

comparing coding in STM and LTM

- auditory coding is predominant type of coding in STM - semantic coding is predominant type of coding in LTM

semantic regularities

- characteristics associated with the functions carried out in different types of scenes - ex. cooking happens in a kitchen

regularities to the environment

- characteristics of the environment that occur frequently - ex. blue is associated with open sky

theory of natural selection

- characteristics that enhance an animal's ability to survive, and therefore reproduce, will be passed on to future generations - experience can shape the way neurons respond

illusory conjunction

- combinations of features from different stimuli - occur because in the preattentive stage, each feature exists independently of the others

Saffran's experiment

- demonstrated statistical learning in young infants - during the learning phase of the experiment, the infants heard four nonsense words --> heard in a string -pairs of 3 syllable stimuli: whole words, part-words (stimuli created from end of one word and the beginning of another) - infants would choose to listen to the part-word stimuli longer than to the whole-word stimuli (repeated to them previously) because they pay more attention to novel stimuli they haven't heard before

Ebbinghaus's memory experiment

- determined how long it took to learn a list for the first time, waited for a specific amount of time (the delay) and then determined how long it took to relearn the list - savings method to measure forgetting - shows that memory could be quantified

Watson founds behaviorism

- dissatisfied with analytic introspection because it produced variable results from person to person and these results were difficult to verify because they were interpreted in terms of invisible inner mental processes - observable behavior not consciousness is main topic of study - Little Albert = loud noise + rat = paired --> fear - dominated psych in 1940s-1960s

distinguishing between different components of long-term memory

- episodic (life events) - semantic (facts) - procedural (physical actions)

distinctions between episodic and semantic memory

- episodic memory includes mental time travel - semantic memory involves accessing knowledge about the world that does not have to be tied to remembering a personal experience

law of pragnanz (principle of good figure/principle of similarity)

- every stimulus pattern is seen in such a way that the resulting structure is as simple as possible - similar things appear to be grouped together - although a person's experience can influence perception, the role of experience is minor compared to perceptual processes - the idea that the principles are built in differs from Helmholz's likelihood principle that our experience with the environment is a central component of perception

experience-dependent plasticity

- experience can shape the nervous system - ex. Gauthier's experiment = participants were given extensive training in "Greeble" recognition --> FFA responded almost as well to Greebles as to faces

what happens to episodic and semantic memories as time passes

- familiarity --> semantic memory - recollection --> episodic memory

MacKay's experiment

- found that the meaning of the biasing word (money or river) affected the participant's choice to pick "they threw stones toward the side of the river yesterday" or "they threw stones at the savings and loan association yesterday" vs. "they were throwing stones at the bank"

mirror neurons

- frontal lobe neurons that fire when performing certain actions or when observing another doing so - the brain's mirroring of another's action may enable imitation, language learning, and empathy - ex. when a monkey sees a human grasping an object and it grasps an object - purpose: involved in determining the goal or intention behind an action

prefrontal neurons that hold information

- important characteristic of memory is that it involves delay or waiting - saw neurons in a monkey's PFC while monkey carried out delayed-response task - monkey looked at fixation point (x) while a square was flashed at one position on the screen --> delay (few secs) --> nerve firing is the neural record of monkey's working memory for position of the square --> after delay the fixation went off --> monkey has to move its eyes to where square had been flashed --> provides behavioral evidence that it remembered location of the square - information can be held in working memory by neural activity that continues across a time gap -> neural firing transmits info in the nervous system

Atkinson-Shiffrin model of memory

- input --> sensory memory (incoming info for a second) --> short-term memory (limited capacity ^ output and round a bout rehearsal [repeat something]) -->/ <-- long-term memory ( hold info for a long period of time) - structural features: box in the model - control processes: dynamic processes associated with structural factors that can be controlled by the person and may differ from one task to another - rehearsal: ex. of a control process that operates on STM (repeating a stimulus over and over) - encoding: process of storing things in LTM - retrieval: remembering info that is stored in LTM

levels of processing theory

- linking type of encoding to retrieval - memory depends on depth of processing that an item recieves

Sach's experiment

- listen to a tape recording of a passage and then measured their recognition memory to determine whether they remembered the exact wording of sentences in the passage or just general meaning of the passage - specific wording is forgotten but the general meaning can be remembered for a long time

LSJ

- loss of episodic memory but who could still learn to master new skills even though they don't remember any of the practice that led to this mastery - demonstrates link between semantic memory and procedural memory

saliency map

- map of a scene that indicates the stimulus salience of areas and objects in the scene - ex. red shirt among many white shirts has high saliency - first few fixations are most likely on high-salience areas --> scanning begins to be influenced by top-down processing that depend on things such as the observer's goals and expectations determined by their past experiences in observing the environment - there are variations in how people scan scenes --> scanning is influenced by preferences a person brings to the situation (top-down processing)

state dependent learning

- matching the internal mood present during encoding and retrieval - when listening to happy/sad music --? listen to this music when having to recall information

transfer-appropriate processing

- matching the task involved in encoding and retrieval - same cognitive tasks are involved during encoding and retrieval

Broadbent's filter model of attention

- model of attention that proposes a filter that lets attended stimuli through and blocks some or all of the unattended stimuli - sensory memory holds all of the incoming info for a fraction of a second and then transfers all of it to the filter - filter identifies the message that his being attended to based on its physical char. (tone, pitch, speed, accent) and lets only attended message pass through to detector and all other messages are filtered out - detector processes the info from attended message to determine high level char. of the message, such as its meaning - output of detector is sent to short-term memory (holds info for 10-15 sec) and also transfers info into long-term memory (hold info indefinitely)

brain imagery

- more evidence for different brain regions associated with episodic and semantic memory

procedural memory

- muscle coordination (long -term memory) - memory for doing things that usually involve learned skills

retrieval practice effect

- preparing for an exam by trying to recall important concepts from memory - if retrieval is difficult, but successful, learning is enhanced and test performance is improved

landmark discrimination problem

- problem in which the task is to remember an object's location and to choose that location after a delay - associated with research on the where processing stream

partial-report method

- procedure used in Sperling's experiment on the properties of the visual icon, in which participants were instructed to report only some of the stimuli in a briefly presented display - a cue tone immediately after the display was extinguished indicated which part of the display to report

Flow diagrams for computers

- processed info in stages - computer process flow diagram: input --> input processor --> memory unit --> arithmetic unit --> output - Broadbent's 1st flow diagram: input (attended/unattended messages) --> filter (lets through attended message) --> detector (records the info that gets through the filter --> to memory

central executive

- pulls information from long-term memory and coordinates activity of phonological loop and visuospatial sketch pad by focusing on specific parts of a task and deciding how to divide attention between different tasks ("traffic cop") - control center of working memory - does not store information but coordinates how information is used by phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad - attention controller

physical regularities

- regularly occurring physical properties of the environment - ex. oblique effect

HM

- removal of hippocampus on both sides of the brain --> eliminating his ability to form new long-term memories - STM and LTM memories are served by separate brain regions

Moray's experiment

- said listener's name in unattended message and 1/3 of participants detected it - evidence against Broadbent's theory because name was not filtered out and had been analyzed enough to determine its meaning

savings curve

- shows that memory drops rapidly for the first 2 days after the initial learning and then levels off - functions like the savings curve could be used to describe a property of the mind (the ability to retain information)

chunking

- small units can be combined into larger meaningful units (words --> phrases) - increases our ability to hold information in STM

vertical/what/perception pathway

- striate cortex to temporal lobe - associated with perceiving or recognizing objects.

shadowing

- technique where a participant is asked to repeat a word or phrase immediately after its heard - could report gender of voice

processing capacity

- the amount of information input that a person can handle - this sets a limit on the person's ability to process information

Bayesian inference

- the idea that our estimate of the probability of an outcome is determined by the prior probability (our initial belief about the probability of an outcome) and the likelihood (the extent to which the available evidence is consistent with the outcome). - ex. prior probability Mary's belief about frequency of getting a cold, lung disease, or heartburn (Mary believes that having a cold or heartburn is likely to occur, but having lung disease is unlikely) - likelihood = chances of coughing that could cause 3 types of health problems --> coughing is associated with a cold or lung disease but not heartburn

transitional probabilities

- the likelihood that one sound will follow another within a word - ex. pretty baby (less likely ty and ba will be in the same word)

apparent movement

- the perception that a stationary object is moving, occurs when different areas of the retina are quickly stimulated, leading us to interpret motion - ex. light flashes --> darkness --> light flashes again - we don't see the darkness because our perceptual system adds something during the period of darkness -- the perception of a light moving through the space between the flashing lights - the whole is diff than the sum of its parts

stimulus salience

- the physical properties of the stimulus, such as color, contrast, or movement - bottom-up processing because it depends solely on the pattern of light and dark, color and contrast without considering meaning of an image

unconscious inference

- the process in which our perceptions are the result of unconscious assumptions, or inferences that we make about the environment - applies the observer's knowledge of the environment in order to infer what the object might be

memory

- the process involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no longer present - active anytime some past experience has an effect on the way you think or behave now or in the future

feature integration theory (FIT)

- the theory that scene perception takes place in two stages - resolves the binding problem by proposing that attention is directed to one object at a time - object --> preattentive stage (analyze into features) --> focused attention stage (combined features) --> perception - preattentive stage - occurs before we focus attention on the object (automatic, unconscious, effortless); features of objects are analyzed independently in separate areas of the brain and are not yet associated with a specific object - focused attention stage - attention is focused on the object and the independent features are combined, causing the observe to be consciously aware of the object

Cherry's experiment

- two auditory messages, one to the left ear and one to the right ear --> focus their attention on one of the messages and ignore the other one - when people focused on the attended message, they could hear the sounds of the unattended message but were unaware of the contents of the message

conjunction search

- useful for studying binding because finding the target in a comparison search involves scanning a display in order to focus attention at a specific location - RM cannot find the target in a conjunction search

dorsal/where/action pathway

- visual cortex to parietal lobe - responsible for object location and movement

likelihood principle

- we perceive the object that is most likely to have caused the pattern of stimuli we have received - we infer that it is likely that this is a rectangle covering another rectangle because of experiences we have had with similar situations in the past

repetition priming

- when the test stimulus is the same as or resembles the priming stimulus - ex. seeing word bird may cause you to respond more quickly to a later presentation of the word bird than to a word you have not seen = better performance for words you have been primed with

Wundt's psychology laboratory

-1st psych lab and structuralism dominated psych in late 1800s and early 1900s

Treisman's attenuation model of selective attention

-messages --> alternator -->/<-- dictionary unit (^ unattended message/attended message) --> to memory - attenuator: analyzes the incoming message in terms of 1) its physical char. - high/low pitched, fast or slow 2) its lang. - how the message groups into syllables or words 3) its meaning - how sequences of words create meaningful phrases - language and meaning can also be used to separate the messages - attended message emerges at full strength and unattended messages are attenuated (present but weaker than attended message) - dictionary unit: contains words stored in memory, each of which has a threshold for being activated

cognitive revolution

1950s, a shift in psychology from the behaviorist's stimulus-response relationships to an approach whose main thrust was to understand the operation of the mind

How many items can short term memory hold?

5-9

brain ablation

A procedure in which a specific area is removed from an animal's brain. It is usually done to determine the function of this area by assessing the effect on the animal's behavior.

generation effect

Memory for material is better when a person generates the material him- or herself, rather than passively receiving it.

movement facilitates perception

Movement helps us perceive things in our environment more accurately than static, still images

propoganda effect

People are more likely to rate statements they have read or heard before as being true, just because of prior exposure to the statements.

principle of good continuation

Points that, when connected, result in straight or smoothly curving lines are seen as belonging together, and the lines tend to be seen in such a way as to follow the smoothest path. Also, objects that are overlapped by other objects are perceived as continuing behind the overlapping object.

maintenance rehearsal

Repeating information over and over to keep it active in short-term memory without any consideration of meaning or making connections with other information --> poor memory

auditory coding

Representation of the sound of a stimulus in the mind.

Baddley's working memory model

Viseospatial sketchpad (visual and spatial information) - central exec. - phonological loop (verbal and auditory information)

analytic introspection

Wundt's procedure used by early psychologists in which trained participants described their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli - describe their experience in terms of elementary mental elements -ex. describe experience of hearing a 5 note chord (can you hear each individual note that made up the chord)

chunk

a collection of elements that are strongly associated with one another but are weakly associated with elements in other chunks

episodic buffer

a component of working memory where information in working memory interacts with information in long term memory (eg. relating information you are processing to a previous memory)

paired-association learning

a learning task in which participants are first presented with pairs of words, then one word of each pair is presented and the task is to recall the other word

working memory

a limited-capacity system for temporary storage and manipulation of information for complex tasks such as comprehension, learning, and reasoning

cognitive map

a mental representation of the layout of one's environment - ex. when rat initially experienced the maze's layout, it developed this

elaborative rehearsal

a method of transferring information from STM into LTM by making that information meaningful in some way

free recall

a procedure for testing memory in which the participant is asked to remember stimuli that were previously presented

remember/know procedure

a procedure in which subjects are presented with a stimulus they have encountered before and are asked to indicate remember, if they remember the circumstances under which they initially encountered it, or know, if the stimulus seems familiar but they don't remember experiencing it earlier or do not know if they remember stimulus at all

synaptic consolidation

a process of consolidation that involves structural changes at synapses that happen rapidly, over a period of minutes

attentional capture

a rapid shifting of attention usually caused by a stimulus such as a loud noise, bright light, or sudden movement

saccadic eye movement

a rapid, jerky movement from one fixation to the next

dichotic listening

a task in which people wearing headphones hear different messages presented to each ear

high-load tasks

a task that uses most or all of a person's resources and so leaves little capacity to handle other tasks

cocktail party effect

ability to attend to only one voice among many

Phineas Gage

accident changed his personality from an upstanding citizen to a person with low impulse control, poor ability to plan, and poor social skills --> frontal lobe is associated with personality and planning and controlling attention

synchronization

act of occurring, or of causing to occur, at the same time

retrieval cue

anything that helps a person (or a nonhuman animal) recall information stored in long-term memory

attention affects perception

attending to an object makes it more clear and visible and vivid --> attention affects perception

selective attention

attending to one thing while ignoring others

Skinner's operant conditioning

behavior is strengthened by the presentation of positive reinforcers or withdrawal of negative reinforcers (shock/social rejection) ex. reinforcing a rat with food for pressing a bar maintained or increased rat's rate of bar pressing

preservation

behavior of patients with frontal lobe damage where they repeatedly perform the same action of thought even if it is not achieving the desired goal

iconic memory of visual icon

brief sensory memory for visual stimuli

semantic coding

coding in the mind in terms of meaning

visual coding

coding in the mind in the form of a visual image

logic theorist

computer that created proofs of math theorems that involve principles of logic

phonological similarity effect

confusion of letters or words that sound similar

persistence of vision

continued perception of a visual stimulus even after it is no longer present

ventral attention network

controls attention based on salience

dorsal attention network

controls attention based on top-down processes

proactive interference

decrease in memory that occurs when previously learned info interferes with learning new information (by presenting words from the same category on a series of trials)

savings

determine how much was forgotten after a particular delay

interaction

different types of memory can interact and share mechanisms

change blindness

difficulty in detecting changes in scenes

attention to locations increases activity in specific areas of the brain

directing attention to a specific area of space activates a specific part of the brain

division

distinguishing between different types of memory

distractions by cell phones while driving

distractions worsen driving skills --> increase in crashes and accidents than compared to if there were no distractions

shallow processing

encoding on a basic level based on the structure or physical features of words

deep processing

encoding semantically, based on the meaning of the words; tends to yield the best retention

testing effect

enhanced memory after retrieving, rather than simply rereading, information

constructive episodic simulation hypothesis

episodic memories are extracted and recombined to construct simulations of future events

Westmacott and Moscovitch's experiment

experiences related to episodic memories can aid in accessing semantic memories

perception

experiences resulting from stimulation of the senses

Stroop effect

explains the decreased speed of naming the color of ink used to print words when the color of ink and the word itself are of different colors

principles of perceptual organization

explains the way elements are grouped together to create larger objects

distraction caused by mind wandering

extremely prevalent and is distracting enough to disrupt an ongoing task (impairs performance)

just in time strategy

eye movements occur just before we need the information they will provide

personal semantic memories

facts associated with personal experiences

sane-object advantage

faster responding that occurs when enhancement spreads within an object

inattentional deafness

focusing on a difficult visual task results in impaired hearing

visuospatial sketchpad

holds visual and spatial information

effective connectivity

how easily activity can travel along a particular pathway

reaction time

how long it takes to respond to presentation of a stimulus

new perspectives on behavior

humans are not just blank slates that just accept and store info

serial position curve

in a memory experiment in which participants are asked to recall a list of words, a plot of the percentage of participants remembering each word against the position of that word in the list

short-term memory

information that stays in our memory for brief periods (10 - 15 sec) if we don't repeat it over and over again

systems consolidation

involves gradual reorganization of circuits in brain

scene schema

knowledge of what a given scene typically contains

size-weight illusion

larger object seems lighter because we perceive that larger objects will be heavier as they get larger

delayed partial report method

letters were flashed on and off and then the cue tone was presented after a short delay

phonological loop

limited capacity and holds information for a few seconds

episodic memories

long-term memories of experiences from the past

bottom-up processing

looking at something creates an image on the retina --> this image generates electrical signals that are transmitted through the retina --> visual receiving area of the brain (eye to brain) (environmental energy stimulates the receptors)

semanticization of remote memories

loss of episodic detail for memories of long-ago events

artificial intelligence

making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving (McCarthy)

encoding specificity

matching the context in which encoding and retrieval occur

electrophysiology

measuring electrical responses of the nervous system --> listen to activity of single neurons

semantic memory

memories of facts

explicit memories

memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and "declare"

continuity errors

mismatch, usually involving spatial position or objects, that occurs from one film shot to another

late selection models of attention

most of the incoming information is processed to the level of meaning before the message to be further processed is selected

visual scanning

movements of the eyes from one location or object to another

activity-silent working memory

neurons going from activity state --> synaptic state (neurons fire briefly --> firing doesn't continue but causes synaptic state in which a number of connections between neurons are strengthened)

word length effect

occurs when memory for lists of words is better for short words than for long words

priming

occurs when presentation of priming stimulus changes the way a person responds to another stimulus (test stimulus)

change detection

one picture is presented followed by another picture and the task is to determine the difference between them

distraction

one stimulus interfering with the processing of another stimulus

structuralism

our overall experience is determined by combining basic elements of experience (sensations) -periodic table of elements for the mind -- --> abandoned in early 1900s

classical conditioning

pairing one stimulus with another, previously neutral stimulus causes changes in the response to the neutral stimulus - ex. Pavlov's pairing of food (which made the dog salivate) with a bell (NS) caused the dog to salivate to the sound of the bell

Balint's syndrome

parietal lobe damage, inability to focus attention on individual objects and makes it difficult to combine features correctly (RM)

mental rotation

participants rotated an image of one of the objects in their mind

fixation

pause on a face to identify it

divided attention

paying attention to more than one thing at a time

oblique effect

people can perceive horizontals and verticals more easily than other orientations

echoic memory

persistence of sound lasts for a few seconds after presentation of original stimulus

KF

poor STM but functioning LTM

whole-report method

procedure used in Sperling's experiment on the properties of the visual icon, in which participants were instructed to report all of the stimuli they saw in a brief presentation

top-down processing

processing that originates in the brain, at the "top" of the perceptual system (identify objects and scenes and determining story behind the scene)

executive functions

range of processes that involve controlling attention and dealing with conflicting responses

short-lived sensory memory

registers all or most information that hits our visual receptors, but that this information decays within less than a second

articulatory rehearsal process

rehearsal that can keep items in the phonological store from decaying

perceptual load

related to the difficulty of a task

articulatory suppression

repetition of an irrelevant sound reduces memory because speaking interferes with rehearsal

familiarity effect

rereading causes material to become familiar

executive functions network

responsible for executive functions

long-term memory

responsible for storing information for long periods of time (minutes to a lifetime)

location

returning to a particular place stimulated memories associated with that place

visual search

scanning a scene to find a specific object

interactions between episodic and semantic memory

semantic memory guides our experience --> influences episodic memories that follow from that experience

information processing approach

sequences of mental operations involved in cognition (occurring in a number of stages)

cognitive control

set of functions which allow people to regulate their behavior and attentional resources and to resist the temptation to give into impulses

scientific revolution

shift from one paradigm to another (paradigm shift)

overt attention

shifting attention from one place to another by moving the eyes

covert attention

shifting attention from one place to another while keeping the eyes stationary

neuropsychology

study of behavior of people with brain damage --> functioning of diff parts of the brain

cognitive psychology

study of mental processes which includes determining the characteristics and properties of the mind and how it operates

paradigm

system of ideas that dominate science at a particular time

self-reference effect

tendency to better remember information relevant to ourselves

primacy effect

tendency to remember words at the beginning of a list especially well

recency effect

tendency to remember words at the end of a list especially well

Miller's principle

that there are limits to the amount of info we can take in and remember

attention

the ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations

viewpoint invariance

the ability to recognize an object seen from different viewpoints

speech segmentation

the ability to tell when one word ends and another begins

central vision

the area you are looking at

visual imagery

the creation of visual images in the mind in the absence of a physical visual stimulus (whether pictures are two different views of the same object or 2 different objects)

early selection model

the filter eliminates the unattended information right at the beginning of the flow of information

coding

the form in which stimuli are represented

autobiographical memory

the memory for events and facts related to one's personal life story

cognition

the mental processes, such as perception, attention, and memory, that are what the mind does

digit span

the number of digits a person can remember

binding

the process by which features such as color, form, motion, and location are combined to create our perception of a coherent object

statistical learning

the process of learning about transitional probabilities and about other characteristics of language

consolidation

the process that transforms new memories into a permanent state in which they are more resistant to disruption

binding problem

the question of how separate brain areas combine forces to produce a unified perception of a single object

inverse projection problem

the task of determining the object responsible for a particular image on the retina, starting with retinal image and extending rays out from the eye

spacing effect

the tendency for distributed study or practice to yield better long-term retention than is achieved through massed study or practice

choice reaction time

the time it takes to respond to a stimulus when there are multiple responses (light flashes) from which to choose

simple reaction time

the time it takes to respond to a stimulus when there is only one possible response

Helmholz's theory of unconscious inference

these unconscious assumptions result in perceptions that seem instantaneous even though they are the outcome of a rapid process

low-load tasks

use up only a small amount of the person's processing capacity

peripheral vision

vision at the edges of the visual field

light-from-above assumption

we usually assume that light is coming from above, because light in our environment, including the sun and most artificial light, usually comes from above

expert-induced amnesia

well-learned procedural memories that do not require attention (happens automatically)

implicit memories

when learning from experience is not accompanied by conscious remembering

inattentional blindness

when people are unaware of clearly visible stimuli if they aren't directing their attention to them

sensory memory

when something is presented briefly, your perception continues for a fraction of a second