AP Psychology Unit 6: Cognition

Explicit Memory

Memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously known and "declare." (Also called declarative memory).

Sensory Memory

The immediate, very brief recording of sensory information in the memory system.

Fixation

The inability to see a problem from a new perspective; an impediment to problem solving.

Spacing Effect

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

Belief Bias

The tendency for one's preexisting beliefs to distort logical reasoning, sometimes by making invalid conclusions seem valid, or valid conclusions seem invalid.

Overconfidence

The tendency to be more confident than correct- to overestimate the accuracy of one's beliefs and judgments.

Memory

The persistence of learning over time through the storage and retrieval if information.

Recall

A measure of memory in which the person must retrieve information learned earlier, as on a fill in the blank test.

Long Term Potenitation (LTP)

An increase in synapse's firing potential after brief, rapid stimulation. Believed to be a natural basis for learning and memory.

Effortful Processing

Encoding that requires attention and conscious effort.

Misinformation Effect

Incorporating misleading information into one's memory of an event.

Transience

Storage decay over time (after we part ways with former classmates, unused information fades).

Bias

Belief colored recollections (a friend's current feelings toward her fiance may color her recalled initial feelings).

Belief Perseverance

Clinging to one's initial conceptions after the bias on which they were formed bad been discredited.

Misattribution

Confusing the source of information (putting words in someone else's mouth or remembering a movie scene as an actual happening).

Repression

In psychoanalytic theory, the basic defense mechanism that banishes from consciousness anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories.

Blocking

Inaccesibility of stored information (seeing an old classmate, we may feel the name on the tip of our tongue, but we experience retrieval failure- we cannot get it out).

Absent-Minded

Inattention to details produced encoding failure (our mind is elsewhere was we lay down the car keys).

Retrieval Cue

Is a prompt that help us remember. When we make a new memory, we include certain information about the situation that act as triggers to access the memory.

Representative Heuristic

Judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes; may lead one to ignore other relevant information.

Imagery

Mental pictures; a powerful aid to effort processing, especially when combined with semantics encoding.

Chunking

Organizing items into familiar manageable units; often occurs automatically.

Language

Our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning.

Suggestibility

The lingering effects of misinformation.

Amnesia

The loss of memory.

Cognition

The mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.

Syntax

The rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language.

Mood Congruent Memory

The tendency to recall experiences that are consistent with one's current good or bad mood.

Functional Fixedness

The tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions; an impediment to problem solving.

Framing

The way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgements.

Automatic Processing

Unconscious encoding of incidental information, such as space, time, and frequency, and of well-learned information, such as would meanings. We automatically process information about space, time, and frequency.

Linguistic Determinism

Whorf's hypothesis that language determines the way we think.

Acoustic Encoding

The encoding of sounds, especially the sound of words.

Algorithm

A methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrasts with the usually speedier- but also more error prone- use of heuristics.

Flashbulb Memory

A clear memory of an emotionally significant moment or event.

Insight

A sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem; it contrasts with strategy-based solutions.

Recognition

A measure of memory in which the person need only identify items previously learned, as on a multiple choice test.

Relearning

A memory measure that assesses the amount of time saved when learning material for a second time, such as a final exam.

Concept

A mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people.

Prototype

A mental image of best example of a category. Matching new items to the prototype provides a quick and easy method for including items in a category (as when comparing feathered creatures to a prototypical bird, such as a robin).

Echoic Memory

A momentary sensory memory of auditory stimuli; in attention is elsewhere, sounds and words can still be recalled within 3 or 4 seconds.

Iconic Memory

A momentary sensory memory of visual stimuli; a photographic or picture-image memory lasting no more than a few seconds.

Hippocampus

A neural center that is located in the limbic system and helps process explicit memories for storage.

Working Memory

A newer understanding of short-term memory that involves consious, active processing of incoming auditory and visual-spatial information, and of information retrieved from long-term memory.

Heuristic

A simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone than algorithms.

Mental Set

A tendency to approach a problem in a particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past.

Confirmation Bias

A tendency to search for information that confirms one's preconceptions.

Three Sins of Forgetting

Absent-minded, Transience, and Blocking.

Short Term Memory

Activated memory that holds a few items briefly, such as the seven digits of a phone number while dialing, before the information is stored or forgotten.

Source Amnesia

Attributing to the wrong source an event we have experienced, heard about, read about, or imagined. (Also called source attribution). Source amnesia, along with the misinformation effect, is at the heart of many false memories.

Babbing Stage

Beginning about 4 months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to household language.

Two Word Stage

Beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly two-word statements,

Telegraphic Speech

Early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram- "go car"- using mostly nouns and verbs and omitting auxiliary words.

Availability Heuristic

Estimating the likelihood of event based on their availability in memory; if instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), we presume such events are common.

Grammar

In a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others.

Phoneme

In a language, the smallest distinctive sound.

Morpheme

In a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or part of a word (such as a prefix).

Mnemonics

Memory aids, especially those techniques that use vivid imagery and organizational devices.

Intuition

Is a person's capacity to obtain or have direct knowledge and/or immediate insight, without observation or reason. It's the "gut feeling" you get. People often place an enormous amount of faith on their intuition, even making decisions that seem to go against all available evidence. For example, a coach might play a second string player instead of a start player just because they had a "hunch" the second string player would do well. This would be a case of using intuition to make a decision.

Self Reference Effect

Is a phenomenon of memory that causes an individual to encode information differently depending on the degree of personal involvement in the sequence of events being encoded. Research has shown that the greater the person's involvement, the greater the level and accuracy of recall. For instance, if an individual is involved in a car accident, the memory will be much more intense than if the accident had only been witnessed.

Three Sins of Distortion

Misattribution, Suggestibility, Bias

Serial Positioning Effect

Our tendency to recall best the last and first items in a list.

One sin of Intrusion

Persistence.

Implicit Memory

Retention independent of consious recollection. (Also called procedural memory). For example, once a person has learned how to ride a bike, repeated riding is implicit memory. The rider does not need to specifically recall each motion that needs to be completed.

Richard Atkins and Richard Shiffrin's three-stage process

Sensory, short term, and long term memory.

One Word Stage

Stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly single words.

Deja Vu

That eerie sense that "I've experienced this before." Cues from the current situation may subconsciously trigger retrieval of an earlier experience.

Ebbinghaus Retention Curve (Forgetting Curve)

The Ebbinghaus Retention Curve, also known as the forgetting curve, shows the rate at which memories are lost over time. It is named after Hermann Ebbinghaus, a pioneering researcher of human memory. He showed that we start to forget items rapidly once we stop rehearsing the material; then the rate of forgetting (or memory decay) slows. He also showed that the more time we initially spend rehearsing information, the less time it takes to relearn it later, and information we spend more time rehearsing decays at a slower rate.

Creativity

The ability to produce novel and valuable ideas.

Priming

The activation, often unconsciously of a particular associations in memory. Ask a friend two rapid fire questions: (a) How do you pronounce the word spelled by the letter s-h-o-p? (b) What do you do when you come to a green light? If your friend answers "stop" to the second question, you have demonstrated priming.

Rehearsal

The consious repetition of information, either to maintain it in consciousness or to eoncide it for storage.

Retroactive Interference (Backward Acting)

The disruptive effect of new learning on on the recall of old information.

Proactive Interference (Forward Acting)

The disruptive effect of prior learning on the recall of new information.

Semantic Encoding

The encoding of meaning, including the meaning of words.

Visual Encoding

The encoding of picture images.

Retrieval

The processing of getting information out of memory storage.

Encoding

The processing of information into the memory system- for example, by extracting meaning. Getting information inside our brain.

Parallel Processing

The processing of several aspects of a problem simultaneously; the brain's natural mode of information processing for many function, including vision. Contrasts with the step by step (serial) processing of most computers and of conscious problem solving.

Long Term Memory

The relatively permanent and limitless storehouse of the memory system. Includes knowledge, skills, and experiences.

Storage

The retention of encoded information over time. Keeping it in your brain.

Semantics

The set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences in a given language; also, the study of meaning.

Persistence

Unwanted memories (being haunted by images of a sexual assault).

Next In Line Effect

When people go around a circle saying words or their names, and attempting to remember what was said by others, their poorest memories are for what was said by the person just before them. When we are next in line, we focus on our own performance and often fail to process that last person's words.