Cognitive Psychology Test 1

central executive

"attention controller", "cognitive supervisor" - frontal lobe damage - perservation - repeatedly performing the same action or thought even it is not achieving the desired goal - inflexible - developed prefrontal cortex

conditional syllogisms

"if then" - if p, then q - three statements if p - antecedant; then - consequent - outcome, p (or q) is/is not true conclusion about p (or q) premise: If I study for cognitive psychology then my head hurts, premise: I studied for cognitive study, then my head must hurt

Rosch

"psychologically privileged" basic level categories One reason why basic level categories may be "psychologically privileged" is that you lose a lot of details when jumping to a global category, but gain only a few details by jumping to a specific category.

Alan Paivio

(1971) imagery might be important to cognition - dual coding hypothesis - conceptual peg, imagery impacts memory, paired associate learning task -concrete v. abstract words, two codes are better than one (verbal and imagery)

Prefrontal cortex

(PFC) and occipital lobe neurons fire during the presentation of a stimulus and during delay - Dorsolateral (PFC) and ventrolateral (PFC) - working and short-term memory

functional magnetic resonance imaging

(fMRI) blood flows increases in active brain areas - measured and shown through hemoglobin and a magnet rotating around the subject's head, action potentials, release of neurotransmitters, oxygenated blood has magnetic properties, indirect way to measure brain activity

William James

1890, functionalism - purpose, usefulness of brain, Principles of Psychology - consciousness, stream of consciousness, break into pieces, Darwin's natural selection

encoding

Acquiring information and transforming it into long-term memory

Contemporary Short Term Memory

Alvarez and Cavannagh 2004, limited - capacity system temporary storage tasks comprehension, learning, reasoning - Baddeley - active processing

mental set

Amber lives in a housing development between two parallel streets that both connect to a freeway. She usually takes the street to the south when heading southbound on the freeway to work, but that street is closed for repairs for three months. Amber takes the street to the north during that time. After the street to the south is re-opened, she continues to take the street to the north, even though it is a slightly longer route. Continuing to take the street to the north represents

word length effect

Baddeley 1975 - remember more short than long words, digit span = how many you can pronounce in 2 seconds, correlation between inner voice and talking -larger capcity of fast talking

echoic memory

Brief sensory memory for sound

Dear Aunt Jane experiment

Broadbent's early selection model might be wrong. people switch ears to follow the meaning of the message even when they are instructed to only shadow one ear. semantic (meaning-based) characteristics can sometimes get through a "leaky" filter.

Newell and Simon

Computer metaphor, cognitive revolution created proofs for problems in logic

levels of processing

Craik, deep v. shallow processing at encoding, depending on what is done during encoding during processing - depth = degree of semantic involvement, increase depth = increase recall

analogical problem solving

Duncker's radiation problem tumor multiple low-intensity rays from different directions- restructuring required, fortress story - radiation alone - 10% solved; after fortress story : 30%; after fortress story and a hint - 75% 1. notice the analogous relationship between source story and target problem 2. map the correspondence between the SS and TP 3. apply the mapping to generate a parallel solution, successful solvers looked at the skin than at the tumor - comapred solutions rates for static diagram - animated tumor area and animated skin area - animated more successful; target problem is the problem that an individual is trying to solve, source problem, which has been solved in the past, is used as a guide for reaching that solution.

extrastriate body area

EBA, activated by pictures of bodies and parts of bodies

retrieval cues

Examples from your book describing real experiences of how memories, even ones from a long time ago, can be stimulated by locations, songs, and smells highlight the importance of ____ in LTM.

Perception

Experience resulting from stimulation of the senses and information from the senses that can help guide our actions

Wilhelm Wundt

Father of psychology, structuralism - inspired by the periodic table of elements, mental elements, analytic introspection - not scientific, subjective, present a stimuli for someone to apply meaning to

FFA

Fusiform face area - temporal lobe ventral -above cerebellum, face inversion effect - good at recognizing upright faces - lose proficiency when upside down, not any other thing

LTM and STM double dissociation

HM/EP - STM intact; impaired LTM- anterograde amnesia, hippocampal damage, no explicit LTM memories but have implicit LTMs; KF - temporal lobe damage, STM- impaired and LTM- intact

HM

Henry Malisson, epileptic, 1953 removed his hippocampus/amygdala - memories from childhood, no new explicit long term memories -anterograde amnesia

Information processing approach

IP involves the use of computers as a metaphor to understand human cognition,IP traces the sequence of mental operations involved in cognition, IP depicts the mind as processing information in a sequence of stages, does not support the principle of behaviorism that behavior is a stimulus-response relationship

Bayesian inference

If a person unconsciously and automatically computes the "prior probability" and "likelihood" during object perception, she is using. estimate probability of an outcome using: prior probability and likelihood -what you expect to see in the world top-down

node

In the semantic network model, a specific category or concept is represented at a ___

flashbulb memory

It is memory for the circumstances surrounding how a person heard about an emotional event that remains especially vivid but not necessarily accurate over time, proper procedure for measuring the accuracy of flashbulb memories repeated recall. extreme vividness of a memory does not mean it is accurate. Experiments that argue against a special flashbulb memory mechanism find that as time increases since the occurrence of the flashbulb event, participants make more errors in their recollections.

Familiarity

Jacoby's experiment, in which participants made judgments about whether they had previously seen the names of famous and non-famous people, found that inaccurate judgments of fame occurred based on

mutilated checker board

Kaplan and Simon, Participants in the bread and butter group had the fastest response time, the way the problem is represented can influence the ease of problem solving.

inattentional blindness

Lan has no idea what she just read in her text because she was thinking about how hungry she is and what she is going to have for dinner, even when the most obvious automatic task is subjugated when working on a focus required task, inability to perceive something that is within one's direct perceptual field because one is attending to something else

connection weights

Learning in the connectionist network is represented by adjustments to network, determines how signals sent from one unit either increase or decrease the activity of the next unit - correspond to what happens at a synapse that transmits signals from one neuron to another, high connection weights result in strong tendency to excite the next unit, lower weights cause less excitation, and negative weights decrease excitation or inhibit activation of the receiving unit - activation depends on whether the signal that originates in the input units and the connection weights through the network

back propagation

Learning takes place in a connectionist network through a process of ______ in which an error signal is transmitted starting from the property units. signals are being sent backward in the network starting from the property units

late selection model

McKay biasing word affecting sentence choice, even though participants were unaware of the biasing words - process physical and semantic characteristics in unattended message

transfer-appropriate processing

Memory performance is enhanced if the type of task at encoding matches the type of task at retrieval the type of encoding task matches the type of retrieval task.

magical number 7

Miller, true for remembering numbers

grace degradation

One beneficial property of connectionist networks, refers to the property that damage to the system does not completely disrupt its operation

cognitive interview

Police allow witnesses to talk with a minimum of interruption from the officer

Proactive interference

Previous information in inferring with the retrieval of more recent information

Retroactive interference

Recent information in interfering with the retrieval of older information

word superiority effect

Reicher , top down processing in written language - words easier than single letter or a non word, easier to identify if it is in context of a word than single word

retrograde amnesia

STM damage, LTM memory intact, usually less severe for remote memories

Perseveration

Shanta has frontal lobe damage. She is doing a problem solving task in which she has to choose the red object out of many choices. She can easily complete this repeatedly, but when the experimenter asks her to choose the blue object on a new trial of the task, she continues to choose the red one, even when the experimenter gives her feedback that she is incorrect. Shanta is displaying

Helmholtz

Some perception result from assumptions we make about the environment that we are not even aware of, unconscious inference theory, likelihood principle, how to resolve ambiguity make assumptions about the environment based on past experiences, bottom-down processing

epiphenomenon

Sometimes a behavioral event can occur at the same time as a cognitive process, even though the behavior isn't needed for the cognitive process. For example, many people look toward the ceiling when thinking about a complex problem, even though "thinking" would likely continue if they didn't look up.

weapons focus experiment

Stanny and Johnson investigating memory for crime scenes, found that the presence of a weapon hinders memory for other parts of the event

analogical transfer

The ability to shift experience from one problem solving situation to a similar problem

Brain ablation

The experimental technique that involves removing part of the brain

syntax-first approach

The idea that the rules governing the grouping of words in a sentence is the primary determinant of the way a sentence is parsed

narrative rehearsal hypothesis

The idea that we remember life events better because we encounter the information over and over in what we read, see on TV, and talk about with other people

same-object advantage

The notion that faster responding occurs when enhancement spreads within an object

Perceptual organization

The process by which small objects become perceptually grouped to form larger objects

method of loci

The technique in which things to be remembered are placed at different locations in a mental image of a spatial layout

Focused attention stage

Treisman's Feature Integration Theory addresses "the binding problem"

preattentive

Treisman's feature integration theory, the first stage of perception

cryptomnesia

Unconscious plagiarism of the work of others

syntactic priming

When two people engage in a conversation, if one person produces a specific grammatical construction in her speech and then the other person does the same, this phenomenon is referred

size of field of view

Your text describes the case of M.G.S. who underwent brain surgery as treatment for severe epilepsy. Testing of M.G.S. pre- and post-surgery revealed that the right visual cortex is involved in

prototype approach

a "typical" or "average" member of a category, to categorization states that a standard representation of a category is based on category members that have been encountered in the past. involves forming a standard representation based on an average of category members that a person has encountered in the past Items high on prototypicality have strong family resemblances.

"slime in the first-grade teacher's desk" experiment

a photograph of the participant's first-grade class increased the likelihood of false memories.

two-string problem

a swinging string led to a restructured representation to this problem

feature search

a target among distractors looking for one distinct feature

script

a type of schema that also includes knowledge of a sequence of actions

lexical ambiguities

accessing the meaning of a word is influenced by: frequency of word in your mental lexicon, context of the sentence, meaning dominance (if more than one meaning) - general, bridge, studies show that people can access ambiguous words when the meaning dominance of each definition of the word.

exemplars

actual members of a category that a person has encountered in the past to categorization works best for small categories, encounter different examples of a category storing it into long term memory

language

ambiguous, top-down processing, communication, expresses our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences, use arbitrary symbols, possesses a hierarchical structure governed by rules, generative/creative, dynamic

information processing approach

approach that traces sequences of mental operations involved in cognition - stages; input --> input processor-> memory unit -> arithmetic unit -> output

conjunction rule

associated with representativeness heuristic, the probability of the things at the same thing - can not be higher than probability of one multiple two probabilities- smaller than one; error - conjunction two events (A and B) cannot be higher than the probability of the single constituents

economic utility theory

assumes people are rational, choose outcome with maximum expected utility, subjective- humans are irrational varies from person to person

Cabeza

autobiographical memory - fMRI study , list of landmarks around Duke - do brains activate diffrently based on whether you took the photo - parietal lobe no real differences in spatial, processing scene - prefrontal cortex difference increase in own over lab photos - knowledge about yourself - hippocampus - more activate for own than lab - difference in encoding

Faces special evidence

babies- no visual experience with faces - equivalent stimuli - human face - choose a human face over a equal complex stimuli - built in to look for faces, Progopagnosia - selective defect in recognizing faces

top-down processing

based on expectations/experience, If a word is identified more easily when it is in a sentence than when it is presented alone, speech segmentation, applying meaning, prior knowledge ex: environmental regularities, Baynesian inference, Helmholtz; stored in our memory the world expectations

what pathway

basic perception of an object, object discrimination, occipital lobe to temporal lobe, ventral pathway, visual-object recognition

John Watson

behaviorism 1913 - experiments, careful - overt behavior not consciousness- can't see it - predict/control behavior stimulus-response psychology - Pavlov, Skinner

optical illusions

best allows psychologists to study the assumptions the brain makes about the environment

McGurk effect

both visual and auditory information used in phoneme perception - watching someone speak is powerful - ambiguity of phonemes, words

9/11 experiment

by Talarico and Rubin (2003) that measured people's memories of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Which of the following was the primary result of that research After 32 weeks, participants had a high level of confidence in their memories of the terrorist events, but lower belief in their memories of "everyday" events.

deductive reasoning

categorical syllogisms -some, all, none; start from premises - rules of logic - objectively correct two statements (premises), followed by a third statement (conclusion) rules of logic, mental model of deductive reasoning - Laird - a specific situation help determine the validity of syllogisms

priming tasks

category exemplar generation, word-stem completion

texture gradient

closer more detailed

occlusion

closer objects overlap overlapping

texts

coherence - linking of information in one part of text to other part(s) - clearly text links together, enhanced by inference - filling in a blank or gap, authors assume have top-down processing to fill in the blanks, interaction of WM and LTM - instrument inference tools in fill in the blank

Illusory conjunctions

combinations of features from different stimuli.

subtraction method

complex task activity minus simple task activity - controlled condition/baseline task, activity specific to a cognitive function

basic principle

conclusion of creating a model and then find a part of a model could be refuted - invalid

unilateral neglect

damage to the parietal lobe -right parietal lobe, disorder of attention, more than perception, not paying attention to visual environment, patients - 1/2 of visual environment does not exist - ignore the left path, double dissociation with imagery and perception ex. Piazza del Duomo experiment - neglect one half of visual images, visual images deficit as well as perception, showed all the information was there but one half reported depending on the orientation

localization of function

different brain are specialized for different functions

Greeble experiment

disproved the idea that face processing is specialized, as subject were overexposed to these strange figures over time the FFA, which is supposed to be just designated to the processing of faces, was activated while looking at these Greebles - experiment-dependent plasticity

articulatory suppression

disrupt Phonological Loop by repeating an irrelevant sound - focus your resources elsewhere - visuospatial sketchpad, Articulatory suppression does all but interferes with semantic coding. verbal task that interferes with remembering and encoding information

atmospheric perspective

distant objects are going to look hazy, more in focus

divided attention

distribution of attention among two or more tasks, easier once processing had become automatic - occurs when a task is well-practiced

definitional approach

doesn't work well for most natural objects like birds, trees, and plants. family resemblance does an object have the defining features of the category?

paired-associate learning.

e.i. In the famous obedience research conducted by Stanley Milgram, a participant was instructed to read a list of word pairs (e.g., "nice day," "blue dress," "fat neck") to another person. The participant would then read the list again but would only provide the first word. The other individual was to recall the word that went with this cueing word.

maintenance rehearsal

e.i. Serena's keys were stolen from her purse. She cannot give a detailed description of her keychain to the police, even though she used it every day for three years. e.i. earning a word by repeating it over and over again is most likely to produce some short-term remembering, but fail to produce longer-term memories

Broadbent's filter model

early selection model, proposes that the filter identifies the attended message based on physical characteristics. Sensory store, filter, detector, short-term memory. the filter eliminates unattended information right at the beginning of the flow of information.

availability heuristic

easily remembered events judged as more probable than less memorable events - priming, related to illusory correlation - mistakenly assume things are correlated when they are not, exaggerated due to confirmation bias - selectively look for information that supports our beliefs and overlook information that argues against them - social psychology -stereotypes

recency effect

end of a word list - STM

Double Dissociation

ex.: Broca's area - frontal lobe, speech body functions and Wernicke's area - temporal lobe - speech comprehension, posterior dorsal, disspell the idea that language exclusive to one area of the brain - functions are independent in the brains - different mechanisms localizing of activation

object discrimination

ex: Amhad is doing an experiment in which he has to choose between the object he has been shown previously (the target object) and another object. Choosing the target object will result in a reward. Damage to the temporal lobe makes this harder

speech segmentation

experience even though language is produced in a speech stream - sound almost all the time, native language - experience as words - breaks, top-down processing context to fill the gaps

Strayer and Johnston's experiment

experiment involving simulated driving and the use of "hands-free" vs. "handheld" cell phones found that talking on either kind of phone impairs driving performance significantly and to the same extent

Long term memory

explicit (conscious): episodic - (personal events) and semantic (facts and knowledge); implicit (unconscious) - priming, procedural memory, conditioning; encoding, retrieval and consolidation

parahippocampal place area

fMRI experiences shown that perceiving pictures representing indoor and outdoor scenes acivates this area - information spatial layout

imagery fMRI

fMRI study of visual areas activated by perception versus visual images - Le Bihan, imagine a picture versus shown picture, fMRI studies of mental images of different sizes, larger images more early visual areas in occipital lobe, right occipital lobe/visual cortex- imagery, not language areas light up, overlap but not perfect, front third brain difference image and middle perception minus imagery - complete overlap

complex stimuli

facial recognition, shapes, forms, light, dark

semantic memories

facts, knowledge about the world, knowledge without mental time travel time, knowing

conjunction search

finding a target among a bunch of distractors looking for a combination of 2+ features

Dunker's candle problem

fix a candle to the wall and light it, functional fixedness, people don't think about using the matchbox

algorithms

formulas that produce consistently optimal outcomes, but may be computationally intensive

match stick arithmetic

goal: move a single matchstick to make the mathematical expression

temporal lobe

hearing/auditory functions, Wernicke's area

semantic network approach

hierarchical, includes associations between concepts and the property of spreading activation. - cognitive economy Collins and Quillian explained the results of priming experiments by introducing the concept of spreading activation into their network model.

oblique effect

horizontal and verticals than other orientations

complexity

how complex the stimulus - colored squares - basic easy to remember high capacity; chinese characters; random polygons; shaded cubes- lowest capacity

synaptic consolidation

how do memories become stable in our brains - minutes or hours - first learn something - brain is changing - structural - long-term potentiation - change to the synaptic structures of dendrites, increased firing of neurotransmitters - memory mechanism Hebb increased firing in the neurons.

inductive reasoning

how do people reason from evidence? conclusions are probably, but not definitely true, predictions from evidence, different levels of confidence shortcuts: heuristics and algorithms

standard model of consolidation

how hippocampus works in consolidating memory, areas in cortex - network pattern to create the memory - recent memories -send signals and coordinating memory - not in long term/consolidated, as it consolidates less dependence on the hippocampus - less hippocampal connection - more cortexal memory, slowly end up just needing cortexal network no longer hippocampal networks strongly active when memories are first formed and being consolidated but becomes less active when retrieving older memories that are already consolidated.

sensory coding

how neurons represent different characteristics: sparse - small groups of neurons fire at a object; population - large groups of neurons, pattern of firing , representation of an object several neurons

self-image hypothesis

hypothesis in which we remember young adulthood and adolescence because that's when we are figuring out our identities

belief bias

if syllogism is true or agrees with a person's beliefs, more likely to be judged as valid, mistakenly think "truth" = validity

top-down and bottom-up and memory

input (bottom-up) into sensory, in between sensory and STM - attention -attending to certain details - bottom-up, encoding -bottom-up, retrieval from LTM- top-down; reconsolidation -see a retrieval cue - bottom-up -> memory top-down

Modal model of memory

input -> sensory memory -> short term memory (10 to 15 seconds) -> encode; <- retrieve long memory - 1 month to a decade

local contrast

interpreting brightness information not doing it in absolute way

difference between imagery and perception

it is harder to manipulate mental images than perceptual images.

typicality effect

items that are high in prototypicality are judged more rapidly as being in a group.

Scene Schema

knowledge about what is contained in a typical scene, top-down

schema

knowledge about what is involved in a concept or experience at encoding, fill in details not remembered, can result in false memories - intelligence to make an educated guess, cannot tease out false versus true

population coding

large groups of neurons, pattern of firing , representation of an object several neurons

operant conditioning

learning through positive and negative reinforcers

basic level

level of categories is the psychologically "privileged" level of category that reflects people's everyday experience. the priming effect was most robust

physical regularities

light-from above assumption, oblique effect, Having one object that is partially covered by another "come out the other side", pictorial cues, shadows, and size constancy NOT face inversion and angled orientation

parietal lobe

location, position

falsification principle

look for situations that falsify the rule, need to test "p" and "not q", affirming the antecedant and negating the consequent - rules in society - if a person is drinking beer, then he or she must be over 21 years old - check been - validating p check 19 year old

risk aversion v. risk taking strategies

loss - take more risks if we could lose, not with gain

Hierarchical processing

low to high, neural processes - feature detectors, complex stimuli, and sensory coding

encoding specificity

match the context, match the environment, learn the context - Baddeley scuba diver test - remember 40 words study: underwater and onland; those who studied on land remembered more words on land than underwater and vice versa - external

state dependent learning

match the internal state, induce a state of sad or happy those who studied sad performed better on a test when they were sad and vice versa with happy

transfer appropriate processing

match the task - encoding - meaning task - deep and rhyming -medium; retrieval asked to do a rhyming recognition test - those who did the rhyming task when encoding performed better than the meaning group - know how the test is going to look - study using that method

elaborative rehearsal

meaning and connection, not quantity - quality - what type of processing - for each word presented, answer one of the following questions - shallow - capital letters? structural, medium - does the word rhyme with train? phonemic, deep - does the word fit into this sentence? semantic

mental chronometry

measure reaction time to make same/different judgments for shapes that are at different orientations - Donders, strong linear relation between RT and degree of rotation

Donders

measure the amount of time it takes to make a decision, reaction time, first cognitive psychology experiment, choice reaction time takes 1/10 longer than a decision

simple span

measures (digit span) test basic storage - chunking in phonological loop

complex span

measures test ability to simultaneously processing info while remembering a subset for later recall - more, simultaneously

hippocampus

memory

Herman Ebbinghaus

memory -learn, after delay recall and relearn nonsense syllables -controlled conditions to which he learned, manipulate memory delay, timing of lists, numbers of repetitions, etc. - IV; measure of memory recall performance - DV - forgetting curve/saving curve - after you learn - exponential curve; Ebbinghaus illusion

situation model

mental representation of what a text is about - experience vicariously what is happening in the book spatially - close to the protagonist -quicker to identify the word

source monitoring error

misidentifying the source of a memory - encode an experiene on TV and movies, good at just information, lose detail

phonemic restoration effect

missing phonemes restored by context and never consciously identified as missing, disambiguate sloppily produced phonemes using context, language in a noisy environment - interruptions, extraneous cough test

systems consolidation

months or years, reorganization of neural circuits- how do certain areas of the brain communicate, major mechanisms: reactivation and reconsolidation - many opportunities to reactivate a memory, reactivation - long to short term - reconsolidation back into long term memory but differently, malleable

moon illusion

moon appears more distant at the horizon - flatted dome same size - influence of context

landmark discrimination

more difficult to do if you have damage to your parietal lobe, where pathway, designated to determine where an object is

Dictionary unit

most closely associated with Treisman's attenuation theory of selective attention

frontal lobe

motor skills, Broca's area, coordination, balance

Nine-dot problem

nine dots in four straight lines without removing pen, draw vertical or horizontal lines only, never crossing a line, staying within the box (solution requires thinking outside of the box)

pictorial cues (2d)

occlusion, texture gradient, linear perspective, relative height, atmospheric perspective

Graded amnesia

occurs because recent memories are more connected to the hippocampus than remote memories.

misinformation effect

occurs when a person's memory for an event is modified by misleading information presented after the event - loftus car crash - smashed versus crashed, Misleading Post Information, leads to retroactive interference, power of suggestion - putting slime in desk experiment

Priming

occurs when presentation of one stimulus facilitates the response to another stimulus that usually follows closely in time.

cultural life script hypothesis

our culture has certain age and time to do certain things that are memorable

utility

outcomes that achieve a person's goals

parallel distributed processing model

output units, input units, hidden units, a connectionist model proposing that concepts are represented by activity that is spread across a network, concepts are represented by activity that is distributed across a network

semantic ambiguity

parsing determines how words are grouped together into phrases as sentences are read (working memory), can tricked by garden path sentences - eye tracking technology ex. because he always jogs a mile seems like a short distance to him. Interactionist approach parsing - syntax and semantics

interactionist approach

parsing states that semantics is activated as a sentence is being read, in addition to syntax.

lexical decision task

participants are asked to decide whether a string of letters is a word or a non-word.

lexical decision task

participants have to decide whether a presented stimulus is a word.

change blindness

participants watch a film of people playing basketball. Many participants failed to report that a woman carrying an umbrella walked through because the participants were counting the number of ball passes. Difficulty in recognizing an alteration - even a very obvious one - in a scene

how/where pathway

pathway leading from the occipital lobe to the parietal lobe - dorsal, figures out spatially where an object is located, action pathway, visual-spatial processing

developmental trajectory

peak until frontal lobe developed - late adolescence young adulthood - 30 drop off in memory, 60 drop off - late to develop/early to decline

text processing

people create a mental representation of what the text is about in terms of people, objects, locations, and events

iconic memory

persistence of vision, fraction of a second memory - sensory memory e.i. When a sparkler is twirled rapidly, people perceive a circle of light.

episodic memories

personally experienced, "mental time travel" revisit past, Tulving remembering

language level of analysis

phonemes - smallest unit of speech sound, words- basic unit of the lexicon, sentences - ordering of words with syntactic structure, texts, ambiguities at each level

Baddeley's model of working memory

phonological loop; central executive; visuospatial sketchpad

environmental regularities

physical regularities -surfaces are similar object uniformly colored, gradual changes caused by shadow - fuzzy edges, shadows move with objects, light from above assumption - shadows caused from above solution: local and contrast - interpreting brightness, information not doing it in an absolute way - darkness/brightness are the same

spreading activation

primes associated concepts.

representativeness heuristic

probability that event A comes from class B can be determined by how well A resembles the properties usually associated with class B - short cut base rate- number or proportion of something in the population, ignores base rate, Failing to consider the law of large numbers most likely results in errors

modern information processing approach

problem solving as a search - Newell and Simon introduced new technology - move through problem space using operators - rules, intitial stage, intermediate stage, goal state

Gestalt approach

problem solving as representation and restructuring - solution to problem depends on how it is represented, restructuring - changing the representation of problem - insight - "Aha" - look at not clear after a while get it - something changing quickly - insight problems - functional fixedness tend to only consider the typical use of object - prior knowledge hinders insight problem solving, cognitive inflexibility - solution requires restructuring

mirror drawing task

procedural skill memory - implicit LTM- repetition priming - faster/ easier processing of a repeated stimulus- propaganda effect- generating examples from a category

Process model

proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin in 1968 early model of memory indicates that incoming information is first handled by "sensory" memory, is then moved to "short term" memory, and finally is pushed into "long-term" memory

human irrationality

psychic budgets - mental categorization of money we've spent or are consider spending: cash to token, sunk costs - investment is irretrievably lost - emotion, time, energy -relationship; inferior third choice - add a choice taht is clearly inferior - decisions in context

self reference effect

rate if the word describes you directly relate something to you more likely to remember

Reading span task

reading sentences -read until you recall, yes or no if it makes sense

reminiscence bump

recall of life story - people over 40, brain development, greatest recall between adolescence and 30 - forming social networks - adolescence

coherence

refers to the level of relationship of information in one part to information in another part of the text, inference

thalamus

regulation, balance

cognitive revolution

reject behavior view, some mental phenomena could not be explained by behaviorists (language, strategies, mental maps) advances in neuroscience, introduction of the computer - computer metaphor - receives input from environment, store information in hardware using representations, software programs for information processing, information-processing approach - sequences of mental operations

Primacy effect

remembering the words at the beginning of a word list -LTM, number of rehearsal - middle words not as rehearsed as the first words

spatial representation

representation same structure as the one in the world - retain properties of images evidence: overlap between perception and imagery - if mechanisms for visual perception use for mental imagery then predict - images act like perception - real world pictures, images should activate brain areas involved visual processing - not language, AGAINST the idea that imagery is spatial in nature - tacit-knowledge explanation

propositional

representation uses images or symbols; non spatial

Structural models

representations of a physical structure

process models

represents the processes that are involved in cognitive mechanisms, with boxes usually representing specific processes and arrows indicating connections between processes

depth cues

retinal images, brain is wrong, undercover top-down assumptions made by the brain

cued recall tests

retrieving information from LTM - don't know when you have something in your LTM - memories are available not accessible match learning and testing conditions

phonemes

roughly onto letters of the alphabet 47 phonemes, ambiguities: dialects or accents, coarticulation - overlapping articulation

Wason four-card problem

rule: if there is a vowel on one side, then there is an even number on the other side taks: verify the rule by turing over minimum number of cards - 53% say E ( correct), 46% say 6 (incorrect), 4% turn over E and 17, The evolutionary approach proposes that the Wason problem can be understood in terms of people's tendency to detect when others are cheating, permission schemas

multiple trace model of consolidation

same as the standard model, only for semantic explicit memories, need hippocampus for mental time travel - explicit episodic, memories start to semanticizing

Behaviorism

school of cognitive psychology that emphasizes the importance of observable behavior to predict cognition

cognitive psychology

scientists that study cognition mind, how and why it does what it does - why did it evolve

phi phenomenon

see two flashing lights in two different locations, one dot - same interval moving back and forth, law of common fate - motion and shape elements move together all part of tje same object

cocktail party effect

selective attend to the person you are talking to, amplified, someone says your name - low-load stimulus

autobiographical memory

semantic and episodic memory, knowledge about your life

sentences

semantics - meaning of the sentence, syntax - rules for combining words into sentences, ambiguity in both, dissociation of semantics and syntax evident in neuropsychological case studies and ERP - event related potential studies of brain activity

error signal

sent back through back propagation, sent back to the hidden units and the representation units provide information how the connection weights should be adjusted so that the correct property units will be activated

heuristics

simple rules that usually lead to a correct decision - cognitive load/resources - every possibility skip

problem solving

situation where there is an obstacle to reach a goal - goal and present state - not obvious how to reach to goal

decision-making

situation with two or more courses of action with the requirement to select just one

chunking

small groups of better meaningful - phone numbers, area codes, social security, verbal chunking - meaning based, visual chunking

sparse coding

small groups of neurons fire at a object

partial report response

smaller response set than whole-report technique

operation span task

solve a math problem while memorizing a word - seat of consciousness - what you holding in your mind right now, predicts higher level abilities like reasoning, problem solving, reading comprehension - working memory

visuospatial sketchpad

specialized system for visual imagery: mental rotation - time to rotate/maneuver objects

specificity coding

specific neurons only fire at at a specific object 1-to-1

feature detectors

specific stimuli: orientation, movement, length

Sapir-Whor hypothesis

states that the nature of a culture's language can affect the way people think

serial position curve

statistical graph/curve that people tend to remember the beginning and end of a word list

Tower of Hanoi

strategic searching, means- ends analysis - goal: reduce difference between initial and goal state, create subgoals that allow for intermediate stages - involves moving away from solution

Brown and Peterson

studied how well participants can remember groups of three letters (like BRT, QSD) after various delays. They found that participants remembered an average of 80 percent of the groups after 3 seconds but only 10 percent after 18 seconds. They hypothesized that this decrease in performance was due to decay, but later research showed that it was actually due to interference.

Eye tracking

studies investigating attention as we carry out actions such as making a peanut butter sandwich shows that a person's eye movements were determined primarily by the task

Dichotic listening

subject is presented with two different messages in different ears, asked to shadow one - say it out loud

Stroop experiment

subjects asked to ignore the meaning of a word (automatic) and to focus on the color of the word

mental scanning

task: commit fictional map to memory, people take a longer time across longer distance, size in visual field - changing the size of mental images how does it take - faster decision when image was larger - find images in enlarged image

connectionist approach

that a specific concept is represented by activity that is distributed over many units in the network. learned the correct pattern for a concept when the error signals are reduced to nearly none and the correct properties are assigned. grace degradation and back propagation

Viewpoint invariance

the ability to recognize the same object even if it is seen from different perspectives

Tolman

the concept of the cognitive map

language special

the human brain is prepared to learn language - Chomsky, pinker; language is universal across cultures; languages are more similar than different across cultures- structure; stages of language acquisition are same across cultures; critical period for language and learn to follow complex grammatical rules easily - not easy to speak correctly or write well; cooing/babbling stages essential for learning phonemic structure of language

Binding

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

bottom-up processing

the sequence of steps that includes the image on retina, changing the image into electrical signals, neural processing, stimuli enters the retina no experience/expectations. involved in fixating on an area of a scene that has high stimulus salience. experiences, information that comes from the world, raw data

Adaptationism

the study of looking at our ancestors in order to understand how our daily cognition developed and why it functions the way that it does

inverse projection problem

the task of determining the object responsible for a particular image on one's retina - 3D -> 2D-> 3D, stimuli are ambiguous

framing effect

the way that choices are presented influences how we decide, opt-in versus opt-out procedures- status quo bias- health insurance

Gestalt principles of perceptual organization

the whole is different than the sum of its parts - structuralism, adding sensations to see the whole - patterns in perception - beyond just the elements of the experience

semanticization

the world of remote memories- loss of the episodic piece, semantic only, meaning

Colin Cherry

this psychologists experiment in which participants listened to two different messages, one presented to each ear, found that people could focus on one message and ignore the other one at the same time. did not find that even deaf individuals process auditory information, even on a non-conscious level

Consolidation

transforms new memories from a fragile state, in which they can be disrupted, to a more permanent state, in which they are resistant to disruption.

anterograde amnesia

trauma/removal of the hippocampus - inner temporal lobe - EP, intact STM - distracted no LTM -double dissociation

radiation problem

tumor multiple low-intensity rays from different directions- restructuring required, fortress story - radiation alone - 10% solved; after fortress story : 30%; after fortress story and a hint - 75% 1. notice the analogous relationship between source story and target problem 2. map the correspondence between the SS and TP 3. apply the mapping to generate a parallel solution, successful solvers looked at the skin than at the tumor - compared solutions rates for static diagram - animated tumor area and animated skin area - animated more successful, solved using representation and restructuring, analogy in problem solving - fortress problem source problem - experts categorize problems based on general principles that problems share NOT Being an expert in one field can transfer to better problem solving in another field

Ponzo illusion

two lines of equal size -provide perspective

input units

units activated by stimuli from the environment -stimuli presented by the experimenter - send signals to the hidden units-> output

anchoring and adjusting heurstic

use initial estimate and adjust upward or downward based on other info, arbitrary coherence - legal decisions - give more to someone who asks for 10 mill than 1 mill; real estate; car sales; credit cards

Sperling

using the partial report procedure in his "letter array" experiment, inferred that that participants initially saw about 82 percent of the 12 letters in the display. Sensory memory delayed partial report procedure provided evidence that information in sensory memory fades within 1 second.

Phonological loop

verbal and auditory information - specialized system for language; phonological similarity effect - lower recall for words that sound the same v. different, impacted on how much we can hold if the language sound alike than different, different easier to remember

occipital lobe

vision from the retina

likelihood principle

we perceive the object that is most likely to have caused the pattern of stimuli we have perceived

Gestalt psychologists

we want to understand how elements are added up to create patterns in perception, mind groups patterns, identified people's tendency to focus on a specific characteristic of a problem that keeps them from arriving at a solution as a major obstacle to successful problem solving

constructive approach

what people report as memories is based on what actually happened plus additional factors such as other knowledge, experiences, and expectations. The "telephone game" is often played by children. One child creates a story and whispers it to a second child, who does the same to a third child, and so on. When the last child recites the story to the group, his or her reproduction of the story is generally shorter than the original and contains many omissions and inaccuracies. This game shows how memory is a _____ process.

cognitive hypothesis

when our brain is good at encoding - stability to instability - consolidate memory , better unstable state

eyewitness testimony

when viewing a lineup, an eyewitness's confidence in her choice of the suspect can be increased by an authority's confirmation of her choice, even when the choice is wrong. the more confident the person giving the testimony is of their memories the more convincing the testimony is to a jury. errors with the role of attention - weapon and role of familarity

Funahashi

work on monkeys doing a delayed response task examined the role of neurons in the prefrontal cortex. recorded neurons in the PF cortex of monkeys during a delayed response task. The reason the researchers concluded that the PF cortex is important for working memory is that these neurons showed the most intense firing during delay