Cognitive Psychology 207 -- Terms

representativeness heuristic

A belief that outcomes will always reflect characteristics of the process that generated them-for example, an expectation that the outcome of a series of coin flips will always look random.

cognitive neuroscience of aging

A new domain of research on the relationship between the aging brain and behavioural measures of cognitive performance.

framing effect

Decision-making bias caused by a propensity to evaluate outcomes as positive or negative changes from their current state.

pragmatics

The rules governing the social aspects of language.

probability

Measurement of a degree of uncertainty, expressed as a number between 0 and 1.

descriptive models of thinking

Models that depict the processes people actually use in making decisions or solving problems.

prescriptive models of thinking

Models that tell us how we "ought" to make decisions or solve problems but that take into account actual circumstances.

age differences

A possible reason for differences in performance.

heuristic

A rule of thumb, or shortcut method, used in thinking, reasoning, and/or decision making.

sunk cost effect

A bias in decision making in which already "spent" costs unduly influence decisions on whether to continue.

thinking

A cognitive process used to transform or manipulate information that may be either focused (that is, solving problems with clear goals) or unfocused (that is, invoking loosely related ideas without clear purpose).

informationally encapsulated process

A process with the property of informational encapsulation.

demand characteristic

A property of certain tasks such that an experimental subject's behaviour or responses are "cued" by the task itself.

deductive validity

A property of some logical arguments such that it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion(s) to be false.

inductive strength

A property of some logical arguments such that it is improbable (but not impossible) for the premises to be true and the conclusion false.

rationality

A property of thinking or decision making such that the processes used are selected with the processor's overall goals and principles in mind.

contradiction

A statement that is false by definition of its form (for example, "A and not-A are both true").

tautology

A statement that is true by definition of its form (for example, "A is either true or it is false").

premise

A statement, from which others are inferred, that helps establish what is already known about a problem.

availability heuristic

A strategy in which one estimates the frequency or probability of an event by the ease with which mental operations, such as retrieval of examples or construction of examples, can be carried out.

mnemonics

Strategies to facilitate retention and later retrieval of information.

bilingual

Describes people who are regularly faced with the task of attending to one set of labels for objects or methods of expression while simultaneously ignoring labels from their other known language depending on the language in which they are trying to communicate.

deductive reasoning

Drawing conclusions from only the given premises.

propositional reasoning

Drawing conclusions from premises that are in the form of true or false assertions.

environmental support

External aids, hints, category headings to help seniors structure their search through memory for the correct response.

mental models approach to the study of reasoning

The idea that reasoning proceeds with general-purpose cognitive processes used in the construction of mental representations.

lexical ambiguity

The idea that some words have different meanings; for example, bank can refer to the side of a river or to a financial institution.

relational-organizational hypothesis

The idea that visual imagery aids memory by producing a greater number of associations.

experimenter expectancy effect

The influence on the performance of experimental participants generated by an experimenter's beliefs or hypotheses, which somehow get subtly transmitted to the participants.

space of navigation

Large spaces that people walk through, explore, or travel to and through.

intelligence

Postulated by some psychologists to represent the sum total of a person's cognitive abilities and resources.

Gricean maxims of cooperative conversation

Pragmatic rules of conversation, including moderation of quantity, quality, relevance, and clarity.

reasoning by analogy

Problem solving that employs an analogy between the current problem and another problem that has already been solved.

inductive reasoning

Reasoning that involves drawing conclusions that are suggested, but not necessarily true.

syllogistic reasoning

Reasoning with problems concerning relationships among categories; for example, "All A are B; Some B are C; therefore, Some A are C."

propositional complexity of a sentence

The number of underlying distinct ideas in a sentence.

generate-and-test technique

A problem-solving strategy in which the solver enumerates (generates) possible solutions and then tries each to see if it constitutes a solution.

working backward

A problem-solving technique that identifies the final goal and the steps, in reverse order, that are necessary to reach the goal.

multiple intelligences

(MI) theory Howard Gardner's theory that intelligence can be divided into distinct types, including musical, bodily-kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal intelligences.

fallacy

An erroneous argument.

cognitive overload

Breakdown of cognitive processing that occurs when the available information exceeds processing capacity.

anchoring

A decision-making heuristic in which final estimates are heavily influenced by initial value estimates.

image theory

A descriptive theory of decision making that posits that the process consists of two stages: (1) a noncompensatory screening of options against the decision maker's image of values and future, in which the number of options is reduced to a very small set, and (2) if necessary, a compensatory choice process.

utility

A measure of a person's happiness, pleasure, or satisfaction with a particular outcome.

effect size (d)

A measure used in meta-analysis, defined as the difference in mean scores between two groups, divided by the average standard deviation for the two groups.

method of loci

A memorization method that requires the learner to visualize an ordered series of physical locations as mnemonic cues for a list of information.

visual image

A mental representation of a stimulus thought to share at least some properties with a pictorial or spatial depiction of the stimulus.

truth table

A method of showing when compound logical expressions are true and when they are false by considering every possible assignment of truth values to propositions.

neuroeconomics

A new field that examines how the brain interacts with the environment to enable us to make complex decisions.

expected utility theory

A normative model of decision making in which the decision maker weights the personal importance and the probabilities of different outcomes in choosing among alternatives in order to maximize overall satisfaction of personal goals.

calibration curve

A plot of accuracy against confidence judgments. The more the curve approaches a 45-degree line, the better the "calibration" or "fit" between the two.

gender differences

A possible reason for differences in performance.

neurological differences

A possible reason for gender differences.

implicit encoding

A principle of imagery that holds mental imagery is used in retrieving information about physical properties of objects, or of physical relationships among objects, that may not have been explicitly encoded.

ill-defined problem

A problem that does not have the goals, starting information, and/or legal steps stated explicitly.

well-defined problem

A problem whose goals, starting information, and legal steps are stated explicitly.

functional fixedness

A problem-solving phenomenon in which people have difficulty seeing alternate uses for common objects.

means-ends analysis

A problem-solving strategy in which the solver compares the goal to the current state, then chooses a step to reduce maximally the difference between them.

grammar

A system of rules that produces well-formed, or "legal," entities, such as sentences of a language.

imaginal scanning

A task in which a participant is asked to form a mental image and to scan over it from one point to another.

ultimatum game

A task that has informed our understanding of the brain mechanisms underlying decision making.

meta-analysis

A technique to review findings in the literature involving the use of specific statistical methods in integrating the findings from different empirical studies.

decision analysis

A technology that helps people gather and integrate information in an optimal way.

hindsight bias

A tendency to exaggerate the certainty of what could have been anticipated ahead of time.

confirmation bias

A tendency to seek only information consistent with one's hypothesis.

bias

A tendency to think in a certain way or to follow certain procedures regardless of the facts of the matter.

recognition-primed decision making

A theory of expert decision making that holds that decision makers choose options based on analogy of a given situation with previously encountered situations.

mental rotation

A type of visual imagery task in which subjects are asked to form an image of a stimulus and then to imagine how it would look as it rotates around a horizontal or vertical axis.

Broca's aphasia

Also called expressive or motor aphasia; symptoms of this organic disorder include difficulty in speaking, using grammar, and finding appropriate words.

Wernicke's aphasia

Also called receptive or sensory aphasia; symptoms of this organic disorder include difficulty in understanding speech and producing intelligible speech, although speech remains fluent and articulate.

illusory correlation

An association between factors that is not supported by data but seems plausible.

gambler's fallacy

An erroneous belief that a random process (for example, a coin flip or a spin of a roulette wheel) will automatically keep track of the outcomes in order to make the overall rate of an outcome in the short run equal to the overall rate of that outcome in the long run.

subjective probability

An intuitive estimate of the likelihood of occurrence of an event.

overconfidence

An overly positive judgment of one's own decision-making abilities and performance.

space of the body

Awareness of where the different parts of one's body are located at any given moment and what other objects different body parts are interacting with; used, along with internal sensations, to direct different parts of the body spatially.

creativity

Cognitive processes that employ appropriate novelty; originality that suits some purpose.

artefact

Concept pertaining to manufactured or human-designed objects.

modularity hypothesis

Fodor's proposal that some cognitive processes, in particular language and perception, operate on only certain kinds of inputs and operate independent of the beliefs and other information available to the cognitive processor or other cognitive processes.

spatial cognition

How people represent and navigate in and through space.

normative models of thinking

Models that define ideal performance under ideal circumstances in making decisions or solving problems.

content effect

Performance variability on reasoning tasks that require identical kinds of formal reasoning but are dissimilar in superficial content.

dual-coding hypothesis

Paivio's assertion that long-term memory can code information in two distinct ways, verbally and visually, and that items coded both ways (for example, pictures or concrete words) are more easily recalled than items coded in only one way (for example, abstract words).

tacit knowledge

People's underlying and implicit beliefs about a task or event.

logical connectives

Symbols used in logic arguments to form compound propositions. Examples: &, Ú.

space around the body

The area immediately around a person's body, in which the person can easily perceive and act on objects.

syntax

The arrangement of words within sentences; the structure of sentences.

linguistic performance

The behaviour or responses actually produced by a cognitive processor engaged in a particular cognitive activity involving language. Contrast with linguistic competence.

Whorfian hypothesis of linguistic relativity

The idea that language constrains thought and perception, so that cultural differences in cognition could be explained at least partially by differences in language.

rules/heuristics approach to the study of reasoning

The idea that reasoning proceeds through the application of rules or heuristics either general or domain specific.

decision structuring

The process(es) by which an individual establishes the criteria and options for consideration.

morpheme

The smallest meaningful unit of language.

semantics

The study of meaning.

phonetics

The study of speech sounds.

phonology

The study of the ways in which speech sounds are combined and altered in language.

cognitive illusions

The systematic biases and errors in human decision making.

mental set

The tendency to adopt a certain framework, strategy, or procedure based on immediate experience or context.

believability effect

The tendency to draw or accept conclusions from premises when the content of the conclusion makes intuitive sense, regardless of the logical necessity.

perceptual set

The tendency to perceive an object or pattern in a certain way, based on one's immediate perceptual experience.

incubation

Unconscious processing that works on a specific problem while the mind is otherwise occupied.

linguistic competence

Underlying knowledge that allows a cognitive processor to engage in a particular cognitive activity involving language, independent of behaviour expressing that knowledge. Contrast with linguistic performance.