Psychology

Constructive memory

constructive-memory. Noun. (plural constructive memories) An apparent memory, of an event that did not actually happen, unconsciously constructed to fill a gap.

Selective attention

the capacity for or process of reacting to certain stimuli selectively when several occur simultaneously.

Concept

Concept. A mental grouping of similar things, events, and people that is used to remember and understand what things are, what they mean, and what categories or groups they belong to.

Overgenerlization

2. the result of overgeneralizing. 3. Linguistics. (in language acquisition) the process of extending the application of a rule to items that are excluded from it in the language norm, as when a child uses the regular past tense verb ending -ed of forms like I walked to produce forms like *I goed or *I rided.

Eidetic imagery

An eidetic image is a type of vivid mental image, not necessarily derived from an actual external event or memory. It was identified in the early twentieth century as a distinct phenomenon by psychologists including E.R. Jaensch, Heinrich Klüver, Gordon Allport and Frederic Bartlett.

Anterograde amnesia

Anterograde amnesia is a loss of the ability to create new memories after the event that caused the amnesia, leading to a partial or complete inability to recall the recent past, while long-term memories from before the event remain intact.

Chunking

Chunking is a term referring to the process of taking individual pieces of information (chunks) and grouping them into larger units. By grouping each piece into a large whole, you can improve the amount of information you can remember.

Cognition

Cognition is a term referring to the mental processes involved in gaining knowledge and comprehension. These processes include thinking, knowing, remembering, judging and problem-solving. These are higher-level functions of the brain and encompass language, imagination, perception, and planning.

Decay theory

Decay theory proposes that memory fades due to the mere passage of time. Information is therefore less available for later retrieval as time passes and memory, as well as memory strength, wears away. When we learn something new, a neurochemical "memory trace" is created.

Elaborative rehearsal

Elaborative rehearsal is a memory technique that involves thinking about the meaning of the term to be remembered, as opposed to simply repeating the word to yourself over and over.

Episodic memory

Episodic memory is a person's unique memory of a specific event, so it will be different from someone else's recollection of the same experience. Episodic memory is sometimes confused with autobiographical memory, and while autobiographical memory involves episodic memory, it also relies on semantic memory.

Emotional memory

Forking concepts is the process of separating the senses, or variations, in the meaning of a term. Term 1 e.g. emotional memory (representation) Emotional memory is the storage and recall of events and details that are couple with the physiological response that was present when the event occurred.

Framing

Framing effect (psychology) ... The framing effect is an example of cognitive bias, in which people react to a particular choice in different ways depending on how it is presented; e.g. as a loss or as a gain. People tend to avoid risk when a positive frame is presented but seek risks when a negative frame is presented.

Functional fixedness

Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used. The concept of functional fixedness originated in Gestalt psychology, a movement in psychology that emphasizes holistic processing.

Hindsight bias

Hindsight bias is a term used in psychology to explain the tendency of people to overestimate their ability to have predicted an outcome that could not possibly have been predicted.

Implicit memory

Implicit memory is sometimes referred to as unconscious memory or automatic memory. Implicit memory uses past experiences to remember things without thinking about them. The performance of implicit memory is enabled by previous experiences, no matter how long ago those experiences occurred.

Morpheme

In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest lingual unit that carries a semantic interpretation. Morphemes are, generally, a distinctive collocation of phonemes (as the free form pin or the bound form -s of pins) having no smaller meaningful members.

Recognition

In psychology and cognitive neuroscience, pattern recognition describes a cognitive process that matches information from a stimulus with information retrieved from memory. ... Pattern recognition is an innate ability of animals.

Confirmation bias

In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias (or confirmatory bias) is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, leading to statistical errors.

Algorithm

In psychology, algorithms are frequently contrasted with heuristics. A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows people to quickly make judgments and solve problems. However, heuristics are really more of a rule-of-thumb; they don't always guarantee a correct solution.

Heuristic

In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules which people often use to form judgments and make decisions. They are mental shortcuts that usually involve focusing on one aspect of a complex problem and ignoring others.

Semantic

In psychology, semantic memory is memory for meaning - in other words, the aspect of memory that preserves only the gist, the general significance, of remembered experience - while episodic memory is memory for the ephemeral details - the individual features, or the unique particulars of experience.

Rote rehearsal

In this sense rehearsal means the mental repetition of incoming information. ... Simply saying something to oneself over and over again, a technique called "rote rehearsal," helps to retain the information in short-term memory but does little to build a long-term memory of the event.

Explicit memory

It is the conscious, intentional recollection of factual information, previous experiences and concepts. ... People use explicit memory throughout the day, such as remembering the time of an appointment or recollecting an event from years ago.

Linguistic determinism

Linguistic determinism is the idea that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought, as well as thought processes such as categorization, memory, and perception. The term implies that people of different languages have different thought processes.

Long term potentiation

Long-term Potentiation. First discovered by Terje Lømo in 1966, long-term potentiation (LTP) is a long-lasting strengthening of synapses between nerve cells. Psychologists use LTP to explain long-term memories.

Means-end analysis

Means-Ends Analysis (MEA) is a problem solving technique used commonly in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for limiting search in AI programs. It is also a technique used at least since the 1950s as a creativity tool, most frequently mentioned in engineering books on design methods.

Memory

Memory is the process of maintaining information over time

Images

Mental imagery (varieties of which are sometimes colloquially refered to as "visualizing," "seeing in the mind's eye," "hearing in the head," "imagining the feel of," etc.) is quasi-perceptual experience; it resembles perceptual experience, but occurs in the absence of the appropriate external stimuli.

Mnemonic devices

Mnemonic devices are techniques a person can use to help them improve their ability to remember something. In other words, it's a memory technique to help your brain better encode and recall important information.

Mood congruent memory

Mood congruence is a type of recall biased mood congruent memory, not to be mistaken with mood-dependent memory, where an individual's current mood or affective state determines the affective association of the memories that are recalled.

Compensatory model

Personality Psychology. ... Social Psychology View All. By Kendra Cherry. Updated January 08, 2016. Definition: The term compensation refers to a type of defense mechanism in which people overachieve in one area to compensate for failures in another.

Proactive interference

Proactive Interference is when you memorize a list of information (words, names, ideas, formulas, and just about anything else that can be made into a list), and when remembering a later part of the list, an earlier memorized part of the list gets in the way.

Procedural memory

Procedural memory is a part of the long-term memory that is responsible for knowing how to do things, also known as motor skills. As the name implies, procedural memory stores information on how to perform certain procedures, such as walking, talking and riding a bike.

Prototype

Prototype Psychology: Prototype Theory, Definitions, and Examples. The concept of prototype psychology is closely related to schema in psychology. Linguistically, the word "prototype" is used for something original — an original form of something that serves as a standard.

Retrieval

Psychologists distinguish between three necessary stages in the learning and memory process: encoding, storage, and retrieval (Melton, 1963). Encoding is defined as the initial learning of information; storage refers to maintaining information over time; retrieval is the ability to access information when you need it.

Relearning effect

Relearning, also known as the Savings Method, is a way of measuring retention by measuring how much faster one relearns material that has been previously learned and then forgotten. To illustrate, let's say you had memorized Martin Luther King Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech at the beginning of your freshman year.

Retroactive interference

Retroactive interference (RI) is a phenomenon that occurs when newly learned information interferes with and impedes the recall of previously learned information.

Semantic memory

Semantic memory refers to a portion of long-term memory that processes ideas and concepts that are not drawn from personal experience. Semantic memory includes things that are common knowledge, such as the names of colors, the sounds of letters, the capitals of countries and other basic facts acquired over a lifetime.

Serial position effect

Serial position effect is the tendency of a person to recall the first and last items in a series best, and the middle items worst. ... Among earlier list items, the first few items are recalled more frequently than the middle items (the primacy effect).

Short term memory

Short Term Memory is the part of the memory system where information is stored for roughly 30 seconds. Information can be maintained longer with the use of such techniques as rehearsal. To retain the information for extended periods of time; it must be consolidated into long-term memory where it can then be retrieved.

Brainstorming

Social psychology: Altruism · Attribution · Attitudes · Conformity · Discrimination · Groups · Interpersonal relations · Obedience · Prejudice · Norms · Perception · Index · Outline. Brainstorming is a group creativity technique designed to generate a large number of ideas for the solution to a problem.

State dependent memory

State-dependent memory or state-dependent learning is the phenomenon through which memory retrieval is most efficient when an individual is in the same state of consciousness as they were when the memory was formed.

Subgoal

Subgoal labeling is giving a name to a group of steps, in a step-by-step description of a process, to explain how the group of steps achieve a related subgoal. This concept is used in the fields of cognitive science and educational psychology.

Grammar

Syntax (grammar) - the study of the rules whereby words or other elements of sentence structure are combined to form grammatical sentences. Semantics - specifies the meaning of words or phrases when they appear in various sentences or contexts.

Language

Technically, we can say that language is a formal system of communication which involves the combination of words and/or symbols, whether written or spoken, as well as some rules that govern them.

Telegraphic speech

Telegraphic speech, according to linguistics and psychology, is speech during the two-word stage of language acquisition in children, which is laconic and efficient. The name derives from the fact that someone sending a telegram was generally charged by the word.

Information processing model

The Information Processing Model is a framework used by cognitive psychologists to explain and describe mental processes. The model likens the thinking process to how a computer works. Just like a computer, the human mind takes in information, organizes and stores it to be retrieved at a later time.

Language acquisition device

The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is the innate biological ability of humans to acquire and develop language. The LAD was developed by linguist Noam Chomsky who contributed to the field of cognitive psychology through his language research.

Syntax

The distinction between syntax (sentence form) and semantics (word and sentence meaning) is fundamental to the study of language. Syntax is the collection of rules that govern how words are assembled into meaningful sentences.

Linguistic relativity hypothesis

The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view or cognition. Popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, the principle is often defined to include two versions.

Primacy effect

The serial position effect is a psychological phenomenon associated with memory that says that items at the beginning (primacy) and items at the end (recency) of a list or string of information are more easily recalled than items in the middle.

Long term memory

The term long-term memory refers to the unlimited capacity memory store that can hold information over lengthy periods of time. By saying "lengthy periods of time" we mean that it is possible for memories in LTM to remain there for an entire lifetime.

Tip of the tongue phenomenon

Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon is the subjective feeling that people have of being confident that they know the target word for which they are searching, yet they cannot recall this word. They are somewhat able to recall words of similar sounds and meaning, but never the actual word they are seeking.

Flashbulb memory

What Is Flashbulb Memory? ... In psychology, these are called flashbulb memories, which are memories of learning something so shocking or surprising that it creates a strong and seemingly very accurate memory of learning about the event--but not the event itself. The name refers to the old process of taking a photo.

Problem representation

A graphic representation of the means to solve a problem. That representation could utilize flow charts, graphs or any other form of clarifying the problem and the means to solve it.Problem representation can help some people better visualize the problem and thus the solution.

Signs

A medical sign is an objective feature indicating a medical fact or characteristic that is detected by a physician, nurse, or medical/laboratory device during the examination of a patient.

Phonemes

A phoneme is a unit of sound in speech. A phoneme doesn't have any inherent meaning by itself, but when you put phonemes together, they can make words. Think of when adults try to get a baby to say his or her first word

Hill climbing

Hill-climbing and means-end problem solving are heuristic problem-solving strategies. ... In this heuristic, you divide the problem into a number of subproblems (or sub-goals), and then you try to reduce the difference between the initial state and the goal state for each of the subproblems.

Recall

Recall in memory refers to the mental process of retrieval of information from the past. ... There are three main types of recall: free recall, cued recall and serial recall. Psychologists test these forms of recall as a way to study the memory processes of humans and animals.

Recency effect

There is the beginning, a very long middle that blurs together, and now it is the end. The primacy effect is the beginning; you remember it because that is where you started. The recency effect is the finish; you remember the end the best.