cognitive psychology exam 1 definitions and people

William James

*american* psychologist; was *not impressed* with *introspection technique* or *research with nonsense syllables*; preferred to theorize about our *everyday psychological experiences*; best known for his textbook "Principles of Psychology" (first textbook of psychology; provides clear, detailed descriptions about people's *everyday experiences*, emphasizes that the *human mind* is *active* and *inquiring*, and *foreshadows topics* that interest 21st century cognitive psychologists (i.e. *perception*, *attention*, *memory*, *understanding*, *reasoning*, and *tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon*)); would have gotten along with Mary Calkins; was very applied

3 rules to draw a cause

1.) covariation (there is a relationship between the independent variable and the dependent variable; just need to find correlation/relationship between the 2 variables); 2.) time precedence of the cause (whether X or Y came first (direction of causality problem)); 3.) no plausible alternative explanations (third-variable problem; can't have any alternative explanations); you can establish rule 1 for correlational research, but not rules 2 and 3 (sometimes you can establish rules 1 and 2)

no correlation

X and Y are unrelated to each other; straight, horizontal line

*operational definition*

a *precise definition* that specifies exactly *how a concept* is to be *measured*; clearly defining your variable, how are you measuring it and what does it mean; a good one of these needs to be *observable* and *countable*; i.e. memory: the number of words someone recalls from a list; attention: the amount of time someone maintains eye contact; encoding time: the amount of time someone has to encode words; angry/anger: scale of 1-10 how angry are you right now

cognitive-behavioral approach

a hybrid form of psychotherapy focused on changing the patient's habitual interpretations of the world and ways of behaving; psychological problems arise from inappropriate thinking (cognitive factors) and inappropriate learning (behavioral factors)

information-processing approach

a mental process can be compared with the operations of a computer; a mental process can be interpreted as information progressing through the system in a series of stages, one step at a time; our cognitive processes work like a computer; stimuli occur or are present in one's environment (information about those stimuli is transported to your sensory receptors (ears, eyes) through a physical medium (light, sound waves); sensory receptors process that info, and are responsible for making sure it gets to your brain); info that is provided to your brain via your senses is processed and decoded through multiple processing stages (like how old computers worked); after a stimulus has been processed enough to be identified and interpreted, a decision must be made about how to respond to stimulus; if you respond to the stimulus, a motor command is sent to parts of the system that are responsible for telling your body how to move; then you initiate an action that allows you to respond as strategically as possible to the stimulus (this action component = computer responding to some input); was considered to be serial (during *serial processing*, the system must complete one step/processing stage before info can proceed to next step in flowchart)

distinctive features

a particular characteristic that makes up a basic object (i.e. a letter or a number); all letters and objects have these; we look for these according to the feature-analysis theory

classical conditioning

a situation in which a relation exists between a stimulus (i.e. a ringing bell) and an outcome (i.e. getting food); the organism demonstrates behavior or response (i.e. salivating) that show that the organism has learned the association between the stimulus and the outcome

holistic (recognition)

a term describing the recognition of faces and other selected stimuli, based on their overall shape and structure, or gestalt

hypothesis

a testable prediction, often implied by a theory; i.e. people who expend great effort to join a group (such as undergoing a harsh/severe initiation) are more apt to like the group than people who do not undergo a harsh initiation; can't change behavior, but can change attitude

short-term memory/working 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

distributed attention

allows you to register features automatically; you use parallel processing across the field, and you register all features simultaneously; is a low-level kind of processing

cognitive neuroscience

an interdisciplinary field that tries to answer questions about the mind; emerged when researchers began to notice connections among a variety of disciplines and began to collaborate with one another; the study of the brain enables the mind

gestalt

an overall quality that transcends the individual elements

functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

are based on the principle that oxygen-rich blood is an index of brain activity; participant has a large, donut-shaped magnet around his head (magnetic field produces changes in oxygen atoms); a scanning device takes a "photo" of oxygen atoms while the participant performs a cognitive task; is less invasive than a pet scan and can measure brain activity that occurs fairly quickly; is more precise than a pet scan as it provides a more detailed image of one's brain; produces more robust illustrations of brain parts involved in processing a stimulus; can detect subtle differences in the way that the brain processes language; gives info about location (like a PET scan), but does not provide info into questions associated with time course; gives you function AND structure; bounces magnetic waves off your brain; blood carrying oxygen and blood not carrying oxygen have different iron levels (waves bounce off differently); gives much better spatial resolution and it gives higher temporal resolution (but not too high/high enough); too slow to provide precise info about timing of brain activity

random assignment

assigning participants to experimental and control conditions by chance, thus minimizing preexisting differences between those assigned to the different groups

retina

back of your eyeball; where you hold all those photo receptors (rods and cones); covers the inside back portion of eye and contains millions of neurons that register and transmit visual info from outside world

feature-integration theory

basic elements of this include: we sometimes look at a score using distributed attention (we process all parts of the score at the same time) on other occasions, we use focused attention (we process each item in the scene one at a time); distributed and focused attention form a conntinuum; frequently use an attention that's somewhere between the 2 extremes; anne treisman; plays a role in the red X demonstration

face-inversion effect

behavioral research shows that people are much more accurate in identifying upright faces than upside down faces

when are people more likely to process unattended message?

both messages are presented slowly; main task is not challenging; meaning of unattended message is immediately relevant (sometimes notice when their name is inserted in unattended message); measured implicitly (implicit memory is when I measure your memory, having you do another task, and you don't realize that I'm measuring your memory)

Ebbinghaus

carefully controlled research; studied *nonsense syllables* (i.e. DBJ, VQR, etc.); would generate lists of syllables that didn't make any sense in his native language (German); would learn these lists over and over again; once he learned them, he would take a break, and then he would see how long it took him to relearn lists; found that it took him *less* time to learn *old* lists than it did *new* lists (*saving score*) (i.e. learning spanish in high school; 10 years later, it would be much easier to relearn spanish than to learn a completely new language); he created lists of nonsense syllables so that he didn't shade the results, so that he could more accurately get an idea of how long it takes to learn brand new material (choosing nonsense syllables reduced the potentially confounding effects of people's previous experience with language on their ability to recall information from their memories); forgetting curve (pattern of forgetting overtime): the longer the retention interval goes on for our memory, the more we forget, and it kinda plateaus out; as time goes on, our memories decay (decay at a faster rate immediately, the permanent information stays longer in our minds, regardless of time passed); was interested in *human memory*

theme 4

cognitive processes are interrelated with one another; they do not operate in isolation; i.e. decision-making typically requires perception, memory, general knowledge, and language

theme 2

cognitive processes are remarkably efficient and accurate; your cognitive systems are designed such that they can limit the amount of info to which you have access; when they do have an error, we can trace them back to our normal cognitive process

theme 3

cognitive processes handle positive information better than negative information; it's much easier to understand something in a positive form (i.e. "i like the movie" vs "i cannot say i don't like the movie"); we understand sentences better if they are worded in the affirmative; we have trouble noticing when something's missing; we tend to perform better on a variety of different tasks if the info is emotionally positive (pleasant) than emotionally negative (unpleasant); our cognitive processes are designed to handle what is, rather than what is not

correlational research

correlation does NOT equal causation; determine whether, and to what extent, variables are *associated* with one another; looking to predict if this will happen; the value of a correlation can vary from -1.0 to +1.0 (-1.0 = perfect *negative* correlation; 0.0 = *no* correlation; +1.0 = perfect *positive* correlation); signs tell you the direction, NOT the strength; does *not* allow for causal claims; can study real-world factors that cannot be manipulated in a laboratory (sex, race, social status, etc.)

attention bias

describes a situation when people pay extra attention to some stimuli/features

ironic effects of mental control

describes how our efforts can backfire when we attempt to control the contents of our consciousness

limits of correlational research

direction of causality problem (you don't know if it's X causing Y or Y causing X; you can't start one and then start the other; measure X and Y at the same time); third-variable problem (in experiments, this is called a confound; you'll find the correlation, but you don't know if the correlation exists between X and Y because X is leading to that relationship, or if Y is leading, or if it's some third variable leading to both of those)

behaviorism

during the first half of the 20th century, this became the *most prominent* theoretical perspective in the U.S.; psychologists must focus on *objective*, *observable* reactions to stimuli in the environment (aka not introspection); most prominent person was John B. Watson; emphasized *observable* behavior, and typically studied *nonhuman animals*; believed it was inappropriate to theorize and speculate about *unobservable* components of mental life; didn't study concepts such as mental image, an idea, or a thought; focused heavily on *learning*; interested in *quantifying* the manner in which *changes in an organism's environment* produced *changes in its behavior*; emphasized the importance of the *operational definition*; also valued carefully controlled research; Skinner

top-down processing

emphasizes how our concepts, expectations, and memory influence our cognitive processes; mental processes that bring pre-existing knowledge/expectations to bear upon perception; is especially strong when stimuli are incomplete or ambiguous; is also strong when a stimulus is registered for just a fraction of a second (allows you to understand the situation better, even when you don't have all of the info); expectations help you recognize objects very rapidly

gestalt psychology

emphasizes that humans have basic tendencies to *actively organize what we see* and that the *whole is greater than the sum of its parts* (i.e. seeing a face instead of an oval with 2 lines); valued unity of psychological phenomena; disagreed with introspection; criticized behaviorists' emphasis on breaking behavior into observable stimulus; emphasized the importance of insight in problem solving; context was important

bottom-up processing

emphasizes that stimulus characteristics are important when you recognize an object; this info starts with the most basic/bottom level of perception and it works its way up till it reaches the more "sophisticated" cognitive brain regions, beyond primary visual cortex; mental processes that begin with the sensation of individual stimulus features which are brought together to form perception; emphasizes importance of info from the stimuli registered on your sensory receptors (uses only a low-level sensory analysis of stimulus)

atkinson-shiffrin model

external input --> sensory memory (lost from sensory memory) --> short-term memory (working memory) (lost from short-term memory) --> long-term memory (lost from long-term memory); sensory memory is external output (info coming in; from mouse/keyboard); short-term memory is RAM; long-term memory is hard drive/gigabytes

change blindness

fail to detect a change in an object or a scene; involves top-down processing; stranger-and-the-door study; when perceiving an entire scene, our top-down processing encourages us to assume that the basic meaning of the scene will remain stable; people quickly identify the change when it's important; people are surprisingly blind to fairly obvious changes in the objects that they are perceiving

ambiguous figure-ground relationship

figure and ground reverse from time to time (i.e. vase-faces effect); we have a natural tendency to want to organize the world around us (the sum is greater than the individual parts); adaptation of neurons in visual cortex; people try to solve the visual paradox

cognitive processes

give you the ability to recognize and interpret stimuli in your environment, act/react strategically to environmental input, plan, create, interact with others, and process all thoughts, sensations, and emotions that you experience on a daily basis

cognitive psychology

has 2 definitions; sometimes it is a synonym for the word "cognition"; sometimes it refers to a particular theoretical approach to psychology

people with damage in left parietal region...

have trouble noticing a visual stimulus on right side

people with damage in parietal region of right hemisphere of brain...

have trouble noticing visual stimulus that appears on left side of their visual field

prosopagnosia

horrible type of agnosia; people with this cannot recognize human faces, though they perceive other objects relatively normally; often report that various parts of a person's face (i.e. nose, mouth, 2 eyes) seem independent of one another instead of a complete face

isolated-feature/combined-feature effect

if target differed from the irrelevant items in display with respect to a simple feature such as color, observers could quickly detect target; people can detect this target just as fast when it is presented in an array of 24 items as when it is presented in an array of only 3 items; time taken to find target increases dramatically as # of distractors increases; people can typically locate an isolated feature more quickly than a combined feature; distributed vs focused attention

executive attention network

in the frontal lobe; used when task features conflict; active during reading, learning, stroop task; inhibiting automatic responses to stimuli; academic learning; when you're trying to pay attention to just one thing, you use this; produces a less-obvious response; prefrontal portion of the cortex is where this is especially active; primarily involved during top-down control of attention; starts to develop at age 3; important for when you acquire academic skills at school and also helps you learn new ideas

positron emission tomography (PET scan)

inject radioactive chemical/dye into your blood; scan your brain and see how much dye/glucose; the brain does not store oxygen (blood flow increases in activated part of brain to carry O2 to that site); researchers measure blood flow in the brain by injecting participants with low dose of radioactive chemical just before this person performs a cognitive task; chemical travels through the bloodstream to activated parts of brain during task; special camera makes an image of the accumulated radioactive chemical in various regions of brain while person works on task; can be used to study *attention*, *memory*, and *language*; require *several seconds* to *produce data*; this method does not provide useful info about the time course of processing a stimulus in the environment (temporal); are expensive and expose people to radioactive chemicals; are used less often nowadays; lower temporal resolution; not very good with picking up speed in action, but it gives you a pretty good spatial resolution (tells us where in the brain, things are occurring); too slow to provide precise info about timing of brain activity

attention

is a concentration of mental activity that allows you to take in a limited portion of the vast stream of information available from both your sensory world and your memory; use both bottom-up processing and top-down processing; theme 5

experimental research

is a method used to examine the causal relationships amongvariables under controlled conditions; 2 key factors: manipulations of independent variables (change the setting/environment in some way for different participants) and control over extraneous variables (through random assignment and experimental control); include 3 variables: independent variable (what we're changing), dependent variable (effect variable), and extraneous variable (all other variables that affect the study, but is not included in the model); as a researcher, goal is to control the extraneous variables as much as possible; advantage is that it can make causal claims due to experimenter control; disadvantages include that it studies behavior in contrived, unrealistic settings, would behavior occur similarly in the real world?, and cannot study everything

primary visual cortex

is in the occipital lobe, which is where that info gets sent and processed, is the part of the cerebral cortex that's concerned with basic processing of visual stimuli; and is the first place where info from your 2 eyes is combined; basic components get processed here (i.e. a line)

ground

is the background; the region that's "left over", forming background

figure

is what separates from the background; has a distinct shape with clearly defined edges

sensory memory (chapter 2)

large-capacity storage system that records info from each of senses with reasonable accuracy

occipital lobe

located in the back of the brain, right above your ears in the back; have one in both the left and right hemispheres; where the brain processes the most basic components of vision; contains the primary visual cortex

theme 5

many cognitive processes rely on both bottom-up processing and top-down processing; they work simultaneously; i.e. pattern recognition (bottom-up: you recognize your aunt partly because of info available from stimulus (info about your aunt's face, height, shape, and etc.); top-down: you must possess stored knowledge about physical characteristics of your aunt, or she would seem like an ordinary person (stored knowledge about her physical identity, necessary to recognize a person); context could play a part (top-down)); bottom-up processing usually occurs slightly before top-down processing

phobic disorder

marked by a persistent and irrational fear of an object or situation that presents no realistic danger

*introspection*

meant that *carefully trained observers* would *systematically analyze* their *own sensations* and *report them* as objectively (impartially) as possible, under standardized conditions; is not reliable (i.e. most people think that when we read, our eyes move smoothly, however our eyes actually take little jumps called saccadic eye movements while we read)

cognition

mental activity; refers to the acquisition, storage, transformation, and use of knowledge; inescapable (at any point you're awake, these processes are at work); information from the environment that was taken in through sensory systems, and it was linked to knowledge that you possess; new memories are created and later on accessed; the overall definition of the concepts that we study, the activity, the acquisition, storage, and transformation, and use of knowledge

Wilhelm Wundt

most believe they should be considered the founder of experimental psychology; *first psychology lab*; he took what other people were doing, ad he applied strict methodological designs to study them, and applied mathematics to the area; was famous for studying *structuralism*; *introspection*; exposed people to different stimuli; would methodically introspect about that process, and write down (step-by-step) what was going through your mind; proposed that psychology should study *mental processes*

stroop effect

naming the colors of words (i.e. "red" written in blue, would answer blue); when words and colors are incongruent, asked to selectively attend to the color that the word is written (this takes inhibition, takes you longer with the incongruent words, people with ADHD will do worse at this task); selective attention: people take longer to pay attention to a color when they're distracted by another feature of the stimulus (namely, the meaning of the word itself)

object recognition/pattern recognition

object/pattern you identify an arrangement of sensory stimuli, and you perceive this pattern to be separate from its background; when you recognize an object, you transform and organize the raw data from your sensory receptors and you compare the data with info in your memory system; we recognize objects fast and accurately; regions beyond the primary visual cortex are activated during this

mindless wandering

occurs when your thoughts shift from the external environment in favor of internal processing

operant conditioning

organisms learn to emit responses or behaviors (i.e. pressing a bar), in response to a stimulus, to achieve desirable outcomes (reward; getting food) or avoiding undesirable outcomes (punishments; getting electric shock)

theme 1

our cognitive processes are active rather than passive; we actively search for information in our environment, and then when we recall it, it's a reconstructed process; initially, classical behaviorists thought humans were to wait for a stimulus to arrive from the environment before executing a response; cognitive approach proposes that people can willfully seek out information; memory is a lively process that requires you to continuously synthesize and transform info; you continually search, process, and synthesize

computer metaphor

our cognitive processes work like a computer; the information-processing approach argued that our mental processes are similar to operations of a computer AND information progresses through our cognitive system in a series of stages, one step at a time; sensory memory = external output (info coming in, from mouse/keyboard); short-term memory = RAM; long-term memory = hard drive or gigabytes

emotional stroop task

people are instructed to name ink color of words that could have strong emotional significance to them; they often require more time to name the stimuli color, because they have trouble ignoring their emotional reactions to the words; people with phobias are significantly slower on these anxiety-arousing words than on control words; people with phobias show attentional bias to meaning of the stimuli (when people pay extra attention to some stimuli/features); i.e. scared of snakes, presented with words related to snakes, such as slither and fangs, will take longer to say color of words

feature-present/feature-absent effect

people can typically locate a feature that is present more quickly than a feature that is absent; search is rapid when we're looking for a particular feature that is present, whether the display contained zero irrelevant items or numerous irrelevant items; locating the target is strictly a bottom-up process; search time increases dramatically as the number of irrelevant items increased; when people search for a feature that is absent, they typically examine every item, 1 by 1 (must use a kind of attention that emphasizes both bottom-up processing and top-down processing); i.e. people quickly locate 1 moving target when it appears in a group of stationary distractors; looking for a feature-present is much easier than a feature-absent; theme 3; searching for "circle with a line" or "circle without a line"; moving vs. stationary targets

inattentional blindness

people fail to notice that a new object has appeared; basketball and gorilla study; people often fail to notice a new object if they are paying close attention to something else; people are more likely to experience this when primary task is cognitively demanding; many of the visual stimuli that people fail to see are not high in ecological validity; involves top-down processing

schizophrenia

people with this do not show intense emotions, and may have hallucinations; disordered thinking; tend to perform poorly on many cognitive tasks; seem to have difficulty perceiving faces and facial expressions; edith pomarol-clotet and colleagues hypothesized that this poor performance in judging faces might be due to more general problems on cognitive tasks, rather than specific difficulty with faces

Mary Calkins

performed similar research to that of Ebbinghaus (had to do with human memory); in the United States; reported a memory phenomenon called *the recency effect*; emphasized that psychologists *should* study how *real people* use their *cognitive processes* in the *real world*, as opposed to in artificial lab tasks; was the first woman to be president of the American Psychological Association; paired associate learning; studied how we learn memory, how her memory works in the real world; learned words linked together "rainbow-cathedral", "captain-carbon" (found that word pairs that shared more meaning were easier to remember)

individual differences

personal attributes that vary from one person to another

iconic memory/visual sensory memory

preserves an image of a visual stimulus for a brief period after stimulus disappears; visual info registered on the retina must make its way through visual pathway, a set of neurons between retina and primary visual cortex; snapshot of visuals

feature-analysis theory

proposes a relatively flexible approach in which a visual stimulus is composed of small number of characteristics or components; each visual characteristic is called a distinctive feature; when you look at a new letter, visual system notes presence/absence of various features, then compares this list with the features stored in memory for each letter of alphabet (works for different handwritings); within an object, we look for distinctive features; all letters and objects have distinctive features; more flexible; problem with this is that it can really only account for basic objects (i.e. letters and numbers)

dichotic listening

psychological test; is studied by asking people to wear headphones, one message is presented to the left ear, and a different message to the right ear; participants often asked to shadow the message in one ear (in classical research, people noticed very little about unattended 2nd message)

event-related potential (ERP) technique

put wires overtop of your skull; gather electrical activity underneath your scalp; generates event related potential; really high on temporal resolution (picks up the speed of neurons firing very quickly); really low on spatial (not as specific as fMRI); records the very brief fluctuations in the brain's electrical activity, in response to stimulus such as auditory tone/visual word; researchers place electrodes on someone's scalp (32/64 electrodes); each electrode records the electrical activity generated by populations of neurons located in the brain; cannot identify response of a single neuron, but it can identify electrical changes over a very brief period produced by populations of neurons in some region of the brain; provides a reasonably precise picture of changes in brain's electrical potential while people perform a cognitive task (can show that your brain responds differently to 2 situations)

*recency effect*

refers to the observation that our *recall* is especially *accurate* for the *final items* in a *series of stimuli* (i.e. word lists, number lists); if i give you a list of words and i have you recall those words, you're more likely to recall the words at the beginning and the end, rather than the middle

selective-attention task

requires people to pay attention to certain kinds of info while ignoring other ongoing info; respond selectively to certain kinds of info, while ignoring other info; theme 2; 3 kinds of this: dichotic listening, the stroop effect, and visual search

focused attention

requires slow serial processing, in which you identify one object at a time; is more demanding; is needed when objects are more complex; identifies which features belong together; each item in the scene processed one at a time; serial processing; complex objects; identify which features belong together

orienting attention network

responsible for the kind of attention required for visual search, in which you must shift your attention around to various spatial locations; selecting information from sensory input (decide whether that's the target or not); when you have brain lesions in certain parts of the parietal lobe, it can lead to unilateral neglect/visual neglect (half of your visual world doesn't work) (their occipital lobe works fine, but this is not what's working); when you're selecting information from sensory input, this is activated; develops during the first year of life

empirical evidence

scientific evidence obtained by careful observation and experimentation

geons

simple 3D shapes; can be used to form meaningful objects; ex: prism, cylinder, tube, cone, box-shape

blindsight

sometimes people can perform cognitive task accurately, with no conscious awareness that their performance is accurate; is an unusual kind of vision without awareness; is a condition when individual with a damaged visual cortex claims not to see an object, however, they can accurately report some characteristics of that object, such as its location; those with this believe they are truly blind in part or all of their visual field

templates

specific patterns that you have stored in memory; we store this for all the different objects we see in the world; compare stimulus to this until a match is found; if not a match, we learn what the stimulus is and form a new one of these; problems with this are that this theory is very, very inflexible (i.e. handwriting amongst several people) and it only works for isolated letters, numbers, and objects (doesn't work for cars, trees, etc.)

viewer-centered approach

states that we store several angles/perspectives of a 3D object, instead of just one viewpoint; added into the recognition-by-components theory

Frederic Bartlett

studied everyday memory; rejected Ebbinghaus and used meaning material (i.e. long stories); saw memory as active, constructive process; we reconstruct our memories based upon previous experiences; we actively encode; schema-based approach; conducted research on *human memory*; published an important book (one of the most influential books in history of cognitive psychology) named "Remembering: An Experimental and Social Study"; discovered that people made *systematic errors* when trying to *recall these stories*; proposed that human memory is an *active, constructive process*, where we *interpret* and *transform info we encounter*; we *search* for meaning, trying to *integrate this new info* so that it's more *consistent* with our own *personal experiences*

social cognitive neuroscience

the area of psychology that attempts to understand social cognition by specifying the cognitive mechanisms that underlie it and by discovering how those mechanisms are rooted in the brain; i.e. study how someone reacts to facial expressions/how their brain reacts to that

consciousness

the awareness people have about the outside world and about their perceptions, images, thoughts, memories and feelings; generally associated with controlled focused attention that is *not automatic*

brain lesions

the destruction of an area in the *brain*, most often due to strokes, accidents, tumors, and blows to the head; the study of this has definitely helped us to understand the organization of the brain; is not limited to just one specific area; Phineas Gage; anti-social personality disorder; frontal lobe

ecological validity

the extent to which a study is realistic or representative of real life; measures how test performance predicts behaviors in real-world stages; studies are high in this if the conditions in which the research is conducted are similar to the natural setting where the results will be applied

*structuralism*

the idea behind *studying human psychology*; we need to *break everything down* to its *most basic elements*, the *structure* of the *thought processes* (aka the perceptions); gestalt psychologists disagreed with this

sensory memory

the immediate, initial recording of sensory information in the memory system; A type of storage that holds sensory information for a few seconds or less

proximal stimulus

the info registered on your sensory receptors (i.e. the image that your phone makes on retina); the same object represented on the back of your retina

positive correlation

the larger X tends to be, the larger Y tends to be; linear line going up (low left corner to top right corner)

negative correlation

the larger X tends to be, the smaller Y tends to be; linear line going down (top left corner to bottom right corner)

bottleneck theories

the narrow neck of a bottle restricts the flow into/out of the bottle; proposed a similar narrow passageway in human info processing; limits quantity of info that we can pay attention to (as one message goes in, others are left behind); researchers rejected this because they underestimate the flexibility of human attention (info is not lost at just one phase of the attention process, it's lost through many phases)

distal stimulus

the object out in the environment (i.e. phone)

visual search

the observer must find a target in a visual display that has numerous distractions (i.e. airport officers search bags for weapons, radiologists search mammogram to detect answer); people are much more accurate in identifying a target if it appears frequently; you must shift your attention around to various spatial locations

long-term memory

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

cognitive approach

theoretical orientation that emphasizes people's thought processes and their knowledge

metacognition

thinking about your own thought processes

binding problem

this is the idea that when you process items, you think that you process the color and shape all at the same time, but what actually happens is your brain processes shape and colors separately, then they are "binded" together later on in different areas of the brain; visual system doesn't represent important features of an object as a unified whole; focused attention allows binding process to operate (acts as a form of glue)

multitask

to do more than one thing at the same time

shadow

to listen to the message and repeat it after the speaker

divided-attention task

trying to pay attention to 2 or more simultaneous messages; aka multi-tasking (i.e. students studying while watching TV); you try to pay equal attention to 2 or more simultaneous messages, responding appropriately to each message; both your speed and accuracy suffer; they strain limits of attention and limits of their working memory and their long-term memory

perception

use of previous knowledge to gather and interpret stimuli registered by your senses; illustrates theme 5; visual stimuli, previous knowledge; combines aspects of both the outside world (the visual stimuli) and your inner world (your previous knowledge); combines bottom-up and top-down processing

word superiority effect

we can identify a single letter more accurately and rapidly when it appears in a meaningful word than when it appears alone/in a meaningless string of unrelated letters (i.e. "p" in plan vs. pnla)

recognition-by components theory

we have areas of our brain that process 3D objects; can show with fMRI research that when we show people these different geons, they can use them to make 3D objects; certain parts of the brain only light up for certain geons; problem with this is standard viewpoint vs. different viewpoint (we are better at recognizing things from a standard viewpoint); was modified to include the viewer-centered approach, saying that we store some basic templates/different angles of objects so that we can recognize them from multiple viewpoints

illusory conjunctions

we inappropriately combine the features of objects and create the perception of something that wasn't there; when using focused attention, would not likely have this; i.e. combining one object's shape with a color of another (presented a blue N and green T, but you report back a blue T and a green N)

illusory contours/subjective contours

we see edges even though they're not physically present in the stimulus; try to "fill in the blanks", but in this case, leads to perceptual error (i.e. pacman looking things and the triangle(s))

theory

well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations; A hypothesis that has been tested with a significant amount of data

unilateral spatial neglect

when a person ignores part of their visual field; these lesions cause unusual deficits; half of your visual world doesn't work

thought suppression

when people engage in this, they try to eliminate the thoughts, ideas, and images that are related to an undesirable stimulus; it backfire and all you can think about is that stimulus; white bear study; initial suppression of thoughts can produce a rebound effect

cocktail party effect

you're at a party with some friends and you're paying attention to the conversation, you're engaged in the selective attention task; you start listening to other people's conversations if they mention your name (unattended message is relevant)

mindless reading

your eyes may move forward, but you don't process meaning of material