Cognitive Psychology
100 flashcards by MentisLibrary
Attention, memory models, heuristics and biases, language, and problem solving, from Sperling's iconic memory to Kahneman and Tversky's judgment research. The classic experiments and what each one demonstrated.
- What is cognitive psychology?
- The scientific study of mental processes including attention, perception, memory, language, reasoning, and problem solving.
- What was the cognitive revolution?
- The mid-twentieth century shift from behaviorism to studying internal mental processes, driven by work in linguistics, information theory, and computing.
- What is the information processing approach?
- Modeling cognition as a sequence of stages that encode, store, transform, and retrieve information, by analogy with a computer.
- What is a mental representation?
- An internal code standing for something in the world, which cognitive processes operate on.
- What is selective attention?
- The process of focusing on some information while filtering out other available information.
- What is the dichotic listening task?
- A method presenting different messages to each ear while the participant shadows one, used to study selective attention.
- What is the cocktail party effect?
- The ability to focus on one conversation in a noisy room while still detecting salient information such as your own name in an unattended stream.
- What is Broadbent's filter model of attention?
- An early-selection model in which unattended information is filtered out on physical characteristics before meaning is processed.
- What is Treisman's attenuation model?
- A revision in which unattended input is weakened rather than blocked, so highly salient or primed items can still break through.
- What is late selection theory of attention?
- The proposal that all input is processed for meaning and selection occurs only at the point of response or awareness.
- What is inattentional blindness?
- Failing to notice a fully visible but unexpected object because attention is engaged elsewhere.
- What is change blindness?
- Failing to notice a large change in a visual scene, especially across a disruption such as a cut, flicker, or brief occlusion.
- What is feature integration theory?
- A theory in which basic features are registered in parallel preattentively and focused attention binds them into objects.
- What is the difference between a feature search and a conjunction search?
- A feature search pops out regardless of the number of distractors; a conjunction search requires serial attention, so time scales with set size.
- What is the Stroop effect?
- Slower and less accurate naming of ink color when the word names a conflicting color, showing automatic reading interferes with a controlled task.
- What is the difference between automatic and controlled processing?
- Automatic processing is fast, parallel, and requires little attention; controlled processing is slow, serial, and effortful but flexible.
- What is divided attention?
- Allocating attention across two or more tasks at once, which degrades performance when the tasks compete for the same resources.
- What is the attentional blink?
- A brief period after detecting one target during rapid stimulus presentation when a second target is likely to be missed.
- What is the multi-store model of memory?
- A model with sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory as separate stores, with attention and rehearsal moving information between them.
- What is iconic memory?
- Very brief visual sensory memory lasting a fraction of a second.
- What is echoic memory?
- Brief auditory sensory memory, lasting a few seconds, longer than iconic memory.
- What did Sperling's partial report procedure demonstrate?
- That the visual sensory store holds nearly the whole display briefly, but the trace decays faster than it can be reported.
- What is working memory?
- A limited-capacity system that holds and manipulates information in the service of ongoing cognition.
- What are the components of Baddeley's working memory model?
- The central executive, the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketchpad, and the episodic buffer added later.
- What is the phonological loop?
- The working memory subsystem holding and rehearsing verbal and acoustic information.
- What is the magical number seven claim?
- Miller's observation that immediate memory span is about seven plus or minus two chunks.
- What is chunking?
- Recoding individual items into larger meaningful units to increase effective capacity.
- What is the serial position effect?
- Better recall of items at the beginning and end of a list than in the middle.
- What is the recency effect, and how is it eliminated?
- Better recall of the final list items, which disappears if a filled delay follows the list.
- What is the difference between explicit and implicit memory?
- Explicit memory is consciously retrieved; implicit memory influences behavior without conscious recollection.