Chapter 4 Cognitive Psychology Flashcards
Consiousness
One’s moment-to-moment subjective experience of the world
Change blindness
a failure to notice large changes in one’s environment
what are the two ytpes of attention?
-Endogenous attention
-Exogenous attention
Endogenous attention
attention that is directed voluntarily
I.e, deciding to attend to what I am reading right now.
exogenous attention
attention that is directed involuntarily by a stimulus
I.e, when I am reading and get a cramp in my leg, my attention shifts to the cramp.
Priming
a facilitation in the response to a stimulus due to recent experience with that stimulus or a related stimulus
subliminal perception
The processing of information by sensory systems without conscious awareness
Mediatation
a mental procedure that focuses attention on an external object an internal event or a sense of awareness
Memory
The ability to store and retreieve information
Procedural memory
A type of implicit memory that involves skills and habits
Encoding
The process by which the perception of a stimulus or event gets transformed into a memory
Schemas
Cognitive structures in long term memory that help us perceive, organize and understand information
Chunking
Organizing information into meaningful units to make it easier to remember
mnemonics
learning aids or strategies that improve recall through the use of retrieval cues
Sensory memory
A memory system that very briefly stores sensory information close to its original sensory form
Working memory
A limited capacity cognitive system that temporarily stores and manipulates information for current use
Long-term memory
Strengthening of a synaptic connection, making the postsynaptic neurons more easily activated by presynaptic neurons
Flashbulb memories
Vivid episodic memories for the cicumstances in which people first learnedof a surprising and consequential or emotionally arousing event.
Retrieval cue
Any stimulus that promotes memory recall
Encoding specificity principle
The idea that a stimulus that is encoded along with an experience can later trigger a memory of the experience
Prospective memory
Remembering to do something at some future time
Retrieval -induced forgetting
Impairment of the ability to recall an item in the future after retrieving a related item from long-term memory.
Proactive interference
Interference that occurs when prior information inhibits the ability to remember new information
Retroactive interference
Interference that occurs when new information inhibits the ability to remember old information
Blocking
the temporary inability to remeber something
absentmindness
The inattentive or shallow encoding of events
Persistence
The continual occurrence of unwanted memories
Memory Bias
The changing of memories over time so that they become consistent with current beliefs or attitudes
Source misattribution
`memory distortion that occurs when people misremeber the time, place, person or circumstance involved with a memory
Source amnesia
a type of misattribution that occurs when people have a memory of an event but can not remember where they encountered the information
Cryptomnesia
A type of missattribution that occurs when people think they have come up with a new idea yet have retrieved a stored idea and failed to attribute the idea to its proper source.
Suggestabiltiy
The development of biased memories from misleading information
Decision making
A cognitive process that results in the selection of a course of action or belief from several options
Problem solving
Finding a way around an obstacle to reach a goal
Heuristics
Shortcuts( rules of thumb or informal guidelines used to reduce the amount of thinking needed to make decisions.
Anchoring
The tendency to make judgments to rely on the first piece of information encountered to information that comes most quickly
Framing
In decision making, an emphasis is on the potential losses or gains from at least one alternative.
avalavibilty heuristic
Make a decision based on the answer that most easily comes to mind.
Representativeness
Placing a person or an object in a category if that person or object is similar to one’s prototype for that category.
affective forecasting
The tendency for people to overestimate how events will make them feel in the future
Restructuring
A new way of thinking about a problem that aids its solution
Mental sets
Problem-solving strategies that have worked in the past
Functional fixedness
In Problem solving, having fixed ideas about the typical functions of objects
Insight
The sudden realiztion of a solution to a problem
Intelligence
The ability to use knowledge to reason, make decisions, make sense of events, solve problems, Understand complex ideas, learn quickly, and adapt to environmental challenges.
