Chapter 7 Flashcards
Time spaces
The visual experience of time units such as days of the week or months of the year as occupying spatial locations outside the body.
Number forms
Automatically generated images of numbers in various spatial layouts external to an individual.
Dual-coding theory
The theory that there are two ways of representing events, verbal and non-verbal.
Logogens
The units containing the information underlying our use of a word; the components of the verbal system.
Imagens
The units containing information that generate mental images; the components of the non-verbal system.
Imagery (Paivio’s sense)
The ease with which something such as a word can elicit a mental image.
Concreteness
The degree to which a word refers to something that can be experienced by the senses (i.e. heard, felt, smelled, or tasted).
Left and right hemispheres theory
The theory that the left hemisphere of the brain controls speech and is better at processing verbal material than is the right hemisphere, which is better at non-verbal tasks. Not totally true!
Mnemonic techniques
Procedures used to aid memory, like Circle of Fifths.
Method of loci
A mnemonic technique based on places and images (one is a bun, two is a shoe, etc.)
Distinctiveness hypothesis
The hypothesis that the more distinctive the item is, the easier it will be to recall.
von Restorff effect
If one item in a set is different from the others, it is more likely to be recalled.
Special place strategy
Choosing a storage location that other people will not think of; the problem is that when the time comes to retrieve the item, you may not think of it either.
Metamemory
Beliefs about how memory works.
Synesthesia
The condition in which a stimulus appropriate to one sense (eg. a sound) triggers an experience appropriate to another sense (eg. a colour).
Chromesthesia
Coloured hearing from synesthesia,
Inducer
The cue that elicits a synesthetic experience.
Concurrent
The synesthetic response.
Apoptosis
Programmed pruning of neurons. Lack of this could be a cause for synesthesia. Certain transient connections in babies become permanent in adults.
Strong synesthetes
People for whom an inducer in one sensory modality (eg. a sound) produces a concurrent image in another sensory modality (eg. a colour).
Cross-modal effects
The ability to appreciate that the sensations of one modality can be similar to those in another modality.
Weak synesthetes
People who can appreciate cross-modal associations without having strong synesthetic experiences.
Icon
The initial, brief representation of the information contained in a visual stimulus.
Eidetic imagery
Images protected onto the external world that persist for a minute or more even after a stimulus (eg. a picture) is removed. No more accurate than regular memories and not photographic.
Cognitive dedifferentiation
Fusion of perceptual process that typically function independently. Synesthesia is the dedifferentiation of sense modalities, while eidetic imagery is the dedifferentiation of imagery and perception.
Vividness of visual imagery
The degree to which an image is clear and lively, and resembles an actual percept.
Mental rotation
Imagining an object in motion and viewing it from different perspectives. Just the right hemisphere is seemingly involved for simple mental rotation but for more complex tasks like mental folding the left hemisphere engages as well.
Objective distances
The true distances between objects in the real world, which are preserved in our mental images.
Categorical distance
The number of units transversed during mental scanning; for instance, landmarks on an island map, rooms in a building, or counties in a state.
Images as anticipation hypothesis
The hypothesis that an image is a readiness to perceive something, like the F on the grid (Podgorny & Shepard).
Emergent properties
New properties that emerge when a mental image is constructed.
Analog form of representation hypothesis
The hypothesis that a mental image embodies the essential relationships of the thing it represents.
Egocentric perspective transformations
You imagine yourself moving, while the objects in the environment remain still.
Spatial framework
An imaginary space with one vertical (above-below) and two horizontal dimensions (ahead-behind and left-right).
Propositional knowledge hypothesis
The hypothesis that knowledge about the world is represented and stored in the form of propositions.
Cognitive map
Information from the environment that is “worked over and elaborated… into a tentative, cognitive-like map… indicating routes and paths and environmental relationships” (Tolman).
Egocentric frame of reference
Using information available from our current perspective to orient ourselves.
Path integration
The process whereby our position in relation to an important location is continuously updated as we move through the environment.
Mental model theory
The theory that we construct a mental model of a given situation, on the basis of which we understand, reason, and draw conclusions about it.
Auditory imagery
The experience of sound in your mind that is not caused by stimulation of the receptive cells in your ears.
Earworm
A conscious experience of sound - typically a short phrase of catchy music - that seems go et stuck on replay in your head.
