Cognitive Flashcards
Bottom up processing
sensory information is taken in and you put the pieces together like a puzzle to make sense of what you’re seeing, smelling, hearing, touching to make sense of it.
Top down processing
schema, priming, or framing influence your perception of sensory information (sights etc) that you take in and shape how you perceive it.
Perceptual Set
a mental predisposition or readiness to perceive stimuli in a particular way based on previous experiences, expectations, beliefs, and context. Top down processing. If a dog has bitten us before, we may be fearful of any smaller hairy creatures when we first see them.
Cocktail party effect
selective attention. For example, if we’re at a party, we can filter out conversations and noises that we think are less important to us. Sometimes this backfires and we do not notice something important.
Change blindness
being unable to notice a change in your visual field after even a short interruption like blinking. This is what many magic tricks rely on.
Binocular depth cues
we can notice distance and depth because we have two eyes rather than just one. As objects get closer, we experience convergence of our eyes. They turn closer to one another until we become cross-eyed. Our brains realize that this means things are closer.
Monocular depth cues
also allow us to perceive distance, but of very distant or 2 dimensional scenes. We use relative size, overlap, texture, light, shadow to determine distance and depth. This can be done even with one eye.
priming
when an idea or past experience causes a perceptual set. It causes top down processing. The idea or past experience shapes how we will interpret stimuli in the future. If our parents yell at us a lot and later we hear yelling out in public, we may cringe and assume it is negative. The yelling could just as easily be joyous though.
Gambler’s fallacy
when we assume that past events have some effect on what is actually random. For example, if a slot machine has a 1 in 1,000 chance of landing on a jackpot, it does not matter that you have pulled the lever 999 times with no jackpot. Even your next pull is still a 1 in 1,000 chance. It is not “due” for a jackpot
Sunk cost fallacy
an unwillingness to cut your losses. You bought this person’s movie tickets and have driven them to school 90 times in an effort to get them to like you. You have sent them 800 creative snaps. They still aren’t into you. You think to yourself “I have put so much effort in with them, I can’t just give up now.” The “costs” that you have “sunk” into them cannot be recovered, and may have no impact on the future at all.
Divergent thinking
creativity. This is when we take the shotgun approach to a problem or task, and just try all sorts of things we think might work. Many of them will not, but one may.
Convergent thinking
When we take a set of facts or advice from experienced experts to attempt to solve problems. Often a good strategy, but can also result in mental-set or functional fixedness. Doing things the way they’ve always been done.
Functional fixedness
not being able to see past an object or concept’s intended use. Concepts from the scientific method are REGULARLY applied in history class, but often we cannot see this and compartmentalize the two subjects. An Xbox controller could easily be used for self defense if needed, but we only see it for gaming
Explicit memory
you can intentionally and consciously recall this and then describe it.
Episodic: something you think you experienced and can describe it like a chronological story or reel.
Semantic: knowing the meanings of things like words or other symbols.
Implicit memory
you cannot exactly put words to this sort of memory or even explain really when you learned it in some cases.
Procedural: memory from behaviors like “muscle memory.” Riding a bike or playing and instrument. Knowing how far apart we stand when speaking in our culture.
