Cognitive Psychology Flashcards
break consciousness down into its elements or specific mental structures
Structuralism
report on current conscious experiences
Introspection
Reaction time
measurement of time elapsed between a stimulus presentation and the subject’s response to it
Brain imaging
associate various cognitive processes to various parts of the brain
Eye movements
an “on-line” measure of information processing
memorize initial list, rememorize it, subtract the number of trials it took to rememoirze the list from the number it originally took, divide by the original number, and multiply by 100
Method of savings (Ebbinghaus)
putting new information into memory
Encoding
retaining the information over time
Storage
recovery of the stored material at a later time
Retrieval
Recall
independently reproducing the information that you have been previously exposed to
Recognition
realizing that a certain stimulus event is one you have seen or heard before
Recency effect
words presented at the end of the list are remembered best
Primacy effect
items presented first are also remembered fairly well
model suggests that recall involves the same mental process involved in recognition plus another process not required for recognition
Generation-recognition
Clustering
when asked to recall a list of words, people tend to recall words belonging to the same category
Several different memory systems exist and each system has a different function; memories enter the various systems in a specific order
Stage Theory of Memory
Sensory Memory
fleeting impressions of sensory stimuli
Iconic (visual) memory and Echoic (auditory) memory
Information does not last long
Whole-report procedure
subjects looked for a fraction of a second to recall as many items as they could
Partial-report procedure
subjects looked for a fraction of a second, but were asked to report only one row of letters (identified by a low, medium, or high pitched tone)
Short-Term Memory
link between rapidly changing sensory memory and the more lasting long-term memory; encoding based on phonology
constant rehearsing of information
Maintenance rehearsal
Long-Term Memory
permanent storehouse of experiences, knowledge, and skills; encoding based on meaning
organizing the material and associating it with information already in long-term memory
Elaborative rehearsal
remembering how things are done
Procedural memory
storage of explicit information
Declarative memory
Semantic memory
remembering general knowledge
Episodic memory
memories for particular events
Semantic priming
subject has to decide whether a stimulus is a word or a nonword; response time quicker if the two words were semantically related
time it takes a subject to respond
Response latency
Spreading activation model
semantic memory is organized into a map of interconnected concepts; key is the distance between concepts (Collins and Loftus)
Semantic feature-comparison model
semantic memory contains feature lists of concepts; key is amount of overlap in the feature lists (Smith, Shoben, and Rips)
Levels-of-Processing (depth-of-processing) Theory
How long you will remember material is not what memory system it gets into, but the way in which you process the material; deeper the processing, and the greater the effort, the better memory of the material will be (Craik and Lockhart)
focusing on appearance, size, and shape of the information
Physical (visual)
focusing on the sound combinations words have
Acoustical
focusing on the meaning of the word
Semantic
Information can be stored (or encoded) in two different ways: visually and verbally
Paivio’s Dual-Code Hypothesis
Decay theory
if the information in long-term memory is not used or rehearsed, it will eventually be forgotten
Inhibition theory
forgetting is due to the activities that have taken place between original learning and the later attempted recall
what was learned earlier interferes with what you learn later
Proactive inhibition
forget what was learned earlier as something new is learned
Retroactive inhibition
assumption that recall will be best if the context at recall approximates the context during the original encoding
Encoding specificity
recall will be better if you psychological or physical state at the time of recall is the same as your state when you memorized the material
State-dependent learning
associating information with some sequence of places with which you are familiar
Method of Loci
prior knowledge and expectations influence recall
Bartlett
Zeigarnik Effect
Tendency to remember incomplete tasks better than completed tasks
Mental set
tendency to keep repeating solutions that worked in other situations
Functional fixedness
inability to use a familiar object in an unfamiliar way
cognitive ability that results in new ways of viewing problems or situations
Creativity
Divergent thinking
thinking that involves producing as many creative answers to a question as possible (Guilford)
Heuristics
shortcuts or rules of thumb (Kahneman and Tversky)
Availability heuristic
use the information most readily available in memory to make our decisions
Representativeness heuristic
categorizing things on the basis of whether they fit the prototypical, stereotypical, or representative image of the category
Base-rate fallacy
using prototypical or stereotypical factors rather than actual numerical information about which category is more numerous
smallest sound units of language
Phonemes
smallest units of meaning in a language
Morphemes
actual word order of the words in a sentence
Surface structure
underlying form that specifies the meaning of the sentence
Deep (abstract) structure
tell us how we can change one structure into another
Transformational rules
Whorfian Hypothesis (linguistic relativity)
our perception of reality is determined by the content of language
individual differences in intelligence are largely due to variations in the amount of a general, unitary factor
Spearman
Primary mental abilities
Thurstone
three aspects to intelligence: componential, experiential, and contextual
Sternberg’s triarchic theory
Theory of multiple intelligences
Gardner
Fluid intelligence
ability to quickly grasp relationships in novel situations and make correct deductions from them; increases through adolescence before declining with advanced age (Cattell)
Crystallized intelligence
ability to understand relationships or solve problems that depend on knowledge acquired as a result of schooling or other life experiences; increases throughout lifespan (Cattell)
intelligence as measured by IQ tests was almost entirely genetic in nature
Jensen
