Cognitive psychology Flashcards
reaction time
elapsed time between stimulus presentation and the subjects response
brain imaging
used to associate various cognitive processes with various brain parts
Herman ebbinghaus- method of savings
measuring retention by measuring how much faster one relearns material that has been previously learned and then forgotten.
ebbinghaus- forgetting curve
decrease in ability of the brain to retain memory over time.
Encoding
putting information into memory
Storage
retaining information in memory
Retrieval
recovering the information in memory
Recall
reproducing info you have been exposed to
Recognition
realizing that a certain stimulus event is one you have heard or seen before
generation-recognition
attempt to explain why you can recognize more than recall; recall is same process but with an extra step
order effects
clustering:
people tend to recall words belong to same category together
stage theory of memory
- sensory memory
- short term or working memory
- long term memory
maintenance rehearsal
repeating info; keeps in short term memory
elaborative rehearsal
organizing info by associating it with info in long term memory
procedural memory
remembering how to do things
declarative memory
+ 2 types Semantic & episodic
remembering explicit info
semantic memory: remembering general knowledge
episodic memory: remembering personal events
Collins and Loftus - spreading activation model
the shorter the distance between 2 words, the closer they are related in semantic memory
Semantic verification task
method used to investigate organization of semantic memory
semantic feature comparison model
semantic memory contains feature lists of concepts ; key is amount of overlap of features in concepts
levels of processing / depths of processing theory
what determines how long you remember info depends on how you process the material
3 ways
- physical (visual)
- acoustical (sound)
- semantic (meaning)
Paivio’s dual code hypothesis
info can be scored in 2 ways : visually and verballu
schema / schemata
conceptual frameworks we use to organize our knowledge
decay theory
if info in long term memory is not used then it will be forgotten
inhibition theory
forgetting is due to activities that take place between original learning and later attempted recall
Proactive inhibition
what you learned earlier interferes with what you learned later
retroactive inhibition
forgetting what you learned earlier as you learn something new
state-dependent learning
recall is better when psychological or physical state is the same as when you learned the info
Method of loci
associating info with some sequence of places you are familiar with
Bartlett & war of Ghosts
subjects reconstructed the story in line with their culture expectations and schema of a ghost story
Elizabeth Loftus and false memories
- much of eyewitness memory can be erroneous
- studied accuracy of repressed early memories
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
a cognitive bias that limits a person to use an object only in the way it is traditionally used
divergent thinking
many creative solutions to a problem
heuristics
shortcuts and rules of thumb when making decisions
availability heuristic
mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person’s mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision.
representatives heuristic
used when making judgments about the probability of an event under uncertainty; categorizing things based on the prototypical image
base-rate fallacy
committed when a person judges that an outcome will occur without considering prior knowledge of the probability that it will occur.; ignoring numerical info about items when categorizing them
phonemes
smallest sound unit
morphemes
smallest unit of meaning
syntax
grammatical arrangement off words and sentences
semantics
meaning of words and sentences
surface structure
actual order of words in a sentence
deep structure
underlying form that specifies the meaning of the sentence
transformational rules
tell us how we can change from one sentence to another (from active voice to passive voice)
Whorfian hypothesis
language determines how reality is perceived
fluid intelligence
increases through adolescence
levels off in young adulthood
declines in advance age
crystallized intelligence
increases throughout life span
A psychologist finds that subjects who drink coffee before viewing a videotape of a comedian find her to be funnier than subjects who did not drink coffee. This best supports which theory?
cognitive-physiological theory of emotion
which is not a basic language component?
phonology morphology syntax semantics pragmatics
morphology
which is the best way to present a tone in order to enhance memory of vanishing letters?
one second after letters have vanished
jess made a list of movies. when recalling, he grouped them together by genre
this is called
- chunking
- clustering
clustering
Dual-code hypothesis suggests that
concrete information tends to be recalled better than abstract information
George sperling discovered that sensory memory could hold how many pieces of information?
9
If a psychologist wanted to test someone to see if experience affected his ability to solve problems ,they might use
luchin’s water jar problem
