Exam 1 Flashcards
Prosopagnosia
Inability to recognize faces
Four F’s of limbic system
Fight
Flee
Feed
Fornication
Selective attention and bottleneck
What you choose to focus on
Limits of your attention
Parallel Processing
Processing several aspects of stimulus simultaneously
Chunking
Memorizing information in groups instead of all at once
Cerebellum
Controls motor movements, balance, walking
Dorsal stream’s importance in vision
Location and motion
Rods
Photoreceptor responsible for seeing in less intense light
What makes a good theory?
Falsifiable, useful and parsimonious (easy to test out)
Corpus callosum
Tissue that connects 2 hemispheres of brain
Brain stem
Regulates autonomic responses
Retrograde amnesia
Memory loss before damage
Anterograde amnesia
Can’t form new long term memories
Patient HM
Had bilateral MTLs and Hippocampus removed to stop seizures
Couldn’t form new explicit memories
Why is forgetting a good thing?
Retain new knowledge
Metacognition
Knowledge and skills in monitoring and controlling one’s learning memory
Five impediments to remembering
Encoding failures Memory decay Inadequate retrieval cues Interference Trying to not remember deliberately
Three stages of memory
Encoding
Storage
Retrieval
Consolidation
Process after encoding believed to stabilize memory traces
6 steps to making a rational decision
Define problem Identify criteria to judge multiple options Weight criteria Generate alternatives Rate each alternative Compute optimal decision
Heuristics
Thinking strategies that simplify decision making by using mental short cuts
Three biases in decision process
Overconfidence
Anchoring
Framing
Retina
Transduction (light converted to neural signals) in human visual system
Dendrites
Short branched extensions of a neuron that are designed to gather info from surrounding neurons
Psychology
Studying of behavior and mental processes
A science!
Independent variable
Factor manipulated
Dependent variable
Factor controlled and measured
External validity
Can study be generalized to other situations and reflect multiple populations
Parts of brain for limbic system
Hypothalamus, Pituitary gland, Amygdala, and Hippocampus
4 lobes of cerebral cortex
Occipital: vision
Temporal: sound
Parietal: spatial awareness, touch, taste
Frontal: language, problem solving, thinking
Quasi experiments
Subjects assigned to different conditions using pre-existing groups like age or gender
What part of the brain is most susceptible to concussions?
Prefrontal cortex
Sensory modalities
Vision Audition Taste Smell Skin sense Kinesthesia Vestibular
Proprioception
Body position, movement, balance
Used kinesthesia and vestibular senses
Ventral stream’s use in vision
Shape and identity
Fovea
Point of central focus in vision
Prefrontal cortex
Complex cognitive behavior, social skills, decision making
Spotlight model
Attention allows us to engage and disengage from aspects of environment
Attentional narrowing
Arousal can increase attention to central details and impair memory for peripheral details
Inattentional blindness
Failure to notice unexpected stimuli in field of vision when paying attention to something else
Change blindness
Failure to notice change in visual stimulus
Automatization
Procedure changes from needing a lot of attention to very little attention
Action slips
Unintended automatic actions inappropriate for current situations
Explicit memory
Declarative and conscious
Includes episodic and semantic memories
Implicit memory
Nondeclarative and unconscious
Included classical conditioning effects, procedural memory and priming
Broca’s area
Area in frontal lobe of left hemisphere in charge of language production
Cones
Photoreceptors for lighted environments that can encode fine visual details
Selective attention (cocktail party situation)
Selecting certain stimuli in environment and ignoring distracting info
Flashbulb memory
Vivid personal memories of receiving the news of a major and usually emotional event
Autobiographical memory
Memory for events of one’s life
False memory
Memory for an event that never actually occurred, implanted by experimental manipulation or other means
Schema
A memory template created through repeated exposure to a particular class of objects or events
System 1 decision making
Intuitive, fast, automatic, effortless, implicit and emotional
System 2 decision making
Deliberative, slower, conscious, effortful, explicit and logical
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Language that people use determines their thoughts and actions
Hindsight Bias
What we think as common sense now wasn’t common sense before
Scientific method
Consider alternate hypotheses and collect data to determine which is supported
If a theory can’t be proven false…
It’s not a scientific theory
Correlations
Measure the relationship between 2 variables
What makes a good experiment?
Standardization and control, operational definitions, reliability and validity
Standardization
Conditions identical
Random assignment to condition
Operational definitions
Way something is measured/manipulated
Can profoundly impact results
Reliability
Stability and consistency
Ethics in research
Informed consent, freedom from coercion, protection from harm, confidentiality and privacy, intentional deception and debriefing, risk/benefit assessment
The astonishing hypothesis
“You” can be explained by behavior of nerve cells
Perception uses both..
Bottom up and top down processing
Depth perception
3D representation from 2D image
Gestalt principles of perceptual organization
Simplicity, closure, continuity, similarity, proximity, common fate
Visual neglect
Patients can’t attend to left side of space
Stroop effect
Interference in reaction time
Reading the color of the text of a word (ie the word is black but is printed in red)
REM sleep
Rapid eye movement
High oxygen consumption, increased and irregular heart and respiration rates, muscle atonia, body temp drops, dreams are hallucinatory, emotional, narrative and with frequent movements
NREM sleep
Non-rapid eye movement
Reduced muscle tension, little movement, low temp and energy consumption, heart rate, respiration and kidney function slow down, increased digestive process, brain resting, neurons firing at lowest point, dreams are thought-like
Sleep deprivation
Loss of motivation Reduced body temp Aches and pains Attentional problems Less regulation of emotions Reduced executive control Impaired memory
Rosy view phenomenon
Remembering the past more positively than it was
DRM Paradigm
Falsely recalling things with categorization and association
Sleeper effect
Knowing something is false now but forgetting later on
Episodic memory
One’s own experiences
Semantic memory
Facts and general knowledge
Analogical reasoning
Identifying meaningful correspondences between situations to draw inferences from one situation to inform another
Phantom pain
Sensing amputated limb like it is still physically there
Capgras delusion
Person holds delusion that someone has been replaced by an imposter
Visual agnosia
Inability to recognize familiar objects
Phineas Gage
Iron rod struck through his head and damaged left frontal lobe which resulted in a personality change
Clive Wearing
Has both anterograde and retrograde amnesia
Frequently believes only recently waking up from a coma
Iconic memory lasts for
Less than one second
Echoic memory lasts for
2-3 seconds
Primary visual cortex
Part of cerebral cortex that processes visual information
Somatosensory and motor cortices
Control voluntary movements
Broca’s Aphasia
Damage to language control
Unable to form correct words
Transfer-Appropriate Processing
Memories are most efficiently and easily stored and retrieved when the processes match
Context-Dependent Learning
Improved recall of info when context present at encoding and retrieval are the same
Interference
Interaction of new and old information impairing memory
Hippocampus
Consolidation of short term memory to long term memory
Functional Fixedness
Bias that limits person using an object only in the way it’s traditionally used
