Final Exam Study Term Flashcards
“Take the Best” Heuristic
given two alternatives, go with the one that is preferred by (a) searching through cues in order of validity, (b) stopping the search as soon as a cue discriminates, and (c) choosing the one this cue favours.
Absentmindedness
everyday memory failures in remembering information, and intended activities, probably caused by insufficient attention or superficial, automatic processing during encoding
algorithm
is a specific solution procedure, often detailed and complex, that is guaranteed to furnish the correct answer if it is followed correctly; for example, a formula
analogies
a relationship between two similar situations, problems, or concepts.
apperceptive agnosia
A disruption in perceiving patterns. People with apperceptive agnosia cannot fill in the missing contours to perceive the whole form or pattern.
associative agnosia
the person is not able to construct a mental percept; he or she can combine the perceived features into a whole pattern, but cannot associate the pattern with the meaning, with stored knowledge about its identity.
associative interference
In associative interference conditions, knowledge is paired with one associate, and then re-paired with a different associate. For example, in locating one’s keys, one may need to differentiate where they were today (the pair keys–pocket) versus yesterday (keys–coffee table)
availability heuristic
in this heuristic we estimate the likelihood of events based on how easily examples come to mind. “ease of retrieval” is what the term availability means here.
Estimates are influenced by the ease with which the relevant examples can be remembered.
bias
Bias is a disproportionate weight in favor of or against an idea or thing, usually in a way that is closed-minded, prejudicial, or unfair. Biases can be innate or learned. People may develop biases for or against an individual, a group, or a belief.
blocking
“blocking out” distracting information. Eg. cocktail party effect, blocking out other conversations.
Capgras Syndrome
Capgras syndrome (CS), or delusion of doubles, is a delusional misidentification syndrome. It is a syndrome characterized by a false belief that an identical duplicate has replaced someone significant to the patient. In CS, the imposter can also replace an inanimate object or an animal.
change blindness
our failure to notice changes in visual stimuli when those changes occur during a saccade
cocktail party effect
The cocktail party effect refers to the phenomenon wherein the brain focuses a person’s attention on a particular stimulus, usually auditory. This focus excludes a range of other stimuli from conscious awareness, as when a partygoer follows a single conversation in a noisy room
cognition
Cognition is the “mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses
conceptually driven processing (top down)
when existing context or knowledge influences earlier or simpler forms of mental processes.
conditional reasoning
involves a logical determination of where the evidence supports, refutes, or is irrelevant to he stated if-then relationship.
conjunction fallacy
The conjunction fallacy explores how individuals commonly violate a basic probability rule by estimating probability of conjunction of two statements to be more probable than the probability they assign to at least one of its constituent statements.
conjunction search
looking for a specific combination of two features
consolidation
makes memories more and more permanent over time
context dependent learning
Context-dependent memory refers to the phenomenon where the context in which information was learned enhances the recall of that information. In other words, it’s easier to remember something when you’re in the same environment or situation in which you first learned it.
controlled attention
refers to deliberate, voluntary allocation of mental effort or concentration. You decide to pay attention to this stimulus and ignore others, and paying attention this way involves effort.
critical lure
a word that was highly related to the other words in the list but which never actually appeared.
data driven processing (bottoms up)
processing is driven by the stimulus pattern, the incoming data (environment)
Decay
forgetting caused by simply the passage of the time.
declarative memory
long term memory knowledge that is retrieved and reflected on consciously. Two types of declarative memory: semantic and episodic memory
distributed practice
study time is spread out over many, shorter sessions.
divided attention
sharing our attention capacity across more than one source of information at a time, and how much information are we picking up from the several sources
DRM procedure
is a false memory paradigm in which subjects are presented with lists of semantically related words (e.g., nurse, hospital, etc.) at encoding. After a delay, subjects are asked to recall or recognize these words
Dual coding
words that denote concrete objects, as opposed to abstract words, can be encoded into memory twice, once in terms of their verbal attributes and once in terms of their imaginal attributes. For example, the word book enjoys the advantage in memory because it can be recorded as an image and as a word.
Einstellung
“approach” or “orientation”
encoding specificity
Each item is encoded into a richer memory representation that includes the context it was in during encoding.
Exemplar Theory
assumes that when people think about categories, they mentally take into account each experience, instance or example, of the encounters they have had with members of that category.
Explicit memory
long term memory knowledge that is retrieved and reflected on consciously.
facilitation of return
people returning to a previously fixated location
false memory
memory of something that did not happen
family resemblance
there is a set of features that many or most of the category members have, although all features may not be present in all members
feature detection
a very simple visual element that can appear in combination with other features across a variety of patterns
feature search
the search for a simple feature
Filtering
the mental process of eliminating those distractions
forgetting curve
Formulated by Ebbinghaus. Shows the reduction in savings score across increasing retention intervals.
Framing
The framing effect is a cognitive bias in which people decide between options based on whether the options are presented with positive or negative connotations.
free recall
recalling the items in a list in any order
functional fixedness
is the tendency to use objects and concepts in the problem environmental only their customary and usual way.
Gambler’s fallacy
occurs when an individual incorrectly believes that a certain random event is less likely or more likely to happen based on the outcome of a previous event or series of events.
Gestalt Principles
These principles show that humans tend to perceive and deal with integrated, cohesive wholes. eg. closure, good continuation, template theory, proximity, figure grounding
Graded membership
Members vary in how good examples of that category are. For example, the category birds, what makes a creature a bird, some birds are “better” than others.
