A Flashcards
(38 cards)
Accessibility
The degree to which information can be retrieved from memory. A memory is said to be accessible if it retrievable; memories that are not currently retrievable are said to have become inaccessible.
Action slips
Unintended, often automatic, actions that are inappropriate for the current situation.
Actor/Agent
In the case of the grammar approach, the person who performs some action in a sentence is the agent, such as Bill in “Bill hit the ball with a bat.”
Ad hoc categories
Categories that people can generate on the fly the have all of the qualities of more traditional categories, but which are based on situational circumstances.
Advantage of clause recency
The speedup of RT to information in the most recently processed clause.
Advantage of first mention
The speedup of RT to information mentioned in the first sentence.
Agnosia
A disruption in the ability to recognise objects.
Agraphia
A disruption in the ability to write, caused by a brain disorder or injury.
Alexia
A disruption in the ability to read or recognise printed letters or words, caused by a brain disorder or injury.
Algorithm
A specific rule or solution procedure that is certain to yield the correct answer if followed correctly (contrasts with heuristic).
Ambiguous
Having more than one meaning, said both of words (e.g. bank) and sentences (e.g. They are eating apples.)
Amnesia
Memory loss caused by brain damage or injury. Retrograde amnesia is loss of memory for information before the damage, anterograde amnesia is loss of memory for information after the damage.
Analogy
A relationship between two similar systems, problems, etc; a heuristic is which a problem is solved by finding an analogy to a similar problem.
Anaphoric reference
The act of using a pronoun or possessive (or synonym) to refer back to a previously mentioned concept.
Anomia/Anomic aphasia
A disruption of word finding or retrieval, caused by brain disorder or injury.
Antecedent (in conditional reasoning)
The ‘if’ clause in the standard conditional reasoning (‘if-then’) tasks. In the statement ‘If it rains, then the picnic will be cancelled.’ the antecedent is ‘if it rains’.
Antecedent (in language)
The concept in which a later word refers; for example, ‘he’ refers to the antecedent Bill in ‘Bill said he was tired’.
Anterograde amnesia
Disruption in memory for events following the brain damage, usually a disruption in the storage of new information after brain damage.
Aphasia
A loss of some or all of previously intact language skills, caused by brain disorder or damage.
Apperceptive agnosia
A form of agnosia in which individual features cannot be integrated into a whole percept or pattern; a basic disruption in perceiving patterns.
Arbitrariness
One of Hockett’s (1960) linguistic universals, that the connections between linguistic units (sounds, words) and the concepts or meanings referred to by those units are entirely arbitrary; for example, it is arbitrary that we refer to a table by the linguistic unit ‘table’.
Argument
In the proposition the arguments are the ordered concepts the specify the meaning of the proposition. The arguments of the relation ‘HIT’ in the sentence ‘Bill hit the ball yesterday’ are ‘BILL’ as the agent, ‘BALL’ as the object, and ‘YESTERDAY’ as the time.
Articulatory loop
The part of the phonological loop involved in the active refreshing of information in the phonological store.
Articulatory suppression effect
The finding that people have poorer memory for a set of words if they are asked to say something while they are trying to remember.
