Cognitive Approach Key Terms 1 Flashcards
Cognition
The mental action/process of acquiring knowledge & understanding through thoughts, experience & the senses
Memory
A basic cognitive process used to store, encode & retrieve info
Capacity
How much info can be stored; an individual’s potential to accomplish a particular creative, intellectual or physical task
Retrograde Amnesia
Loss of memory before a specified time/event
* Often caused by brain injury
Anterograde Amnesia
When you can’t form new memories after a specified time/event
Schema
Stable, deeply rooted mental representations (MR) that organize our knowledge, beliefs & expectations
* derived from prior experience & knowledge
* helps us to predict what to expect based on what has happened before
* used to organize our knowledge, assist recall & guide our behaviour
* helps us to make sense of current experiences
Reconstructive Memory
Theory that when memories are accessed, they are not retrieved as a single, whole memory, but rather as a collection of independent memories put together. It is in this “reconstructive process” that distortions occur.
* suggests that in the absence of all info, we fill in the gaps to make more sense of what happened
* based on the idea that memories are not saved as complete, coherent wholes
* retrieval of memory influenced by our perception, beliefs, cultural factors & past experiences in which we are recalling the info
* schemas influence what we encode & retrieve from memory
Special Mechanism Hypothesis
Argues for a special biological mechanism that, when triggered by an event exceeding critical levels of surprise, creates a flashbulb memory
Thinking
Process of using knowledge & info to make plans & to interpret/predict the world in general. Diff. components of thinking include problem-solving, creativity, reasoning & decision-making
Duration
Period of time info can last in one’s memory stores
Assimilation
Process of taking in new info into our previously existing schema
Serial reproduction
Where participant A (PA) reads a story & reproduces it to PB who then reproduces it to PC & so on until 6~7 reproductions have been created →
multiple ppl are asked to recall the story as they heard/remembered it from when it was told to them
Repeated Reproduction
Participant learns & recalls the material repeatedly over various testing occasions
Rote-rehearsal
Practicing smth over & over again
Importance-Driven Model
The critical role of the amygdala in generating emotional arousal in response to an event, meaning that we tend to remember events depending upon their personal significance to us
