PSYC 105 Final Flashcards
(243 cards)
1
Q
What is cognitive psychology
A
Study of the mind, specifically mental processes
2
Q
Monism
A
The mind and the body are the same entity. Some believe only the mind exists and some only the body
3
Q
Dualism
A
Mind and body are separate entities
4
Q
Introspection
A
Earliest popular way to study the mind; looking within and recording one’s own mental processes and experiences; still can’t study unconscious thought
5
Q
Behaviorism
A
Studying observable behaviors and stimuli, how does behavior change in response to stimuli; But it makes the brain look like a “black box” with no mental processes
6
Q
Transcendental method
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Inference of behavior is the best explanation for what is happening in the mind
7
Q
The scientific method
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The systematic and iterative process of hypothesizing, predicting, and observing phenomenon in order to generate knowledge
8
Q
Constructs
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Ideas we care about that can’t be observed directly. eg: happiness (broad idea)
9
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Variables
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Things we measure/manipulate that indirectly reflects constructs
10
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Independent variable
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The variable that researchers manipulate or assign to the participants, the hypothesized cause of the effects on the dependent variable
11
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Dependent variable
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The variable that researchers measure, the outcome of interest
12
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Behavioral data
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Measuring performance, eg: accuracy, response time
13
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Biological data
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Neuroimaging, neurological damage. Understanding what biological structures are necessary for performing a task
14
Q
Comparing different populations
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Do different groups of people behave in the same way?
15
Q
3 functions of the brain
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Creating a sensory reality; integrating information (making decisions); producing a motor output (responding to environment)
16
Q
Frontal lobe
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Motor, executive function (goal directed behavior)
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Parietal lobe
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Somatosensory, spatial information
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Temporal lobe
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auditory processing, emotions, language
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Occipital lobe
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Visual processing
20
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Thalamus
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Relay station for sensory information
21
Q
Hypothalmus
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Controls motivated behaviors like eating, drinking, and sexual activity
22
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Amygdala
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Emotional processing
23
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Hippocampus
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Learning and memory
24
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Projection
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Certain cortical areas map onto certain parts of the body; size correlates to precision and acuity
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Neuroplasticity
The brain's ability to change its structure, functions, or connections; Neuroplasticity enable cortical remapping (adjacent body part can take over)
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Apraxia
Unable to move certain body parts
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Agnosia
Inability to identify objects
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Unilateral neglect syndrome
Can't see/ignoring half the visual world
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Aphasia
Inability to speak/communicate, language issue
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Contralateral organization
Many neural pathways are crossed over; sensations from the right side of the body correlate to the left hemisphere and sensations from the left correlate tot he right hemisphere
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Lateralization
The concept that each hemisphere is associated with specialized functions
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Left hemisphere
Language and logical reasoning
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Right hemisphere
Spatial tasks
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Corpus callosum
Helps with communication between hemispheres; when severed leads to split brain patients
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Sensation
The stimulation of sensory receptor cells, which is converted to neural impulses; the physiological basis of perception
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Perception
The process by which the brain selects, organizes and interprets the sensations
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Photoreceptors: Rods
Sensitive to low levels of light, lower acuity, color-blind
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Photoreceptors: Cones
Primarily in the FOVEA, Cannot function in low light, higher acuity, color-sensitive
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Blind spot
Area of the retina where the optic nerve is; Both eyes fill in for the other, brain also fills in information
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Why do dim stars in the night sky fade when you look at them?
Because there are no rods in the fovea; it's dim and we are highly focused on the star so we have trouble seeing it
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Receptive field
The size and shape of the area in the visual field to which the ganglion cell responds to. The more similar to a 'preferred' stimulus the more often the cell fires
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Lateral inhibition
Stimulated cells inhibit the activity of neighboring cells; increases acuity by enhancing contrasts; helps us see edges better
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Bipolar cells
Enhance the contrast ratio for edge detection (lateral inhibition) and send signal to the ganglion cells
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Akinetopsia
Inability to perceive motion
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Parallel processing
Specialized regions are activated simultaneously; different areas have different purposes and work parallel to each other to help us perceive things
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What pathway
Pathway connecting the occipital lobe and inferotemporal cortex (temporal lobe); Aids in identification of visual objects
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Where pathway
Pathway connecting the occipital lobe and posterior parietal cortex (parietal lobe); Aids in perception of an object's location
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Associative agnosia
Can perceive entire object and copy but cannot name it; damage to what pathway; difficulty linking perceived object to stored knowledge
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Apperceptive agnosia
Cannot copy from model but can draw from memory; damage to where pathway; Difficulty integrating features into a meaningful whole
50
Bottom-up processing
Processing sensory information, assembling, and integrating it; data-driven
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Top-down processing
Using prior knowledge (expectations) to interpret sensory info; concept-driven
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Gestalt psychologists on perception
The perceptual whole is often different than the sum of its parts; similarity, proximity, good continuation, closure, simplicity
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Binocular disparity
The image of the same object falls on different regions of the retina for left vs. right eye, the disparity gets encoded as *depth*; greater the disparity, the closer the object
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Convergence
The inward turning of eyes to focus on near objects
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Perceptual constancy
Tendency to perceive constant object properties even though sensory info changes when viewing circumstances change
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Visual illusions (brightness and color)
Our interpretation is affected by experience with light and shadow
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Takeaway from illusions
Demonstrate how good we are at interpreting ambiguous sensory input, NOT how bad we are at perceiving our surroundings; top-down processing!!!
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Feature nets
Each detector has an activation level, and it produces signal when the response threshold is met
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Priming
A detector may take less stimulation to produce a signal due to frequency and recency
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Recognition errors
Our input is often ambiguous and partial; more primed units are likely to fire
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The Mcclelland and Rumelhart model
Information flows bottom-up, top-down, and within the same level; there are excitatory and inhibitory connections
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Recognition by components
Feature net for 3D objects; Geons (parts of object) form objects like how letters form words; viewpoint independent- understanding structure from its part
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Viewpoint-dependent recogntion
Like a feature net for views stored in memory from different angles; eg- motorcycle
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Face inversion effect
Less sensitive to features changes when upside down
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Composite face effect
Facial features are harder to detect in context than in isolation; faces are always processed as whole configurations
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Multimodal perception
Integrating sensory signals from different modalities to form a unified reality
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McGurk effect
Conflicting visual and auditory signals mutually influence our perception
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Cross-modal perception
The influence between the different sensory modalities; nuanced differences between sounds and events may be learned through experience
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Attention
Mechanisms that select select relevant perceptual input and reject irrelevant input
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Selective attention
Tasks that require attending to one stimulus and ignore another; informs us about the process of selection and what happens to the unattended stimuli
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Divided attention
Tasks that require attending to all stimuli; informs us about processing limits and attentional capacity
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Inattentional blindness
The failure to see a prominent stimulus, even if one is staring right at it; Attention is focused elsewhere
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Change blindness
The inability to detect change in a scene, despite looking at it directly; either visual or gradual
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Dichotic listening task
Different audio inputs presented in each ear of headphones; Made to pay attention to the attended channel
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Unattended channel in the dichotic listening task
Unlikely to remember semantic information, but may still be aware of physical attributes or potentially meaningful information (eg: changes in the audio)
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Cocktail party effect
The ability to focus on one conversation and tune out other conversations in the background; BUT exception when you hear personally relevant information
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Early selection model
Selection is based on physical characteristics; Failure to perceive; unattended stimuli receive less processing than unattended stimuli
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Late selection model
Selection based on semantic content; failure to remember; some processing happened but irrelevant stimuli still made it to brain
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Attenuation model
Attended information is enhanced, unattended is reduced, but both ARE STILL PROCESSED
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Priming
A lower response threshold (the lowest point at which a particular stimulus will cause a response) leads to easier/faster recognition; especially frequency or recency of stimuli
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Expectation based priming
What we use to selectively attend, effortful; Top-down activation of detectors you are expecting to use
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Stimulus-driven priming
Requires no effort/cognitive resources; Bottom-up activation of detectors based on features in the stimulus
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Posner task
faster to respond to expected arrow cue; expectation based priming (top-down) can be helpful but wrong orientation/misguiding has a cost
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Attention as a spotlight
The movement of the 'beam' refers to the movement of *attention* not the movement of eyes; context affects voluntary eye movements
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Endogenous attention
Consciously choose what we want to attend; voluntary/top-down attention
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Exogenous attention
An external stimulus seizes your attention; involuntary/bottom-up attention
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Is attention to object-based or location-based?
Face value = location-based; ACTUALLY BOTH
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Binding problem
Parallel processing happens simultaneously, ATTENTION is the glue that combines the dorsal and ventral stream to perceive a single unified object
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Feature search
Automatic and parallel; things "pop out"
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Conjunction search
Effortful and serial; usually on by one, longer time to check more features
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Feature integration theory
pre-attentive stage and focused attention stage
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Pre-attentive stage
Features separated, parallel and automatic processing, separate features pop out
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Focused attention stage
Features combined, serial processing (attention) to bind features together
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cognitive budget
Divided attention will fail if the combination of tasks exceeds our limited mental resources
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Generality of resources
A single pool of resources needs to be divided among multiple concurrent tasks
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Domain-specificity of resources
Different modalities have different pools of resources, similar tasks compete for the same resources
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Response selector resources
Required for selecting and initiating responses
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Executive control resources
Setting goals and priorities, avoid conflict among competing habits/responses (eg: distraction)
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Frontal lobe lesions
Deficits in executive control, make preservation errors (same response repeatedly when task requires change in response)
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Goal neglect
Disorganized thinking/performance, doing things randomly without planning (rey osterrieth figure)
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Task similarity
It is easier to do dissimilar tasks than similar tasks
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Automaticity
Tasks that are well-practiced and require little to no executive control
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Strop interference task
Say only the color of the word, not the written color
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The modal model of memory
Acquisition, storage, and retrieval
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Sensory memory
A brief store of raw sensory information; modality specific- iconic (visual) memory is the shortest
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Working memory (originally STM)
Active manipulation of information entering the brain
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Serial position effects
Recall likelihood is influences by the item's serial position (order); WM-recency effect, LTM- Primacy effect
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Working memory capacity
~ 4 chunks
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Chunking
Grouping seemingly random items into meaningful units
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Operation span
Measures the capacity when WM is "working, highlights the active nature of WM
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WM components: Central executive
Direct attention and resources
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WM components: Episodic buffer
Organize information into a chronological sequence, narrative/event
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WM components: Visuospatial sketchpad
Planning visual and spatial tasks
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WM components: Phonological loop
Auditory storage and articulatory processing ("inner voice")
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Maintenance rehearsal
Repeating information in a rote mechanical way
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Elaborative rehearsal
Thinking about meaning, relating items to each other or existing knowledge; more connections, easier to retrieve
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Intentional learning
Deliberate, with expectation to be tested
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Incidental learning
Learning in the absence of an intention to learn
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Explicit memory
Conscious, can be tested with "direct tests"
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Implicit Memory
Can be tested by indirect tests
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Mnemonics
Associating a well-known structure or sequence with a less well-known one; often rely on mental imagery, may not lead to better understanding and learning
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Retrieval paths
Connections between new memory with existing memory; only useful if you can access them
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Spreading activation
activation spreads to nearby nodes, decreasing in strength with distance from the original node; stronger when association is closer
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Why do retrieval cues help us remember?
Having multiple cues = receiving activation from multiple sources -> increases the chance that a node will reach threshold
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Context reinstatement
Mentally recreating the context
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Encoding specificity principle
Materials are better recognized as familiar later if they appear in, or are cued by a similar context
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Testing effect
Testing yourself is better for long-term memory retention; re study is good on the short-term
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Memory is reconstructive
We often remember the *gist* of our experiences, use the gist to reactivate nodes and connections from original memory
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Intrusion errors
Falsely recalling something that was not present in encoding; prior knowledge or other connection cause false recollections
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Schematic knowledgable
Remember what is typical or frequent of a situation, built up on prior experiences
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Misinformation effect
Our memory is susceptible to "contamination" by external sources
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Confidence and accuracy
Confidence can be altered without changing the memory itself
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Flashbulb memories
A special kind of episodic memory that we recall in great, vivid details; the involvement of amygdala in encoding and retrieval; vividness is often mistaken accuracy
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Forgetting: Decay theory
memories fade or erode over time
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Forgetting: Interference theory
The recall of some info affects the recall of other info
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Proactive inference
Old affects new
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Retroactive interference
New affects old
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Forgetting: Retrieval failure
Memory is intact, but temporarily unable to access
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Clive Wearing
Both retrograde and anterograde amnesia
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Damage to amygdala
Little implicit memory (fear response), intact explicit memory
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Damage to hippocampus
Little explicit memory, normal fear response
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Concept
Mental representation used for a variety of cognitive functions
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Categorization
The process by which things (like concepts) are placed into groups called categories
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Definitional approach
Determine category membership based on whether the object meets the definition of a category; too rigid, not all members of everyday categories have the same defining features
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Probability approach
The more characteristic features an object has the more likely we are to believe it likely part of the category
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Family resemblance
Category members may not be defined, but rather resemble one another
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Prototype approach to categorization
An abstract representation of the "typical" member of a category; an average of category members encountered in the past; fuzzy boundaries
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High prototypicality
Category member closely resembles category type; the "typical member"
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Low prototypicality
Category member does not closely resemble category prototype
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Typicality effect
Prototypical objects are processed preferentially; highly prototypical objects are judged as the category faster
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Naming effect
Prototypical objects are named first
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Exemplar approach to categorization
Concept is represented my multiple exemplars (rather than a single prototype); representation is not abstract like prototype view; easily takes into account atypical cases
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Global level
General category (eg: furniture)
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Basic level
Somewhat specific category (eg: table, chair); the most special hierarchical category, quicker to identify and learned first
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Specific/subordinate level
Very specific category (eg: kitchen table, dining table)
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Inductive inference
The process of making observations and applying those observations by generalization to a different problem. Therefore one infers from a special case to the general principle
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Bayesian inference: Posterior
How probable is the hypothesis given the evidence?; overall 1 is a better hypothesis than 2 or 3
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Bayesian inference: likelihood
How probable is the evidence given that our hypothesis is true?; 1 and 2 are more likely to explain the data than 3
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Bayesian inference: prior
How probable was our hypothesis before observing the evidence?; 1 and 3 are more common than 2
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Core knowledge
The initial seeds of knowledge get learning started; early concepts of how the world works
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Theory of mind
Babies are tying ideas of the world together, internally building their own theories
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Phonemes
Smallest unit of sound
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Phonology
How sounds connect to make words
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Morphemes
Smallest unit of meaning
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Morphology
How morphemes are combined to make up words
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Lexicon
Representations of words, "mental dictionary" of all the info we know about a word
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Syntax
Rules governing how words are combine to form sentences
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Semantics
Literal meaning of words/sentences)
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Pragmatics
Meaning in context
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Which of the following is the best description of the sentence: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"?
It is semantically non-sensical in english
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Arbitrariness
Abstract symbols determined by convention, no inherent relations between sounds and meanings
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Displacement
Can talk about things and ideas not in the "here and now"
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Duality of patterning
Combinations of otherwise meaningless units are meaningful; separate = no sense, together = meaningful
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Productivity
Speakers can create novel utterances they have never heard before, can create an infinite set of meanings with a finite set of units
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Reflexiveness
Can use the language to talk about language itself
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Recursion
Embedding structures within structures; hierarchical and potentially infinite
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Language acquisition device
Internal (born with), general set of rules and constraints that are shared by all human languages (nativism)
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Poverty of stimulus
Children can produce novel structures and learn based on limited and imperfect input
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Linguistic determinism (stronger version)
Language limits/determines thoughts; no word for idea/concept = hard to solidify in brain
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Linguistic relatively (milder version)
Language affects perception (but doesn't determine it)
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Egocentric frame of reference
In relation to one's own position; common in english
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Allocentric frame of reference
Independent of viewer's pov, usually in relation to landmarks (uphill vs downhill, to the north)
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Codability
Higher agreeability on the labels, usually shorter in length, easier for speakers to come up with; better recognition memory for more codable color
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Categorical perception
The perception of distinct categories when thee is a gradual change in a continuum; Distinguishing within category items is harder and takes longer than between-category items
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Word spurt
Around 18 months old children rapidly learn words at an exponential rate
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How do children learn words
Look and name
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Referential ambiguity
When learning new words with look and name is it talking about the object itself or its attributes?
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Solutions to Referential ambiguity: Whole object
The label refers to the object rather than its parts (seen earlier in life)
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Solutions to Referential ambiguity: mutual exclusivity
New word is probably a label for an object that does not already have a label
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Solutions to Referential ambiguity: Taxonomic restraint
New word refers to a basic category rather than a theme
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Solutions to Referential ambiguity: syntactic bootstrapping
Using the syntactic structure (grammar) to get the meaning; eg- this is a bif (noun/object)
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Time course for learning grammar
U-shaped development; specific instances of grammar to overregularization of rules (using rules when they don't apply to word like goed, wented), then gradually learning the exceptions/rules and improving
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Critical period hypothesis
The process of lateralization (language development in left brain) develops rapids between age 2 and 5, then slows down, being complete by puberty; the period of maturation
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Speech mitigation
Slicing of continuous speech sounds into appropriate segments
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Coarticulation (related to speech mitigation)
A sound may be affected by features of adjacent sounds
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Voice onset time (VOT)
The timepoint at which the vocal cord starts to vibrate; < 30 ms makes a p sound and < 30 ms makes a b sound; harder to discriminate sounds as we get close to VOT
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Phoneme restoration effect
The effect of context on speech process; use semantic and syntactic information to "fill in the gaps"; more noticeable if sound is replaced with silence
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Lexical ambiguity
Eg: "children's stool good for use in garden" - what type of stool?
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Selective access model
One meaning activated at a time; check serially in order of meaning frequencies until one fits
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Multiple access model
All meanings activated simultaneously; all activated and make decision when context permits
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Parsing
Computing the syntactic structure of a sentence; knowing the syntactic category, how units combine to make bigger units. Ambiguity exists on a syntactic level as well
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Garden path sentence
Sentence leads you to one interpretation which turns out to be wrong; eg- while sarah was dressing he baby played on the floor
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Late closure strategy
Attach incoming words to current phrase, rather than creating a new one
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Grammatically effect
Errors often within the same grammatical class (nouns for nouns and verbs for verbs); eg- I’m stuttering psycholinguistics. vs. I’m studying psycholinguistics
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Consonant-vowel rule
Errors occur within the same phonological class (consonants for consonants; vowels for vowels); eg- rule of rum vs. rule of thumb
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Lexical bias effect
Errors that make up real words are more likely than non-word errors; eg- Deep cot -> Keep dot more likely than Deed Cop -> Keed Dop
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tip-of-the-tongue
Failure to retrieve a word, often coupled with partial recall and the feeling that successful retrieval is imminent -> meaning and grammar can be accessed separately from pronunciation
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Structural priming
Exposure to one structure increases the likelihood of producing that structure again, even when the semantic content has changed -> sentence frames can be planned independently of words (eg- active vs passive voice)
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Broca's aphasia
Halting speech, disordered syntax, comprehension intact
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Wernicke's aphasia
Fluent speech, adequate syntax, comprehension not intact
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Self-monitoring
Speech errors are generally rare; Although our production system may be very efficient and accurate, there must be some monitoring mechanism that helps us detect and prevent errors before they are uttered; taboo errors (with swear/inappropriate words) are less common
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Judgement
The mental process through which people draw conclusions from the evidence they encounter
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Prescriptive theory of decision making
How to help people make better decisions
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Descriptive theory of decision making
How people actually make decisions; e.g., the use of heuristics (mental shortcuts)
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Normative theory of decision making
The supposedly optimal decision based on a set of principles
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Dual process model: system 1
Intuitive, automatic, immediate, rely on heuristics
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Dual process model: system 2
Analytical, controlled, cognitively demanding, more likely to be correct
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Heuristics
Mental shortcuts, constructed based on prior experience to save time and energy; BUT they are not guaranteed to be correct; rely on attribute substitution
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attribute substitution
using one attribute (e.g., fluency or similarity) to make a judgment about another attribute (e.g., frequency or probability)
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Availability heuristic
Making a judgment based on how easily something can be recalled, the easier it is for something to comes to mind, the more frequent/likely/significant it is assumed to be; eg- fluency effects
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Representativeness heuristic
the assumption that resemblance to the prototype reflects probability
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Assumption of homogeneity
an expectation that each individual is representative of the category overall
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Base rate
Actual rate of how common something is
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Base rate neglect
The tendency to ignore the “prior probability” of
an event
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Conjunction fallacy
An inference that the set of two or more conclusions is more likely than any single member of that set
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Gambler's fallacy
failure to consider the independence of probabilistic events; chance viewed as a “self-correcting” process
225
Anchoring and adjustment
the tendency to anchor estimate on first salient number then adjust up or down from there
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Utility
The importance/value of each outcome
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Probability
How likely each outcome is
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Utility theory
Assumes that humans are rational actions who choose the option that provides the most utility; Utility can be thought of as the “expected value” of a choice; Expected value = probability of an outcome x value of the outcome
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Prospect theory
People hate losing more than they like winning; The marginal impact of a change in value diminishes with the distance from a relevant reference point
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framing effects
People tend to interpret a choice based on the given frame of reference
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Frequencies vs probabilities
People are more likely to accept the test in the probability condition (eg- reduce chance of death by 1/3 over reduce 3 in 1000)
232
Problem solving
The process by which one determines the steps needed to reach a goal
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Components of a problem: Initial State
Resources you currently have
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Components of a problem: Goal state
End product
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Components of a problem: Operates
A set of operations or actions taken to reach the goal state
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Components of a problem: Constraints
Rules that cannot be violated
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Problem space
The total set of possible moves within the constraints of the problem
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Navigating the problem space: Algorithm
A procedure that inspects every possible move in the space by applying operations over and over again until goal state is reached; slow but guarantees a solution
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Problem solving heuristics: Hill-climbing strategy
At each step in solving a problem, choose the option that moves you in the
direction of your goal; But does not work for problems that require you to move away from the goal for some steps.
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Problem solving heuristics: Means-end analysis
Divide the problem into smaller problems then solve in any order
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Problem solving heuristics: Mean-end analysis
Goal divided into many sub-goals
