Term
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Definition
| The collection of mental processes and activities used in perceiving, remembering, thinking and understanding, and the act of using those processes. |
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Term
| Define cognitive science. |
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Definition
| A new term designating the cross-disciplinary study of cognition, typically includes psychology, linguistics, computer science and neuroscience. |
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Term
| Define cognitive psychology. |
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Definition
| An approach to psychology that emphasizes internal mental processes. |
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Term
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Definition
- Set up the first psychology laboratory in 1879 to study mental phenomenon
o Interested in conscious mental events
- Made extensive use of introspection |
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Term
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Definition
o The basic belief was that the human mind should be open to self-observation and that through intense self-inspection one could discover and identify the primary experiences out of which all thought was constructed
Problems with introspection
- Different results from different individuals
o Potential issues with individual difference unrelated to the basic phenomenon (eg. vocabulary)
o Very subjective
- Not objective & responses cannot be verified
o Unable to study anything that is not available to consciousness
- A lot of what we do, we don’t know why we do or how we do it |
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Term
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Definition
- John Watson
- Psychology should study only external, observable events
o Objective measures of behaviour
- Consciousness is neither a definite nor a usable concept (Watson, 1930)
- Radical behaviourists rejected the idea of study the mind or mental processes
- Known for their well defined, tight studies and methodology |
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Term
| What was the cognitive revolution? |
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Definition
- Growing dissatisfaction with ignoring the mind and mental processes
o Must focus on our understanding of a stimulus, not just the stimulus |
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Term
| What is the information processing approach? |
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Definition
| A particular approach to theorizing in which complex mental events, such as learning, remembering, and deciding, are understood as being built up out of a large number of discrete steps. These steps occur one by one, with each providing as its "output" the input to the next step in the sequence. |
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Term
| Name the four lobes and define what they are mainly responsible for. |
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Definition
Partial: Primary sensory projection area
Temporal: Memory
Occipital: Vision
Frontal: Decision making, organizing, planning |
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Term
| What is the corpus collosum? What function does it serve? |
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Definition
| The largest of the commissures linking the left and right cerebral hemispheres. |
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Term
| What are ERPs, CAT scans, PET scans and fMRIs? |
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Definition
ERPs (Event Related Potentials) tell us which areas of the brain are stimulated
- Electrical activity on the scalp
• Associated with different types of processing
Localization of activity / function, but no structural information
- CAT scans (or CT scans)
o Computerized axial tomography
o Series of x-rays taken at variety of angles then reconstructed in a computer to form an image
o Allows for the study of anatomy and structure, but not function
- PET scans
o Positron emission tomography
o Measures blood flow, usually via a radio active glucose tracer
o Measures brain activity over time (not instantaneous) – Big disadvantage
o Can see which areas of the brain are active during different processes.
fMRI
o Magnetic resonance imaging & functional magnetic resonance imaging
o Use of a giant magnet to measure fluctuations in magnetic fields
o fMRI measures rapid changes in blood and oxygen flow in brain regions (eg. BOLD fMRI)
o FMRI helps us determine “localization of function” |
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Term
| What does Localization of Function mean? |
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Definition
| The research endeavor of determining what specific job is performed by a particular region of the brain. |
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Term
| Who was H.M. and what was his condition? What is he so widely discussed in cognition? |
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Definition
• Lesioned the source of his seizures
• Other cognitive functions were relatively in tact
• Developed major amnesia
Reveals information about brain damage, and also normal functioning |
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Term
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Definition
• Expressive aphasia
• Disrupted production, agrammatical speech
• Understanding is not affected
• Can write notes |
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Term
| What is Wernnicke's aphasia? |
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Definition
• Receptive aphasia
• Difficulty understanding
• Speech is often a “word salad”
• Cannot write notes |
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Term
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Definition
o An extremely brief, temporary store for information coming in via the senses
o Often totally unaware of it |
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Term
| What is the visual persistence effect? |
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Definition
Visual light trails (sparkler trails)
- Your brain doesn't process the information fast enough and sees trails of visual stimuli. |
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Term
| What is the visual sensory store? |
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Definition
- Also called 'Iconic Memory'
o Sperling’s partial report technique
When information was briefly presented participants could see more items than they could report
Items “faded” before they could be reported
o Iconic store large, but items held very briefly |
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Term
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Definition
- Also called visual sensory store.
o Sperling’s partial report technique
When information was briefly presented participants could see more items than they could report
Items “faded” before they could be reported
o Iconic store large, but items held very briefly |
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Term
| What is Sperling’s partial report technique? |
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Definition
In Sperling's initial experiments in 1960, observers were presented with a tachistoscopic visual stimulus for a brief period of time (50 ms) consisting of either a 3x3 or 3x4 array of alphanumeric characters.
The partial report condition required participants to identify a subset of the characters from the visual display using cued recall. The cue was a tone which sounded at various time intervals (~50 ms) following the offset of the stimulus. The frequency of the tone (high, medium, or low) indicated which set of characters within the display were to be reported. Due to the fact that participants did not know which row would be cued for recall, performance in the partial report condition can be regarded as a random sample of an observer's memory for the entire display. This type of sampling revealed that immediately after stimulus offset, participants could recall most letters (9 out of 12 letters) in a given row suggesting that 75% of the entire visual display was accessible to memory. This is a dramatic increase in the hypothesized capacity of iconic memory derived from full-report trials. |
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Term
| What is the whole report technique? |
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Definition
In Sperling's initial experiments in 1960, observers were presented with a tachistoscopic visual stimulus for a brief period of time (50 ms) consisting of either a 3x3 or 3x4 array of alphanumeric characters.
The whole report condition required participants to recall as many elements from the original display in their proper spatial locations as possible. Participants were typically able to recall three to five characters from the twelve character display (~35%).[1] This suggests that whole report is limited by a memory system with a capacity of four-to-five items. |
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Term
| What is the auditory sensory store? |
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Definition
- Aka Echoic memory
- Echoic store is large, items held longer than the iconic store (although still brief store)
- Likely because auditory information is spread over time… need a slightly longer store
o These stores allow information to be held briefly before it is processed and recognized |
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Term
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Definition
- Aka Auditory sensory store
- Echoic store is large, items held longer than the iconic store (although still brief store)
Likely because auditory information spread over time… need a slightly longer store
o These stores allow information to be held briefly before it is processed and recognized |
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Term
| What is pattern recognition? |
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Definition
Identifying or categorizing objects in the environment
Can be visual, auditory, etc. |
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Term
| What are agnosia & visual agnosia? |
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Definition
- Agnosia: A loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells while the specific sense is not defective nor is there any significant memory loss
- Visual agnosia: the inability to recognize objects & use them appropriately |
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Term
| What are template matching theories? |
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Definition
- Identify patterns by comparing the patterns of neural excitation with patterns or “templates” stored in memory
- Perform a holistic match between stimuli and the representations in memory
o Eg. barcodes |
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Term
| What are feature comparison theories/feature detection theories? |
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Definition
o Examine the object’s features to determine what the object is
Break object into parts or features
Recognition based on processing features |
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Term
| What is the pandemonium model? |
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Definition
o One of the earliest feature models of Letter / word recognition
- Multiple levels of demons all shouting
Each level recognizes more complex features & feeds information to higher levels
The louder demons have the most evidence for what they are recognizing |
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Term
| What is the lexical decision task? |
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Definition
| A test in which participants are shown strings of letters and must indicate, as quickly as possible, whether each string of letters is a word in English or not. It is supposed that people perform this task by "looking up" these strings in their "mental dictionary". |
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Term
| What are visual search studies? |
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Definition
o It is easier to locate a target defined by a single feature
o There are detectors that tune into specific features |
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Term
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Definition
| A device that allows presentation of a stimuli for precisely-controlled amounts of time |
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Term
| What is a post-stimulus mask? |
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Definition
Letters or symbols presented after the stimulus, serves to disrupt any sensory memory
o Allows the researcher to determine how much the participant can discern in a brief presentation |
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Term
| What is the recognition threshold? |
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Definition
| The length of exposure to stimulus necessary for recognition |
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Term
| What is the word-frequency effect? |
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Definition
- Determines how easy/difficult a word is to detect
- More frequently encountered words detected more easily |
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Term
| What is repetition priming? |
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Definition
| - More recently viewed words easier to recognize, processing is more efficient the second time you are exposed to a stimulus |
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Term
| What is the word-superiority effect? |
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Definition
- Determines how easy/difficult a word is to detect
- More frequently encountered words detected more easily |
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Term
| What is the degree of well-formedness? |
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Definition
- Word-superiority effect only occurs if the letter appears within a context that obeys the rules of language
o Pseudo-words
o JPSRW vs. GLAKE |
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Term
| What are over-regularization errors? |
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Definition
o Tend to mis-read less common letter patterns as if they were more common patterns
o Misspelled words, partial words, or non-words read in way that brings them in line with normal spelling
Misread plumbor as plumber and not notice |
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Term
| What are feature nets (or networks)? |
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Definition
o Layered network of detectors
o First layer detects simple patterns or features, each subsequent layer detects more complex patterns
o Each detector has an activation level
o Activation level is increased when the detector receives input |
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Term
| What are detectors/nodes? |
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Definition
| A node within a processing network that fires primarily to a specific target contained within the incoming perceptual information. |
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Term
| What is baseline activation/resting activation? |
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Definition
| The detectors activation level prior to any inputs – the resting level |
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Term
| What are Bigram detectors? |
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Definition
| - Some letter combinations are more frequent than other, have higher baselines activation and require less activation to reach response threshold |
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Term
| What are 'bottom-up & top-down' processing models? |
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Definition
- Bottom-up Models: the processing of information begins with low-level information
o Data-driven
- Top-down Models: information and knowledge used to guide lower-level processes
o Conceptually-driven |
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Term
| What are data-driven & conceptually driven processing? |
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Definition
Data driven - bottom up processing.
Conceptually Driven - top down.
- Bottom-up Models: the processing of information begins with low-level information
o Data-driven
- Top-down Models: information and knowledge used to guide lower-level processes
o Conceptually-driven |
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Term
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Definition
- Parallel Distributed Processing Models
- Knowledge of spelling patterns “built into” the network
- But the net doesn’t “know” anything, the patterns are not explicitly stored anywhere
o Rule-like behaviour without explicitly storing the rules |
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Term
| What are local & distributed representations? |
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Definition
| - Local vs. distributed representation - everything about a specific topic is store in one place in the brain vs. things that are stored across multiple nodes or detectors that are connected. Contrasting theories. |
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Term
| What is are parallel & serial processing? |
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Definition
| A system in which many steps are going on at the same time (parallel). A system in which only one step happens at a time. |
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Term
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Definition
- Recognition by components
- Geons: basic building blocks of all objects
o We recognize characteristics of geons |
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Term
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Definition
| - Geons: basic visual building blocks of all objects |
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Term
| What is the restoration effect? |
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Definition
o Can delete sounds from recorded speech, replace them with noise
o Participants do not detect the omission report hearing the complete word plus the noise
- “Fills in” what ought to be there |
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Term
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Definition
Damage to Fusiform face area (FFA) (face detector neurons)
- Agnosia specific to faces, cannot recognize them. |
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Term
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Definition
- “Attention” refers to the allocation of resources
o The concentration of mental efforts on sensory or mental events |
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Term
| What is a shadowing task? |
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Definition
| - A task in which research participants are required to repeat back a verbalinput, word for word, as they hear it. |
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Term
| What is a dichotic listening task? |
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Definition
| A task in which participants hear two simultaneous stimuli-one presented in the left ear and the other in the right ear. Participants are usually told to pay attention to only one stimulus. |
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Term
| What are attended and unattended channels? |
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Definition
| In selective attention experiments, attended channels are the stimuli we are told to pay attention to, while the unattended channels are the ones we are told to ignore. |
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Term
| What is the cocktail party effect? |
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Definition
o First noted by Cherry
o The capturing of attention by an event in the unattended channel
- Often your name, but can be other interesting remarks as well |
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Term
| What is an attentional blink? |
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Definition
| Done under the RSVP technique (rapid serial visual presentation). Once a stimulus is shown, we cannot process another one if it is shown too quickly after, almost as though our attention is 'blinking'. |
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Term
| What is the RSVP technique? |
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Definition
| rapid serial visual presentation. Many visual stimuli are presented in quick succession. |
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Term
| What is negative priming? |
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Definition
| Refers to a slowed response identification time to a target stimulus that has been previously ignored. In previous trials of the experiment this target stimulus or probe [disambiguation needed] was a distractor stimulus. It is widely assumed negative priming occurs as a result of the selection that occurs in the first display |
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Term
| What are the filter theories of attention? |
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Definition
- Many early theories suggested we “filtered out” the unattended channel
o “selected” which channel to attend to
- A major point of debate was whether selection occurred early or late in processing
But simple filtering could not account for all the experimental data |
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Term
| What is inattentional blindness? |
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Definition
| Inattentional blindness, also known as perceptual blindness, is the phenomenon of not being able to perceive things that are in plain sight. It is caused by an absence of attention to the unseen object and is clear evidence of the importance of attention for perceiving. (the gorilla walking across the screen while we |
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Term
| What is change blindness? |
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Definition
Colour change card trick.
When we are oblivious to changes in visual stimuli when our attention is elsewhere. |
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Term
| What is a fixation point? |
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Definition
- Focus eyes on fixation point
- If cue (arrow) consistently, correctly guides attention to location of stimulus, get faster RTs
- But if cue is incorrect, it takes longer to redirect attention to new location and detect stimulus
• Even longer than with no cue
Experiment: Told that the stimuli would appear in the middle of the screen, but it was not always truthful. |
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Term
| What are the 2-part theories of attention? |
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Definition
1) Block the processing of distracters
o Consistent with previous research and theorizing
2) Promote the processing of desired stimuli
o Newer notion
o We perceive most easily & effectively when we are prepared for upcoming stimuli |
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Term
| What is selective priming? |
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Definition
| Exposure to a stimulus influences response to a later stimulus. It happens, for example, that if a person reads a list of words including the word table, and is later asked to complete a word starting with tab, the probability that they will answer table is greater than if not so primed. |
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Term
| What are spatial anticipations? |
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Definition
o Consistent vs. inconsistent cues
- Fixation point, when you are expecting a stimulus to appear in a certain region . |
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Term
| What are consistent & inconsistent cues? |
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Definition
| When sometimes the stimulus will appear where it was cued to appear and sometimes it does not. |
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Term
| What are high validity primes and low validity primes? |
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Definition
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Term
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Definition
- Warning or emergency signals designed to capture attention with rapidly changing & distinct stimuli
- As are many roadside signs and advertisements |
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Term
| What is divided attentions? |
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Definition
- Can “split” attention between multiple inputs/tasks
- Limited resources & “cognitive budget” |
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Term
| What is a cognitive budget? |
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Definition
| A way of thinking about attention. We only have so many resources and we can budget them; separate them among different tasks. |
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Term
| What are general-resources and task-specific resources? |
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Definition
o General-resources vs. task specific resources
- Revealed through divided attention tasks
• Experiments that test certain resources and then ask for the answer to use the same or different resources ie. verbal, verbal, or verbal, written. |
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Term
| What is automaticity and automatization? |
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Definition
- Automatized skills
- Automatic
- Require fewer resources
- Are Largely independent of intention
- Can go forward without awareness |
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Term
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Definition
| - When a colour is presented in words and the letters are in a different colour than the word, we have a hard time identifying either colour. |
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Term
| What is controlled processing? |
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Definition
Controlled Processing
- With Intention
- Are subject to introspection
- Use many resources
- Are often a slow, effortful process |
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Term
| What is Channel segregation? |
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Definition
In performing simultaneous tasks, one needs to keep track of which task elements belong with which task.
The task of keeping these elements separate, so that elements from one task do not intrude into the other task, is called channel segregation. |
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Term
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Definition
| When performing simultaneous tasks,when task elements overlap. For instance if you are talking on the phone and trying to write things down, and you write what they say to you instead of what you mean to write down. |
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Term
| What is Extinction and neglect? |
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Definition
- Exaggerated tendency to orient to one side (right or left) and not to attend to other side
• Often ignores one side of the visual field |
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Term
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Definition
| Attention deficient hyperactive disorder - A problem with inattentiveness, over-activity, impulsivity, or a combination. For these problems to be diagnosed as ADHD, they must be out of the normal range for a child's age and development. |
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Term
| What are Sustained attention response task / Vigilance task / Continuous performance tasks? |
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Definition
- Sustained Attention Response Task
- Vigilance or Continuous Performance Task
- Extremely taxing
- Often used to detect subtle attention deficits |
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Term
| What is a cancellation task? |
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Definition
- Can reveal variety of attention deficits, including visual neglect
- Can use visual or auditory stimuli
- The subject gets one or more digits s/he has to cross out from a list of numbers. The resulting score consists of the correctly crossed out numbers minus the incorrectly crossed out numbers. |
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Term
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Definition
| Injury to frontal lobes, anterograde and retrograde memory are severely damaged, only knows facts about himself |
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Term
| What are the three basic aspects to memory? |
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Definition
o Acquisition (taking information in)
- How are memories formed?
o Retention & storage
- How are memories saved?
o Retrieval
- How are memories accessed and remembered |
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Term
| What is the modal model of memory? |
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Definition
- Sensory stores
- Short-term store
- Long-term store
o Information moves through the system via a variety of mental processes and mechanisms (eg. attention & rehearsal) |
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Term
| What is short term memory / working memory? |
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Definition
o A store of information currently being used or to be used soon
- Aka “working memory” (WM)
o Instantly and easily accessed
o Limited capacity
- Seven plus or minus two |
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Term
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Definition
|
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Term
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Definition
A chunk is a quantity of information
- But not a fixed quantity
o You can increase the amount of information by putting more into each chunk
o C A N O F B E A N S
o = CAN OF BEANS
o Allows you to store the same number of chunks, but more information in total |
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Term
| How are chunking and clustering different? |
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Definition
- Chunking, you repackage it on the way in to short term memory – so 1 9 5 7, we remember it as 1957.
- Clustering is an output, information comes in and we organize it before we output it |
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Term
| What is the Digit Span Test / Simple Span Test? |
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Definition
| Tests short term memory. Memory span is the longest list of items that a person can repeat back in correct order immediately after presentation on 50% of all trials. Digit span test uses numbers instead of words. |
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Term
| What is the Reading Span test / Complex Span Test? |
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Definition
| The reading span task was the first instance of the family of complex span tasks, which differ from the traditional simple span tasks by adding a processing demand to the requirement to remember a list of items. In complex span tasks encoding of the memory items (e.g., words) alternates with brief processing episodes (e.g., reading sentences). For example, the operation span task combines verification of brief mathematical equations such as "2+6/2 = 5?" with memory for a word or a letter that follows immediately after each equation. |
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Term
| What is the Brown-Peterson task? |
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Definition
o 3 letter stimulus recalled after a delay
o Count backwards by 3s to prevent rehearsal
o The memory faded rapidly if not rehearsing
- Initially interpreted in favour or decay, time passes, you forget |
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Term
| What is Decay vs. interference and STM? |
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Definition
| Decay is time passes, you forget, but interference is when other things enter and 'take away' or 'replace' the original thought. |
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Term
| What is Retroactive interference? |
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Definition
| o New materials interferes with old, backwards in time (New postal code, forget the old) |
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Term
| What is proactive interference? |
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Definition
| o Older material interferes with new, forward in time (Memory card game, remembers from previous round) |
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Term
| What is the Release from PI? |
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Definition
| In order to release from proactive interference, you can change the nature of the stimulus |
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Term
| What is the serial position curve? |
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Definition
o Presented with a series of words, then asked to recall as many as possible
o Results in a U-shaped curve, people remember first and last items |
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Term
| What is the primacy effect? |
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Definition
| - Likely to recall the first few items |
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Term
| What is the Recency effect? |
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Definition
| - Likely to recall the last few items |
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Term
| What are Sound alike vs. look alike errors? |
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Definition
o “Sound alike” errors vs. “look alike” errors
- B, Z or D
- F is never recalled as E
- We made mistakes when the stimulus (letter) is presented orally
- Demonstrates the high resources devoted to vision |
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Term
| What is the Word length effect? |
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Definition
More likely to mistake
- Chad, Burma, Greece, Cuba, Malta
- Czechoslovakia, Somaliland, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia |
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Term
| What is the Baddeley & Hitch model? |
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Definition
Working Memory not a single entity, but a system
o Central Executive
- Multi-purpose processor
- Co-ordinates tasks
o 2 slave systems
- Rehearsal loop, phonological loop
- Information that is not required gets taken away from the central processor to free it up. |
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Term
| What is Long-term memory? |
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Definition
- Mental “reference” library
o Vast is size… perhaps limitless?
o Slower rate of forgetting
o Accessibility
- Must be searched; information not instantly accessible
o Most information lies dormant |
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Term
|
Definition
o Semantic memory
- Generalized world knowledge |
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Term
|
Definition
o Episodic memory
- Personally experienced; autobiographical |
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Term
| What is Procedural memory? |
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Definition
o Procedural memory
- How to do things (how to play piano)
o Consciousness & brain damage |
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Term
| What is Maintenance & elaborative rehearsal? |
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Definition
o Maintenance rehearsal
- Rate, mechanical process
- Recycling items through working memory
o Elaborative rehearsal (relational rehearsal)
- Meaning of the TBR items, relationship with other items
- More effortful, but promotes better recall |
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Term
| What is incidental learning? |
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Definition
o Learning in the absence of intention to learn
o Intention seems to influence strategy selection/type of rehearsal |
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Term
| Depth of processing / Level of processing? |
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Definition
- Shallow = superficial, surface details
- Deep = meaningful, semantic, elaborative
- Type of processing more important than intention to learn |
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Term
|
Definition
o Specifics techniques used to aid recall of material
o Often rely on organization & imagery |
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Term
| What are Elaboration coding mnemonics? |
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Definition
- Elaboration coding mnemonics
- Pegword mnemonics
- Method of loci – placement of objects |
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Term
| What is Reduction coding mnemonics? |
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Definition
o Reduction coding mnemonics
- Eg. ROYGBIV, HOMES, CANOE/OCEAN |
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Term
|
Definition
- Clustering
o Strong tendency to recall items in an organized manner
- Clustered into categories with free recall task
- Idiosyncractic clusters with material that appears unrelated |
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Term
| What is the Importance of understanding? |
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Definition
o Organization helps aid recall
o Optimal organization depends on understanding the material
o Recall of passages with & without title
- Title that clarifies story helps with recall |
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