Cognitive Psychology Basics
The main focus of cognitive psychology.
What is understanding mental processes such as perception, memory, and reasoning?
The person considered the father of cognitive psychology.
Who is Ulric Neisser?
The term for organizing and interpreting sensory information.
What is perception?
The process by which we identify objects visually.
What is object recognition?
The part of the ear that translates sound waves into neural signals.
What is the cochlea?
What major event in the 1950s marked the rise of cognitive psychology?
The cognitive revolution.
Name one early cognitive psychologist who contributed to memory research.
Hermann Ebbinghaus
What is the difference between bottom-up and top-down processing?
Bottom-up processing is data-driven, while top-down processing is guided by prior knowledge.
What theory explains how we match visual input to stored templates?
Template-matching theory
What is the term for recognizing a tune even when played in a different key?
Transposition
A commonly used research method to study cognitive processes.
What is the experimental method?
A historical limitation of behaviorism that led to the cognitive revolution.
What is its inability to explain complex mental processes like language?
What is focusing on specific stimuli while ignoring others to manage information overload?
The importance of selective attention.
What is perceiving similar objects as part of the same group?
The effect of the Gestalt principle of similarity on visual recognition.
The phenomenon where the brain fills in missing phonemes in speech based on context.
What is phonemic restoration?
The term "mental representation" in cognitive psychology.
What is an internal symbol or model of external reality?
What is challenging behaviorist views of language learning and proposing the concept of innate grammar?
Noam Chomsky’s role in the cognitive revolution.
The role of the fusiform face area (FFA).
What is specializing in recognizing faces?
What is a theory suggesting we recognize objects by identifying their component features?
The feature-analysis theory.
What is helping the brain interpret ambiguous or incomplete auditory signals?
The effect of context on auditory recognition.