Concept Formation
This concept theory accounts for the typicality effect and involves comparing new objects against an abstraction of the most characteristic parts of a category.
What is Prototype Theory?
This is the type of knowledge that concerns personally experienced events that include contextual elements like time and place.
What is Episodic Memory?
This type of processing is guided by higher-level mental processes, exemplified by the Gestalt law of closure allowing us to ignore gaps in shapes.
What is Top-Down Processing?
This is the heuristic mode of the dual process view, characterized as often unconscious and automatic, such as immediately agreeing to coffee late at night because you are tired.
What is System 1?
This term refers to the degree to which we can recall a piece of information (how accessible a memory is).
What is Retrieval Strength?
The main weakness of this concept formation theory is that we might lose important details, such as the context of each exemplar, when abstracting common features.
What is Prototype Theory?
This large number of personal memories is recounted from the ages of 10 to 30 years old and includes autobiographical and semantic memories.
What is the Reminiscence Bump?
This is what we sense with our sensory organs, such as sensing soundwaves in our environment with the cochlea in the inner ear.
What is Sensation?
This concept is defined as the inability to creatively us an item when generating solutions because we have attached a fixed function to it.
This is the variable that is being manipulated by the researcher, and if it is not randomly assigned (e.g., age), the study becomes a quasi-experiment.
What is the independent variable?
This theory states that we store every example ever seen and categorize new items by selecting the stored item they best match.
What is Exemplar Theory?
This phenomenon, in which we have few personal memories when we are very young (0-5 years), may occur because young children lack the developed language needed for verbal memories or a developed "sense of self."
What is Infantile Amnesia?
The research by Mishkin & Ungerleider (1982) suggests this visual pathway is the unconscious "where" pathway.
What is the Dorsal visual pathway?
When asked to rank the likelihood of Linda being a bank teller vs. being both a bank teller and a feminist, both Stats novices and experts committed the conjunction fallacy, supporting the pervasive use of this heuristic.
What is the Representativeness Heuristic?
In the Roediger & McDermott (1995) study, participants incorrectly identified this type of word as "old" even though it was never presented in the list, a result explained by spreading activation.
What is the critical word?
The strength of this theory is that is accounts for context effects, but a weakness is that it is not cognitively efficient to remember and compare against every single thing we have ever seen.
What is Exemplar Theory?
Though their accuracy and forgetting rates are similar to everyday autobiographical memories, these memories are different because we tend to have higher confidence and vividness for them.
What are Flashbulb Memories?
Kosslyn, Ball, & Reiser (1978) found that when mentally "walking" through a map of a fictional island, participants took longer to move between landmarks that were farther apart, supporting this perspective of mental imagery.
What is the visual code (of mental imagery)?
This component of metacognitive processes involves evaluating cognition, while Control involves changing behavior based on metacognitive evaluations.
What is Monitoring?
In the Roediger & Karpicke (2006) study, the group that engaged in this activity performed better on tests after 2 days and 1 week than the re-read group, supporting the retrieval-practice effect.
What is taking a test (or practice testing)?
This theory states that categorization relies on a set of rules that must be both necessary and sufficient, but a criticism is that it cannot explain how exemplars can be ranked by typicality.
What is Rule-Based Theory?
This type of memory is defined as knowledge or information that does not include contextual elements; older adults were found to be better at it than younger adults.
What is Semantic Memory?
In the study by Mishkin & Ungerleider (1982), monkeys with a lesion to the ventral pathway struggled with this specific task, which involves finding a treat based on the pattern of an object.
What is the pattern task?
Gick & Holyoak (1983) found that people were better at solving the radiation problem when they were provided with multiple example problems that had similar problem structure but varied versions of this feature.
What are surface details (or surface features)?
Loftus, Miller, & Burns (1978) showed that participants who received an inconsistent survey question about this specific traffic object were more likely to inaccurately report seeing it than those who received a consistent question.
What is the yield sign (instead of the stop sign)?