Definitions
The act of bringing knowledge to the foreground of thinking
What is retrieval?
Even if you’re looking directly at something, you’re likely to miss it if your attention is elsewhere.
What is inattentional blindness?
A list is learned, set aside, then later relearned.
What is a relearning task?
A mental workbench—a place where mental effort is applied
What is working memory?
Steven crams the night before his exam, while Lucy studies an hour a day for a week.
What are massed and distributed practice?
The maintenance of attention for infrequent events over a long period of time.
What is vigilance or sustained attention?
In this theory, working memory is regarded as the knowledge in long-term memory that is currently being attended
What is Engle’s Controlled Attention Model.
The backwards counting task in a Brown-Peterson task was originally designed to prevent this cognitive process from occurring.
What is rehearsal?
This part of memory is often referred to as the information processing bottleneck.
What is short-term or working memory?
Harry’s friend drops a large plate full of dessert in the next room, causing him to turn abruptly towards the source of the noise.
What is the orienting reflex?
A unit of knowledge that provides a way for scientists to quantify meaning.
What is a proposition?
This type of memory is theorized to be the storage space for items occurring towards the beginning of a learned list.
What is long-term memory?
This individual looked at response time variance between memory set sizes to estimate how much time was need for a single memory search.
Who is Sternberg?
This individual’s experiment lead to the spotlight metaphor of attention.
Who is Posner?
After taking French lessons Ana tries to speak Spanish, which she learned previously, but is unable to do so because French words keep interfering.
What is retroactive interference?
Knowledge that influences thought and behavior without any necessary involvement of consciousness
What is non-declarative or implicit memory?
This type of information is proposed to be the basis for filtering in early selection models.
What are physical properties?
Average response time is shorter during these trials of conjunction search because it is serial self-terminating.
What is target-present search?
This component of working memory can be thought of as the CEO of the process.
What is the central executive?
During a visual search experiment, Joe is tasked with looking for a blue circle among blue squares and green circles.
What is conjunction search?
Attentional selection that occurs after all of the initial processing of a message is done.
What is late selection?
This theory proposes an advantage for words that can be thought of in terms of their verbal attributes and in terms of their imaginal attributes.
What is the dual-coding hypothesis?
Julie is asked to remember the names of three fruits while counting backwards. After four trials, she switches to remembering vegetables instead. Danny is in the same experiment, but in a different condition. After remembering fruits, he switches to animals. The researchers measure the number of words accurately recalled in each condition. What is the independent variable?
What is the similarity of the memory categories?
This metaphor describes attention as a function that focuses effort on an external stimulus or an internal thought.
What is attention as a mental process?
Sam goes to the kitchen to do something, but when she arrives, she can't remember why she went there. However, when she goes back to where she started, she remembers.
What is encoding specificity or a retrieval cue?