Working Memory
This is a component of working memory. It is responsible for temporarily holding and manipulating visual and spatial information.
Visuospatial sketch
These two phenomena occur when older memories interfere with the ability to recall newer information and when new information interferes with the ability to recall older memories.
Proactive interference and retroactive interference
This principle suggests that objects or shapes that are close to one another tend to be perceived as a group or a whole.
Proximity
This involves the addition of a pleasant stimulus following a behavior, increasing the likelihood of that behavior being repeated.
Positive reinforcement
This is a small, seahorse-shaped structure located in the temporal lobe of the brain. It is primarily involved in the formation and consolidation of long-term memories and is essential for learning new information.
Hippocampus
This is another component of working memory. It is responsible for holding and processing verbal and auditory information. It consists of a phonological store and an articulatory rehearsal process.
Phonological loop
These two effects are the tendency to recall the first and last items in a list because they have more time to be encoded into long-term memory or they are still fresh in short-term memory.
Primacy and recency effects
This principle states that objects that are similar in shape, size, color, or other visual attributes are perceived as belonging together.
Similarity
This involves the removal of an unpleasant stimulus following a behavior, which also increases the likelihood that the behavior will be repeated.
Negative Reinforcement
This is a small, almond-shaped structure located in the temporal lobe. It is primarily involved in processing emotions, but it also plays a significant role in emotional memory and learning.
Amygdala
This is the control system in working memory that coordinates the activities of the visuospatial sketchpad, phonological loop, and other subsystems. It is responsible for decision-making, attentional control, and integrating information from different sources.
Central executive
This is the type of long-term memory that stores facts, events, and concepts that can be consciously recalled and verbally stated.
Declarative memory
This principle suggests that we tend to perceive lines or shapes as continuing in a smooth path, even when they are interrupted.
Continuity
This involves adding an unpleasant stimulus following a behavior in order to decrease the likelihood of that behavior being repeated.
Positive punishment
This is a cognitive process in which individual pieces of information are grouped together into larger, more meaningful units.
Chunking
This is a component of working memory responsible for integrating information from the phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, and long-term memory into a coherent episodic representation, or "episode," that we can consciously access.
Episodic buffer
This is a subtype of declarative memory that involves the recall of personal experiences and specific events, including the context.
Episodic memory
This principle suggests that we tend to fill in gaps or missing information in a visual pattern, perceiving incomplete figures as complete.
Closure
This involves adding an unpleasant stimulus following a behavior in order to decrease the likelihood of that behavior being repeated.
Negative punishment
This was a famous psychological experiment conducted by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris in 1999. It demonstrates how inattentional blindness works—the phenomenon in which people fail to notice an unexpected object or event when they are focused on a task.
Inattentional Blindness Gorilla Suit Experiment
These are two types of recall tasks in which participants are asked to recall items or information either in order or without a sequence.
Serial or free recall
This is a phenomenon in which exposure to one stimulus influences the response to a subsequent stimulus, often without conscious awareness. It illustrates how prior exposure can influence later cognitive processes.
Priming
This principle refers to the tendency to perceive an image as either a figure (the focus of attention) or a background (the less important surrounding area). This helps us distinguish objects from their environment.
Figure-ground
These are two types of reinforcement using stimuli that are inherently reinforcing because they satisfy basic biological needs or drives or stimuli that become reinforcing through association with primary reinforcers or through learning.
Primary and secondary reinforcement
This principle (often called the Law of Simplicity) states that people will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images in the simplest, most stable, and most symmetric form possible. Our brains tend to favor simplicity and clarity in organizing sensory information.
Pragnanz