Transforming incoming information into a usable form
What is encoding?
100
This French term describes the feeling that we’ve seen or experienced our current situation before; it can be triggered if the present circumstances share characteristics of earlier experiences.
What is déjà vu?
100
Compared to an algorithm, this method of problem-solving is a quicker, although more error-prone, way to arrive at an answer.
What is a heuristic?
100
Beginning around age 2, children’s language usage is characterized by telegraphic speech, part of this period of language development.
What is the two-word stage?
100
He studied his own ability to remember verbal material, and created a "forgetting curve" showing how much of the material he retained over the course of 30 days.
Who is Herman Ebbinghaus?
200
A teacher who most readily recalls the names of students whose names start with A and Z is demonstrating this characteristic of memory formation.
What is the serial position effect?
200
People who incorrectly pick out which image is the true face of a penny when presented with an array of possible choices have failed at this measure of memory.
What is recognition?
200
Our tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions instead of other ways.
What is functional fixedness?
200
The word “filled” contains two of these smallest units of language that carry meaning; the word “refilled” contains three.
What is a morpheme?
200
Her experiments testing the malleability of memory have caused controversy, but she is still considered one of the most influential psychological researchers of the last century.
Who is Elizabeth Loftus?
300
This type of information processing is considered the most effective for material retention because it focuses on the meaning of the word in context.
What is semantic encoding?
300
The tendency for witnesses of an accident to recall the crash as more violent than it was after being asked what happened when the vehicles smashed into each other reflects this phenomenon of memory construction.
What is the misinformation effect?
300
Creativity is often associated with this type of thinking, in which there is more than one solution to a given problem.
What is divergent thinking?
300
Researchers like to say that childhood represents this period of time where children master certain aspects of language, or even start to learn a second language.
What is the critical period?
300
Behaviorist B.F. Skinner believed language development occurred through operant conditioning; this linguist argued that humans will acquire language naturally because of the universal grammar that underlies all human language.
Who is Noam Chomsky?
400
Amnesia victims typically lose their ability for conscious recall, but their implicit memory, also called this, remains intact.
What is procedural memory?
400
A police detective who instructs you to close your eyes and retell details of the event as you recall them, rather than asking you leading questions, is practicing this strategy for reducing eyewitness error.
What is the cognitive interview technique?
400
When we presume that certain events are more common than they actually are if the instances come readily to our mind.
What is the availability heuristic?
400
A rule in French that adjectives must come after the noun they are describing is an example of this subset of grammatical organization.
What is syntax?
400
After experimenting with Sultan the chimpanzee’s ability to solve problems, this psychologist concluded animals do display cognition and insight.
Who is Wolfgang Kohler?
500
A mail clerk who has difficulty sorting the mail for the first few days following the rearrangement of mailboxes in an office building is displaying this kind of retrieval failure.
What is proactive interference?
500
Someone who claims to have a photographic memory is definitely exaggerating; at best they have this kind of memory, more often found in prodigious children than adults.
What is eidetic memory?
500
Invalid conclusions may seem valid to someone experiencing this obstacle to logical reasoning in which preexisting beliefs distort a person’s perceptions.
What is belief bias?
500
Infants display this cognitive feat when they discern the differences between syllable patterns, thus indicating an inborn readiness to learn grammatical rules.
What is statistical learning? (also acceptable: statistical analysis)
500
He coined the phrase “Magic Number Seven, plus or minus two”, referring to the number of items a person can store in their short-term memory.