Experimental Methods
The variable that is being manipulated; the variable that is being measured in an experiment
What is an independent variable; what is a dependent variable?
When viewing visual information, these principles describe how we group similar or spatially close items together and ignore gaps to fill in missing parts to see edges.
What are Gestalt principles of object recognition?
This memory system is different from short-term memory because it involves manipulating the stored information, not just storing it.
This selection theory suggests that attention filters out information at the Sensory Store?
What is Broadbent's early selection theory?
This technique, abbreviated EEG, measures when the brain is active.
An experiment where participants experience every level of the independent variable
What is a within-subjects experimental design?
This theory of object recognition suggests that we identify objects by breaking them down into simple shapes that we then combine.
What is the recognition-by-components theory of object recognition?
Chase & Simon (1973) found that chess experts excelled at recreating real chess boards because their expertise allowed them to form larger examples of this, thus increasing their short-term memory capacity. When the chess pieces were randomly positioned, chess novices outperformed chess experts.
What is chunking?
This is the phenomenon where people fail to notice a new object in a scene, such as missing a gorilla walking through because their attention is directed elsewhere.
What is inattentional blindness?
Blindsight occurs because damage affects the "what" pathway, which is also called this pathway and is typically responsible for conscious object perception.
What is the ventral pathway?
This design involves two independent variables, where one is manipulated between subjects and the other is manipulated within subjects
What is a mixed experimental design?
This type of mental processing is guided by higher-level mental processes such as our biases and expectations.
The phonological loop uses a subvocal rehearsal mechanism that allows us to repeat articulatory information, and this occurs in this specific brain area (processes language).
What is Broca's Area?
This theory of attention suggests that all information reaches working memory from the sensory store, but some is prioritized while the rest is weakened.
What is the attenuation theory of attention?
Caused by brain damage between the fusiform face area and the limbic emotion system, patients with this condition believe their loved ones are imposters because they elicit no emotional response.
What is Capgras syndrome?
Sensation is the physiological (biological) process of sensing with our sensory organs, while this is our conscious psychological experience of those senses.
What is the difference between sensation and perception?
This illusion demonstrates that we view faces holistically and must compare them to our knowledge about faces, known as Second-Order Relational Information.
What is the Thatcher illusion?
The findings of Roediger & Karpicke (2006) showed that although restudying was best immediately, this action was best for performance at a delay.
What is taking a practice test (or retrieval practice)?
Hearing a participant's name in the unattended ear during a dichotic listening task is often referred to as this, and it supports the attenuation theory of attention.
What is the Cocktail Party Phenomenon?
This sense detects acceleration by using fluid mechanics in the vestibular apparatus of the inner ear.
What is the vestibular sense?
This is required for an independent variable; if it is not performed, the experiment is classified as a quasi-experiment.
In the study by Rueckl & Oden (1986), when the last letter of a critical word (like "beans" or "bears") was ambiguous, participants followed this type of perception/processing and used the context of the sentence to decide which word they saw.
What is top-down processing?
The research by Kosslyn, Ball, & Reiser (1978) on mental maps showed that participants took longer to mentally "walk" between landmarks that were farther apart on a fictional map, supporting this specific code of mental imagery over a language code.
What is the visual code of mental imagery?
The feature-integration theory of attention views attention as a continuum between which two concepts?
Distributed and focused attention
This visual pathway is responsible for spatial information (the "where" pathway) and its function is described as unconscious.
What is the dorsal pathway?