Cognitive Psychology Concepts
The term for the ability to remember and manipulate information over short periods of time.
What is Working Memory?
Part of the brain that is primarily involved in processing and recognizing faces.
What is the fusiform face area (FFA)?
The process of retrieving information from memory.
What is recall?
In this type of research, participants are asked to decide whether a string of letters is a word or a nonword.
What is a lexical decision task?
The type of memory that is sensitive to details about the context and the specific circumstances under which an event occurred.
What is episodic memory?
Type of memory responsible for storing detailed, vivid memories usually associated with highly emotional event.
What are flashbulb memories?
Damage to this area of the brain can lead to unilateral neglect, where a person ignores one side of space.
What is the right parietal lobe?
This type of memory involves the inability to retrieve previously stored information, often due to interference or failure in the retrieval process.
What is forgetting?
This phenomenon in memory refers to the tendency for a person to be unable to detect a change in a visual scene, even if it's occurring right in front of them.
What is change blindness?
The term for a memory test where participants must decide if they have previously encountered a stimulus or not.
What is a recognition test?
This term describes the finding that participants are more likely to remember items presented at the beginning (primacy effect) and end (recency effect) of a list.
What is the serial position curve?
Brain structure that is responsible for encoding new explicit memories, such as facts and events, and is often damaged in amnesia cases like H.M.
What is the hippocampus?
In the DRM paradigm, participants often falsely recall a word (such as "sleep") that was never presented but is closely related to the words that were.
What is false memory?
This research approach focuses on studying observable behaviors in response to stimuli, and is often criticized for ignoring mental processes.
What is behaviorism?
This phenomenon, related to cognitive fluency, means that information that is processed more easily is often judged to be more believable.
What is processing fluency?
This method, associated with Kant, answers questions about the mind by deducing how mental events can be explained from concrete observations.
What is the transcendental method?
This brain area helps us regulate attention and resolve conflicts, and is also central in working memory processes.
What is the central executive?
This type of amnesia involves the loss of memories for events that occurred just before an injury or trauma.
What is retrograde amnesia?
In an experiment this phenomenon looks like this. Two different groups of patients with different brain lesions show opposite effects on different tasks.
What is a double dissociation?
This model of memory storage includes the phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, episodic buffer, and central executive.
What is Baddeley's working memory model?
This theory of memory explains how we encode new information based on its meaning and how we relate it to previously stored knowledge.
What is elaborative rehearsal?
This technique uses a magnetic pulse to temporarily disrupt brain activity in a specific area, allowing researchers to study its function.
What is transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)?
This is the effect of receiving feedback after a recognition task that can lead to increased confidence, even if the memory was inaccurate.
What is the post-identification feedback effect?
In an fMRI study designed to measure brain activity in response to emotional faces, this is a major flaw of the experimental design.
What is the need for a better control condition (e.g., showing neutral faces instead of a blank screen)?
This effect refers to the improved ability to recall information that was learned in the same physical or psychological context as the retrieval context.
What is context-dependent learning?