History & Methods
The acquisition, storage, transformation, and use of knowledge.
What is cognition?
The idea that we use previous knowledge to gather and interpret stimuli registered by the senses.
What is perception?
A concentration of mental activity, allowing cognitive processes to take in limited portions of sensory environment and memory.
What is attention?
The difficulty in learning new material because previously learned material keeps interfering with their new learning.
What us proactive interference?
The high-capacity type of memory that contains our memories for experiences and information that we accumulate over the course of our lifetime.
What is long-term memory?
The wave of psychology which emphasized that people use organization to perceive patterns and often solve problems by using insight.
What is Gestalt psychology?
The form of processing that emphasizes the importance of the stimulus in object recognition.
What is bottom-up processing?
A theory that suggests humans can only process a limited amount of information at once, necessitating a filtering process.
What is the attentional bottleneck?
The brief, immediate memory for the limited amount of material that you are currently processing.
What is working memory?
The type of memory that focuses on autobiographic memories, specifically events; allowing you to travel back in time and reminisce about your life.
What is episodic memory?
*would accept autobiographical memory
The wave of psychology that dismissed mental processes and focused on observable/measurable phenomena.
What is behaviorism?
The form of processing that emphasizes how a person's concepts, expectations, and memory influence object recognition.
What is top-down processing?
A form of attention that focuses exclusively on one task or stimulus, while ignoring others.
What is selective attention?
The ability to process a limited number of sounds for a short period of time. It processes language and other sounds that we hear as well as the sounds that we produce.
What is the phonological loop?
The type of memory that stores knowledge about the world, including words and factual information.
What is semantic memory?
The method of examining brain function by observing the flow in oxygenated blood.
What is fMRI?
An important element that facilitates recognition. For example, recognizing a letter more accurately and more rapidly when it appears in a meaningful word compared to in a meaningless string of lettes.
What is context?
The type of attention that often results in a performance trade-off due to the division of attention on multiple tasks.
What is divided attention?
The kind of working memory that allows you to look at a complex scene and gather visual information about objects and landmarks.
What is the visual-spatial sketchpad?
OR short-term visual memory, visuospatial working memory.
The type of memory that stores knowledge on how to do something.
What is procedural memory?
The approach that regards cognitive processes in terms of networks of neurons, allowing for multiple functions to occur in parallel.
What is the connectionist approach?
The brain uses context to perceive a missing sound in speech. For example, when there is a loud noise that cancels our a word in a speaker's sentence, but the brain still recognizes the sentence and fills in the gaps.
What is phonemic restoration?
The irrelevant and competing stimuli hindering our ability to focus and complete tasks efficiently.
What is cognitive interference?
A temporary storehouse that can hold and combine information from the phonological loop, your visuospatial sketchpad, and long-term memory. For example, remembering a conversation and re-interpreting it from different angles.
What is the episodic buffer?
Two terms: The process of intake of information; and the process of locating and accessing information.
What are encoding and retrieval?