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Cog. Psych Test 2
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Dichotic listening | task in which participants hear two simultaneous verbal messages (one presented to the left ear, a second presented to the right ear). participants are asked to pay attention to one of these inputs (the attended channel) and urged to ignore the other. |
| Attended channel | In selective attention experiments, participants are exposed to simultaneous inputs and instructed to ignore all of these except one. The attended channel is the input to which participants are instructed to pay attention. |
| Unattended channel | A stimulus (or group of stimuli) that a person is not trying to perceive. Ordinarily, little information is understood or remembered from the unattended channel. |
| Shadowing | A task in which research participants are required to repeat back a verbal input, word for word, as they hear it. |
| Cocktail party effect | a pattern in which a person seems to 'tune out' all conversations reaching the ears except for the current conversation; however, if some salient stimulus appears in one of the other conversations, the person is reasonably likely to detect this stimulus. |
| Filter | A hypothetical mechanism that would block potential distractors from further processing. |
| Fixation target | A visual mark (such as a dot or a plus sign) at which one points one's eyes (or 'fixates'). Fixation targets are used to help people control their eye position. |
| Inattentional blindness | A pattern in which perceivers seem literally not to see stimuli right in front of their eyes; this pattern is caused by the participants' attending to some other stimulus and not expecting the target to appear. |
| Change blindness | perceivers do not see, or take a long time to see, large-scale changes in a visual stimulus. This pattern reveals how little people perceive, even from stimuli in plain view, if they are not specifically attending to the target information. |
| Early selection | A proposal that selective attention operates at an early stage of processing, so that the unattended inputs receive little analysis. |
| Late selection | A proposal that selective attention operates at a late stage of processing, so that the unattended inputs receive considerable analysis. |
| Response time | The amount of time (usually measured in milliseconds) needed for a person to respond to a particular event (such as a question or a cue to press a specific button). |
| Limited-capacity system | A group of processes in which resources are limited so that extra resources supplied to one process must be balanced by a withdrawal of resources somewhere else, with the result that the total resources expended do not exceed some limit. |
| Spatial attention | The mechanism through which you allocate processing resources to particular positions in space, so that you more efficiently process any inputs from that region in space. |
| Unilateral neglect syndrome | A pattern of symptoms in which patients ignore all inputs coming from one side of space. Patients put only one of their arms into their jackets, eat food from only half of their plates, read only half of words (e.g., they might read 'blouse' as 'use'). |
| Divided attention | The skill of performing multiple tasks simultaneously. |
| Response selector | A (hypothesized) mental resource needed for the selection and initiation of a wide range of responses, including overt responses (e.g., moving in a particular way) and covert responses (e.g., initiating a memory search). |
| Perseveration error | A pattern of responding in which you produce the same response over and over, even though you know that the task requires a change in response. This pattern is often observed in patients with brain damage in the frontal lobe. |
| Goal neglect | A pattern of behavior in which you fail to keep your goal in mind, so that (for example) you rely on habitual responses even if those responses will not move you toward the goal. |
| Automaticity | state that can be achieved, in which the task can be performed with little or no attention. these actions can be combined with other activities without interference. they are often difficult to control, leading many to refer to them as mental reflexes. |
| Controlled tasks | Tasks that are novel or that require flexibility in one's approach; these tasks usually require attention, so they cannot be carried out if the person is also busy with some other task. |
| Automatic tasks | Tasks that are well practiced and that do not require flexibility; these tasks usually require little or no attention, and they can be carried out if the person is also busy with some other task. |
| Stroop interference | classic demonstration of automaticity; people are asked to name the color of ink used to print a word, and the word itself is a different color name. Considerable interference is observed in this task. |
| Information processing | An approach to theorizing where complex mental events are understood as being built up out of a large number of discrete steps. These steps occur one by one, with each providing as its output the input to the next step in the sequence. |
| Modal model | in this model, WM is the storage site for material being contemplated and the loading platform for LTM. Info can reach WM through perception, or can be drawn from LTM. Once in WM, material can be further processed, or can be recycled for subsequent use. |
| Long-term memory (LTM) | The storage system in which we hold all of our knowledge and all of our memories; contains memories that are not currently activated |
| Free recall | A method of assessing memory. The person being tested is asked to come up with as many items as possible from a particular source (such as 'the list you heard earlier' or 'things you saw yesterday'), in any sequence. |
| Primacy effect | effect in which you remember the early-presented materials within a sequence. it is generally attributed to the fact that you can focus attention on these items b/c you are not trying to divide attention between these items and other items in the series. |
| Recency effect | The tendency to remember materials that occur late in a series; attributed to the fact that these late-arriving items are still in working memory (simply because nothing else has arrived after these items, to bump them out of working memory). |
| Serial position | A data pattern summarizing the relationship between some performance measure (often, likelihood of recall) and the order in which the test materials were presented. In memory studies, the curve tends to be U-shaped. |
| Memory rehearsal | Any mental activity that has the effect of maintaining information in working memory. Two types of rehearsal are often distinguished: maintenance rehearsal and elaborative rehearsal. |
| Digit-span task | A task often used for measuring working memory's storage capacity. participants are read a series of digits and must immediately repeat them back. If they do this successfully, they are given a slightly longer list. |
| 7 plus-or-minus 2 | A number often offered as an estimate of the holding capacity of working memory. |
| Chunk | The hypothetical storage unit in working memory; it is estimated that working memory can hold 7 plus-or-minus 2 chunks. An unspecified quantity of information can be contained within each chunk. |
| Operation span | A measure of working memory's capacity. This measure turns out to be predictive of performance in many other tasks, presumably because these tasks all rely on working memory. |
| Maintenance rehearsal | A mechanical process in which items are continually cycled through working memory, merely by being repeated over and over. Also called 'item-specific rehearsal'. |
| Relational rehearsal | A form of mental processing in which you think about the relations, or connections, among ideas. The connections created (or strengthened) in this way will later guide memory search. |
| Elaborative rehearsal | A way of engaging materials to be remembered, such that you pay attention to what the materials mean and how they are related to each other, or to other things in the surroundings, or to other things you already know. |
| Intentional learning | The acquisition of memories in a setting in which people know that their memory for the information will be tested later. |
| Incidental learning | Learning that takes place in the absence of any intention to learn and, correspondingly, in the absence of any expectation of a subsequent memory test. |
| Shallow processing | A mode of thinking about material in which you pay attention only to appearances and other superficial aspects of the material; shallow processing typically leads to poor memory retention. |
| Deep processing | A mode of thinking in which you pay attention to the meaning and implications of the material; deep processing typically leads to excellent memory retention. |
| Level of processing | An assessment of how deeply newly learned materials are engaged. |
| Retrieval path | A connection (or series of connections) that can lead to a sought-after memory in long-term storage. |
| Mnemonic strategy | A technique designed to improve memory accuracy and to make learning easier; in general, mnemonic strategies seek in one fashion or another to help memory by imposing an organization on the materials to be learned. |
| Peg-word systems | A type of mnemonic strategy using words or locations as 'pegs' on which to 'hang' the materials to be remembered. |
| Context-dependent learning | A pattern of data in which materials learned in one setting are well remembered when the person returns to that setting, but less well remembered in other settings. |
| Context reinstatement | A procedure in which someone is led to the same mental and emotional state he or she was in during a previous event; this can often promote accurate recollection of that event. |
| Retrieval cue | An instruction or stimulus input, provided at the time of recall, that can potentially guide recall and help the person to retrieve the target memory. |
| Encoding specificity | The tendency to place in memory both the materials to be learned and also some amount of the context of those materials. As a result, these materials will be recognized as familiar, later on, only if the materials appear again in a similar context. |
| Node | An individual unit within an associative network. |
| Associations | Functional connections that are hypothesized to link nodes within a mental network or detectors within a detector network; often hypothesized as the carriers of activation, from one node or detector to the next. |
| Subthreshold activation | Activation levels below response threshold. this activation, by definition, will not trigger a response; nonetheless, this activation is important because it can accumulate, leading eventually to an activation level that exceeds the response threshold. |
| Summation | The addition of two or more separate inputs so that the effect of these combined inputs is greater than the effect of any one of the inputs by itself. |
| Spreading activation | A process through which activation travels from one node to another, via associative links. As each node becomes activated, it serves as a source for further activation, spreading onward through the network. |
| Lexical-decision task | test in which participants are shown strings of letters and must indicate, as quickly as possible, whether each string of letters is a word in English or not. |
| Semantic priming | A process in which activation of an idea in memory causes activation to spread to other ideas related to the first in meaning. |
| Recall | The task of memory retrieval where one must come up with the desired materials, sometimes in response to a cue that gives context in which the materials were earlier seen, sometimes in response to a question that requires the sought-after information. |
| Recognition | The task of memory retrieval in which the items to be remembered are presented and ome must decide whether or not the item was encountered in some earlier circumstance. |
| Source memory | A form of memory that allows you to recollect the episode in which learning took place or the time and place in which a particular stimulus was encountered. |
| Familiarity | the subjective feeling that you have encountered a stimulus before or the objective fact that you have encountered a stimulus before and are in some way influenced by that encounter, regardless of if you are aware of it. |
| Attribution | The step of explaining a feeling or event, usually by identifying the factors (or an earlier event) that are the cause of the current feeling or event. |
| 'remember/know' | A distinction between two experiences you can have in recalling. If you 'remember' you can offer info about that encounter (when, where, how). If you 'know' then you have a sense of familiarity w/ the stimulus but no idea when or where. |
| Word-stem completion | task in which people are given the beginning of a word and must provide a word that starts with those letters. 1st version: performance measured by # of words completed. 2nd version: performance assessed by the responses fulfill some other criterion. |
| Explicit memory | A memory revealed by direct memory testing and typically accompanied by the conviction that one is, in fact, remembering -- that is, drawing on some sort of knowledge (perhaps knowledge about a specific prior episode, or perhaps more general knowledge). |
| Direct memory testing | A form of memory testing in which people are asked explicitly to remember some previous event. Recall and standard recognition testing are both forms of this. |
| Implicit memory | A memory revealed by indirect memory testing and usually manifested as a priming effect in which current performance is guided or facilitated by previous experiences. |
| Indirect memory testing | A form of memory testing in which research participants are not told that their memories are being tested. Instead, they are tested in a fashion in which previous experiences can influence current behavior. |
| Illusion of truth | An effect of implicit memory in which claims that are familiar end up seeming more plausible. |
| Source confusion | A memory error in which you misremember where a bit of information was learned or where a particular stimulus was last encountered. |
| Processing pathway | The sequence of detectors and nodes, and the connections among these various units, that activation flows through in dealing with (recognizing or thinking about) a specific stimulus. |
| Processing fluency | An improvement in the speed or ease of processing that results from prior practice in using those same processing steps. |
| Amnesia | A disruption of memory, often due to brain damage. |
| Retrograde amnesia | An inability to remember experiences that occurred before the event that triggered the memory disruption. |
| Anterograde amnesia | An inability to remember experiences that occurred after the event that triggered the memory disruption. |
| Korsakoff's syndrome | A clinical syndrome characterized primarily by dense anterograde amnesia. Korsakoff's syndrome is caused by damage to specific brain regions, and it is often precipitated by a form of malnutrition common among long-term alcoholics. |
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aes21
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