PSYCH 405 Vocab

action pathway
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Terms in this set (112)
action pathway
neural pathway, extending from the occipital lobe to the parietal lobe, that is associated with neural processing that occurs when people take action. Corresponds to the "where" pathway
action potential
propagated electrical potential responsible for transmitting neural information and for communication between neurons; typically travel down a neuron's axon
amygdala
a subcortical structure that is involved in processing emotional aspects of experience, including memory for emotional events
analogical paradox
people find it difficult to apply analogies in laboratory settings, but routinely use them in real-world settings
analogical encoding
a technique in which people compare two problems that illustrate a principle. this technique is designed to help people discover similar structural features of cases or problems
analogical problem solving
the use of analogies as an aid to solving problems. typically a solution to one problem, the source problem, is presented that is analogous to the solution to another problem, the target problem
analogical transfer
transferring experience in solving one problem to the solution of another, similar problem
analogy
making a comparison in order to show a similarity between two differing things
analytic introspection
a procedure used by early psychologists in which trained participants described their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli
anaphoric inference
an inference that connects an object or person in one sentence to an object or person in another sentence
anterior temporal lobearea in the temporal lone. damage to this has been connected with semantic deficits in dementia patients and with the savant syndromeapparent movementan illusion of movement perception that occurs when stimuli in different locations are flashed one after another with the proper timingarticulatory rehearsal processrehearsal process involved in working memory that keeps items in the phonological store from decayingarticulatory suppressioninterference with operation of the phonological loop that occurs when a person repeats an irrelevant word such as "the" while carrying out a task that requires the phonological loop.artificial intelligencethe ability of a computer to perform tasks usually associated with human intelligenceattentionfocusing on specific features, objects, or locations or on certain thoughts or activitiesattentional capturea rapid shifting of attention, usually caused by a stimulus such as a loud noise, bright light, or sudden movementattenuation model of attentionTreisman's model of selective attention that proposes that selection occurs in two stages. In the first stage, an attenuator analyzes the incoming message and lets through the attended message - and also the unattended message pass through with reduced strengthattenuatorin Treisman's model of selective attention, this analyzes the incoming message in terms of physical characteristics, language, and meaning. Attended messages pass through at full strength, and unattended messages pass through with reduced strengthautobiographical memorymemory for specific events from a person's life, which can include both episodic and semantic componentsautomatic processingprocessing that occurs automatically, without the herons's intending to do it, an d that also uses few cognitive resources; associated with easy or well practiced tasksavailability heuristicevents that are more easily remembered are judged to be more probable than events that are less easily remembered.axonpart of the neuron that transmits signals from the cell body to the synapse at the end of itback propagationa process by which learning can occur in a connectionist network, in which an error signal is transmitted backward through the network. this backward-transmitted error signal provides the information needed to adjust the weights in the network to achieve the correct output signal for a stimulusbalanced dominancewhen a word has more than meaning and all meanings are equally likelybayesian inferencethe idea that our estimate of the probability of an outcome is determined by the prior probability (our initial belief) and the likelihood (the extent to which the available evidence on individual objects)Balint's syndromea condition caused by brain damage in which a person has difficulty focusing attention on individual objectsbase ratethe relative proportions of different classes in a population; failure to consider can often lead to errors of reasoningbasic levelin Rosch's categorization scheme, the level below the global level; according to Rosch, this level is psychologically special because it is the level above which much information is lost and below which little is gained.behaviorismthe approach to psychology, founded by John B. Watson, which states that observable behavior provides the only valid data for psychology. A consequence of the idea is that consciousness and unobservable mental processes are not considered worthy of study by psychologistsbelief biastendency to think a syllogism is valid if its conclusion is believable or that it is invalid if the conclusion is not believablebiased dominancewhen a word has more than one meaning and one meaning is more likelybindingprocess by which features such as color, form, motion, and location are combined to create perception of a coherent objectbinding problemthe problem of explaining how an object's individual features become bound togetherbottleneck modelmodel of attention that proposes that incoming information is restricted at some point in processing, so only a portion of the information gets through to consciousness. Broadbent's model of attention is an examplebottom-up processingprocessing that starts with information received by the receptors; this type of processing is called data-based processingbrain ablationa procedure in which a specific area is removed from an animal's brain. it is usually done to determine the function of this area by assessing the effect on the animal's behaviorbrain imagingtechnique such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that results in images of the brain that represents brain activity. In cognitive psychology, activity is measured in response to specific cognitive tasksBroca's Aphasiaa condition associated with damage to broca's area, in the frontal lobe, characterized by labored ungrammatical speech and difficulty in understanding some types of sentences.broca's areaan area in the frontal lobe, associated with the production of languagecandle problema problem, first described by duncker, in which a person is given a number of objects and is given the task of mounting a candle on a wall so it can burn without dripping wax on the floor; this was used to study functional fixednesscategorical syllogisma syllogism in which the premises and conclusion describe the relationship between two categories by using statements that begin with All, NO, or Somecategorizationthe process by which objects are placed in categoriescategorygroups of objects that belong together because they belong to the same class of objectscategory-specific memory impairmenta result of brain damage in which the patient has trouble recognizing objects in a specific categorycausal inferencean inference that results in the conclusion that events described in one clause or sentence were caused by events that occurred in a previous clause or sentencecell bodypart of a cell that contains mechanisms that keep the cell alive. in some neurons it is associated with dendrites that receive information from other neuronscentral executivethe part of working memory that coordinates the activity of the phonological loop and the visuospatial sketchpad. the "traffic cop" of the working memory systemcerebral cortexthe outer layer of the brain that contains the mechanisms responsible for higher mental functions such as perception, language, thinking, and problem solvingchange blindnessdifficulty in detecting changes in similar, but slightly different, scenes that are presented one after another. the changes are often easy to see once attention is directed to them but are usually undetected in the absence of appropriate attentionchange detectiondetecting differences between pictures or displays that are presented one after anotherchoice reaction timetime to respond to one of two or more stimuli. for example, in the Donder's experiment, subjects had to make one response to one stimulus and a different response to another stimuluschunkused in connection with the idea of chunking in memory; a collection of elements that are strongly associated with each other but weakly associated with elements in other oneschunkingcombining small units into larger ones, such as when individual words are combined into a meaningful sentence; can be used to increase the capacity of memoryclassical conditioninga procedure in which pairing a neutral stimulus with a stimulus that elicits a response causes the neutral stimulus t elicit that responsecocktail party effectthe ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli, especially at a party where there are a lot of simultaneous conversationscodingthe form in which stimuli are represented in the mind; for example information can be represented in visual, semantic, and phonological formscognitionthe mental processes involved in perception, attention, memory, language, problem solving, reasoning, and decision makingcognitive economya feature of some semantic network models in which properties of a category that are shared by many members of a category are stored at a higher-level node in the network. For example, the property "can fly" would be stored at the node for "bird" rather than the node for "canary"cognitive hypothesisan explanation for the reminiscence bump, which states that memories are better for adolescence and early adulthood because encoding is better during periods rapid change that are followed by stabilitycognitive mapmental conception of a spatial layoutcognitive neurosciencefield concerned with studying the neural basis of cognitioncognitive revolutiona shift in psychology, beginning in the 1950s, from the behaviorist approach to an approach in which the main thrust was to explain behavior in terms of the mind. One of the outcomes was the introduction of the information-processing approach to studying the mindcoherencethe representation of a text or story in a reader's mind so that information in one part of the text or story is related to information in another partcommon groundknowledge, beliefs, and assumptions shared between two speakersconcepta metal representation of a class or individual. also, the meaning of objects, events, and abstract ideas. an example would be the way a personal mental represents "cat" or "blouse"conceptual knowledgeknowledge that enables people to recognize objects and events to make inferences about their propertiesconclusionthe final statement in a syllogism, which follows from the two premisesconditional syllogismsyllogism with two premises and a conclusion, like a categorical syllogism, but whose first premise is an "if...then" statementconfirmation biasthe tendency to selectively look for information that conforms to our hypothesis and to overlook information that argues against itconjunction rulethe probability of the conduction of two events cannot be higher than the probability of the single constituentsconjunction searchsearching among distractors for a target that involves two or more featuresconnection weightdetermines the degree to which signals sent from one unit either increase of decrease the activity of the next unitconnectionisma network model of mental operation that proposes that concepts are represented in networks that are modeled after neural networks; this approach to describing the mental representation of concepts is also called the parallel distributed processing approachconsolidationthe process that transforms new memories into a state in which they are more resistant to disruptionconstructive nature of memorythe idea that what people report as memories are constructed based on what actually happened plus additional factors, such as expectations, other knowledge, and life experiencescontrol processesin atkinson and shiffrin's modal model of memory, the active processes that can be controlled by the person and ay differ from one task to another; rehearsal is an examplecorpusthe frequency with which specific words are used and the frequency of different meanings and grammatical constructions in a particular languagecovert attentionoccurs when attention is shifted without moving the eyes, commonly referred to as seeing something from the corner of the eyescreative cognitiona technique developed by Finke to train people to think creativelycrowdinganimals tend to share many properties, such as eyes legs, and the ability to move; this si relevant to the multiple-factor approach to the representation of concepts in the braincryptoamnesiaunconscious plagiarism of the work of others. this has bee associated with errors in source monitoringcued recalla procedure for testing memory in which a participant is presented with cues, such as words or phrases, to aid recall of previously experienced stimuli.cultural life scriptlife events that commonly occur in a particular culturecultural life script hypothesisthe idea that events in a person's life story become easier to recall when they fit the cultural life script for that personals culturedecayprocess by which information is lost from memory due to the passage of timedeductive reasoningreasoning that involves syllogisms in which a conclusion logically follows from premisesdeep processingprocessing that involves attention to meaning and relating an item to something else; usually associated with elaborative rehearsaldefinitional approach to categorizationthe idea that we can divide whether something is a member of a category by determining whether the object meets the definition of the categorydelayed partial report methodprocedure used in Sperling's experiment on the properties of the visual icon, in which participants were instructed to report only some of the stimuli in a briefly presented display. a cue tone that was delayed for a fraction of a second after the display was extinguished indicated which part of the display to reportdelayed-response taska task in which information is provided, a delay is imposed, and then memory is tested. this task has been used to study short-term emory by testing monkeys' ability to hold information about the location of food during a delaydendritesstructures that branch out from the cell body to receive electrical signals from other neuronsdepictive representationcorresponds to spatial representations; so called because spatial representation can be depicted by a picturedepth of processingthe idea that the processing that occurs as an item is being encoding into memory can be deep or shallow; deep processing involves attention to meaning and is associated with elaborative rehearsal; shallow processing involves repetition with little attention to meaning and is associated with maintenance rehearsaldichotic listeningthe procedure of presenting one message to the left ear and a different message to the right eardictionary unita component of treisman's attenuation model of attention; processing unit that contains stored words and thresholds for activating the words; helps explain why we can sometimes hear a familiar word like out name, in an unattended messagedigit spanthe number of digits a person can remember; used to measure the capacity of short-term memroydirect pathway modelmodel of pain perception that proposes that pain signals are sent directly from receptors to the braindistractionoccurs when one stimulus interferes with attention to or the processing of another stimulusdistributed representationoccurs when a specific cognition activates many ares of the braindivergent thinkingthinking that is open-ended, involving a large number of potential solutionsdouble dissociationa situation in which a single dissociate can be demonstrated in on person and the opposite type of singe dissociation can be demonstrated in another persondual systems approachthe idea that there are two means systems, one fast and the other slower, tat have different capabilities and serve different functionsearly selection modelmodel of attention that explains selective attention by early filtering out of the unatended messageechoic memorybrief sensory memory for auditory stimuli that lasts for a few seconds after a stimuli isextinguishedelaborative rehearsalrehearsal that involves thinking about the meaning of an item to be remembered or making connections between that item and prior knowledgeembodied approachproposal that our knowledge of concepts is bases on reactivation of sensory and motor processes that occur when we interact with an objectencodingthe process of acquiring information and transferring it into memoryencoding specificitythe principle that we learn information together with its context; means that presence of the context can lead to enhanced memory for the informationepiphenomenona phenomenon that accompanies a mechanism a mechanism but is not actually part of the mechanismepisodic buffera component added to baddeley's original working memory model that serves as a "backup" store that communicates with both LTM and the components of working memory; holds information longer and has greater capacity than the phonological loop or visuospatial sketchpaderror signalduring learning in a connectionist network, the difference between the output signal generated by a particular stimulus and the output that actually represents that stimulus