Cognitive Psychology Chapter 1 Flashcards

Key Terms in Cognitive Psychology

• Analytic introspection: Procedure where trained participants report experiences and thought processes in response to controlled stimuli.

• Behavioral approach: Focuses on studying the mind by measuring observable behavior and explaining actions in behavioral terms.

• Behaviorism: Founded by John B. Watson, this psychological approach asserts that only observable behavior is valid data for psychology, dismissing consciousness and unobservable mental processes.

• Choice reaction time: The time taken to react to one of multiple stimuli, illustrated in Donders' experiment where participants made different responses to different stimuli.

• Cognition: Encompasses mental processes related to perception, memory, language, reasoning, problem solving, and decision making.

• Cognitive psychology: Branch of psychology studying mental processes scientifically, including perception, attention, memory, language, and decision-making.

• Cognitive revolution: A movement in the 1950s transitioning from behaviorism to an approach explaining behavior in terms of mental processes, leading to the information-processing approach.

• Cognitive science: Interdisciplinary field studying the mind, incorporating disciplines like computer science, neuroscience, linguistics, and psychology.

• Information-processing approach: Developed in the 1950s, this perspective views the mind as processing information through various stages.

• Long-term memory: A storage mechanism holding large amounts of information for extended periods, part of the modal model of memory.

• Mental chronometry: Technique used to assess the duration of mental processes.

• Mental rotation: The cognitive task of rotating images of objects in the mind, evidenced by Shepard and Metzler's experiments assessing object similarity from different angles.

• Modal model of memory: Proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin, it depicts memory as processing information through stages, including short-term and long-term memory.

• Model in cognitive psychology: A representation of mental processes, often depicted as interconnected boxes representing specific functions.

• Physiological approach: Examines the mind by measuring physiological responses and explaining behavior in physiological terms.

• Reaction time: The interval between stimulus presentation and a subject's response, measured in various forms of reactions, like button presses or verbal responses.

• Savings method: Developed by Ebbinghaus to measure memory retention, calculating repetitions required to recall lists of nonsense syllables after varying intervals.

• Sensory memory: The initial stage of memory, lasting seconds or fractions of a second, where sensory information is briefly stored.

• Short-term memory: A temporary storage system for information that can hold a limited amount of data for a short duration.