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CHAPTER ONE
Cognitive Psychology
Psychology – scientific study of human affect (feelings/emotions), behavior
(actions that can be directly observed) and cognition (mental processes; internal
processes that cannot be directly observed).
Cognitive Psychology – scientific study of human cognition.
 Scientific Study – systematic investigation of a phenomenon based on
empirical data.
 Systematic – scientists use a similar approach to conducting research
(research topic, develop hypotheses, develop methods to test hypothesis,
collect data and analyze data with statistics).
 Empirical data – information comes from observations that can be verified
by other scientists.
History of Cognitive Psychology
Donder’s Decision Making – this is considered the first cognitive psychological
experiment. However, it was conducted before the term cognitive psychology was
developed, or before psychology as a discipline was developed. Observed reaction
time to figure out how long it takes people to decide.
 Part One – recorded how long it took participants (Ps) to press a button after
a light flashed. Referred to as reaction time data (how long it takes a P to do
something), simple reaction time.
 Part Two – Ps had to push one button after a light on the left flashed;
another button if the light on the right flashed. Referred to as choice
reaction time.
 Part Two – Part One = Time it takes to decide what button to push.
Donder’s concluded that it takes 1/10th of a second to decide what button to push.
This illustrates inferential methods in cognitive psychology. Decision-making
cannot be directly observed; reaction time was observed and used to infer how
long it takes to decide.
Wilhelm Wundt – founder of psychology, founded first psychological lab and
developed first PhD program in psychology. He founded structuralism but never
offered support for it. He is credited for emphasizing that research could be used
to explain human behavior and cognition.
Structuralism – focused on identifying the structures of the human mind. The mind
consists of basic elements, he thought that he could discover a periodic table of the
mind. He thought he could do this by having Ps introspect and describe their
internal experiences
Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve – studied nature of learning and forgetting.
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 Ebbinghaus first taught himself lists of nonsense syllables (SBI, QPX)

because he wanted to use novel words that weren’t associated with
meanings or memory.
 He kept going through the list until he was able to remember all of the
syllables in order without making any mistakes and recorded how many
trials he had to go through before he got 100% (time 1 trials).
 Recorded how many trials it took him to get to 100% after a delay period
(time 2 trials). Delay period – anywhere from immediately to 31 days.
 Time 1 trials - time 2 trials / time 1 trials x 100 = % of savings (information
retained).
Ebbinghaus found that it always took less time to learn the lists the second time
around (time 1 > time 2); the longer the delay, the smaller the savings
(memories/knowledge decay with the passage of time). There is a drastic loss in
memory within 2 days.
William James – brought psychology to United States, studied cognitive topics
(thinking, consciousness, attention, memory) and wrote first psychology text book.
Behaviorism – theory of learning that focuses on observable behavior and ignores
internal mental processes; became popular during the early 1900s-1950s.
 Behaviorists said that mental processes cannot be clearly observed, thus
they cannot be verified by other people. Believed that introspection was the
only way to study mental process and it was impossible to tell if people were
being honest or accurate with their reports of their mental processes.
Classical Conditioning – when a stimulus becomes associated with a neutral
stimulus, the neutral stimulus will elicit the same response as the stimulus.
Pavlov’s salivating dog – Pavlov rang a bell every time before feeding the dogs, and
eventually the dogs would salivate after hearing the bell ring.
Watson’s little Albert – Watson made a loud noise every time he presented Albert
with a white rat, and he became terrified of the white rat.
Operant Conditioning – if you reward a behavior, you increase the likelihood of
the behavior reoccurring.
Skinner’s Rats – rats received a food pellet after pressing a lever and began
pressing the lever all the time, so they would receive food (positive reinforcement).
Same study was done again with cocaine.
Contradictions – by the 1940’s there were several studies that behaviorism
couldn’t account for. Research below led to the cognitive revolution (reemergence
of mental processes in psychology) in the 1950s.
Tolman’s Mental Map – rats explored the maze, food was placed in a location and
rats learned to turn right to find the food (positive reinforcement for right turn).
But when rat was placed in a different spot, it would turn left for food instead.
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Tolman believed that the rats learned a mental map of the maze at the beginning
of the study.
Noam Chomsky – believed that humans had a natural capacity to quickly pick up
primary language and our brains are prewired for language. Support: children
make language errors that they have never heard before, young children pick up
languages much easier than adults and areas of the brain appear to be devoted to
acquisition of language.
Human Mind as a Computer – information processing approach, the mind is
similar to the computer in the sense that operations are performed in a series of
tasks.
Broadbent – created the first flow diagram explaining how we direct our attention
to certain stimulus while ignoring other stimuli in the environment.
 INPUT -> filter -> detector -> memory: filter only lets certain information
into our attention, the detector records the information that gets through
the filter and puts it into memory storage. Some psychologists believe that
we can program computers to mimic mental processes (artificial
intelligence).
Research Methods
Behavioral Approaches – researching cognitive processes by observing behavior.
Ex: Ebbinghaus memory research
Physiological Approaches – researching cognitive processes by brain imaging,
observe what parts of the brain are active during certain cognitive tasks.
Models of the mind – psychologists create models to explain how information is
processed in the mind. Ex: Broadbent’s flow diagram.

CHAPTER TWO
Neurons
Cognitive Neuroscience – studies how the brain is responsible for various mental
processes.
Glia – cells that support function of neurons.
Neurons – responsible for processing information and transmitting information
between different areas of the brain by communicating with one another. To pass
along a message, a neuron sends a brief electrical impulse down its axon.
 Dendrites – “input” side of neuron; receive messages from another neuron
and send the message to the cell body.
 Cell body (soma) – contains nucleus; is responsible for keeping the neuron
alive.
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 Axon – “output” side of the neuron; when neuron sends messages to other
cells, thy travel down the axon.
 Myelin sheath – fatty substance that coats the axon and speeds up the
transmission of the signal.
Action Potential (nerve impulse) – the brief wave of positive electrical charge
that sweeps down the axon, also known as “firing”. They do not vary in intensity
(all or nothing), it fires completely or does not fire at all.
Threshold – if the strength of a message passes the threshold, the neuron will fire.
Stronger message doesn’t result in stronger firing, A stronger message will result
in the same action potential as a weaker message, given that both messages have
passed the neuron’s threshold. Intensity of firing doesn’t weaken as it travels
down the axon, strength of message is shown by rate of firing.
Synapse (synaptic gap) – tiny space between neurons, between the axon of one
neuron and the dendrites of another. Neurons release neurotransmitters
(chemicals) into the synapse when the impulse reaches the terminal button, and
then the neurotransmitters attach onto receptor sites. Receptor sites are like
keyholes on the dendrites because only certain neurotransmitters can fit into them.
Neurotransmitters can be excitatory (stimulate other neurons to fire) and/or
inhibitory (prevent other neurons from firing).
The Brain
PET Scan (positron emission tomography) – measures glucose level and blood
flow in the brain by producing pictures that illustrate different levels of activity.
More glucose and blood flow mean more activity.
fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) – measures oxygen levels in
blood and produces pictures. More oxygen means more blood which means more
activity. Most popular technique in neuropsychological studies.
 Time 1 scan – take picture of brain during control state, before stimulus is
presented (i.e., holding an object).
 Time 2 scan – take picture of brain while stimulus is presented (i.e., holding
and moving around an object.
 Time 2 scan – time 1 scan = areas that are active when moving object.
EEG (electroencephalography) – electrodes are place on the surface of the scalp
and record the level of activity in the brain underneath, can record change in
electrical activity over time.
Event Related Potential (ERP) – researchers can determine how specific areas
of the brain are influenced by a specific stimulus by observing the changes in the
EEF in the period before the presentation of the stimulus (the event), during the
event and after the event.
Single-cell recording – the activity of one neuron is observed and the rate of
firing is recorded.
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Localization of Function
Cerebral Cortex – outer layer of the brain; wrinkly surface. Our cerebral cortex
can be divided into four lobes and different lobes are responsible for processing
information about our senses.
 Parietal lobe – touch and skin senses.
 Occipital lobe – sight and visual cortex.
 Temporal lobe – auditory cortex and hearing.
 Frontal lobe – involved in the coordination of two or more senses.
Our lobes also have different functions, the above descriptions were just referring
to the localization of function for senses. Other areas of the brain that have specific
sensory functions.
Module – an area specialized for a specific function.
 Fusiform face area (FFA) – responsible for facial recognition and located in
temporal lobe on lower right side of the brain. People with damage to this
area of the brain suffer from prosopagnosia (inability to recognize faces of
friends, family members and sometimes their own face).
 Extrastriate body area (EBA) – activated by bodies and body parts (but not
faces).
 Parahippocampal area (PPA) – activated by pictures representing indoor and
outdoor scenes.
Broca’s area – located in frontal lobe, believed to be responsible for language
production and formation: determining the relation between words in a sentence.
 Broca’s aphasia – people have difficulty speaking (speech is slow, labored
and fragmented), damage to Broca’s area.
Wernicke’s area – located in temporal lobe believed to be responsible for
language comprehension.
 Wernicke’s aphasia – people can speak freely but they produce incoherent
language.
Capgras syndrome – rare disorder in which people recognize familiar other but
denies that they are who they appear to be. Amygdala serves as emotional
appraisal of faces, but without that feeling the person will believe their family are
imposters.
Representation in brain – the light reflected from a tree enters our eyes and is
focused on the retina on the back of our eye. The neurons in the retina transform
the light into an electrical impulse (action potentials). The signal leaves the eye
through the optic nerve and is sent to the occipital lobe (visual), certain neurons
here will fire in response to certain features.
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Feature detectors – neurons that respond to specific feature (i.e., orientation,

size or more complex features). These were discovered using single-cell recording
technology.
 Center surround cells – specific neurons that fire in response to dots and are
also sensitive to locations of dots.
 Edge detectors – specific neurons that will respond to a stimulus that
contains an edge; some neurons will respond to vertical/horizontal/tilted
edges or bars.
 Movement – specific neurons that will respond if a stimulus is moving (some
may respond to left to right movements and others to right to left
movement).

CHAPTER THREE
Sensation
Process that occurs when special receptors (sensory receptors) in the sense organs
(the eyes, ears, nose, skin, taste buds) are activated, allowing various forms of
outside stimuli to become neural signals in the brain.
 Sensory receptors – specialized cells that detect stimulus information and
transmit it to the brain (unconscious experience). Neurons in the retina
transform light into a neural impulse that is sent to the occipital lobe.
Perception
The process or organizing and interesting sensory information so that it makes
sense (conscious experience).
Bottom-up processing
Processing that begins with information that is received by the sensory receptors.
Outside worlds influence on perception: light from a tree stimulates certain feature
detectors. Perception is created by combining the neural impulses from the
different feature detectors.
Top-down processing
Initiated by higher-level cognitive processing. Expectations and prior
understanding; internal/mental world’s influence on perception. Our ability to
recognize obstructed objects is often based on the environment.
Unconscious interference – some of our perceptions are the result of
unconscious assumptions.
 Likelihood principle – we perceive the object that is most likely to have
cause the pattern of stimuli we have received.
Perception is like solving a problem: we use knowledge of the environment to
perceive what the object may be.
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Research for top-down processing

Perceiving size – object size is not determined by the size of the image on the
retina, we can perceive two objects as very different sizes even if they are actually
the same size on out retina.
 Size constancy – we tend to perceive objects as the same size even when
they move to a different distance
Perceiving odor intensity – stronger sniffs equate to more molecules that
stimulate our sense should equate stronger perception of odor.
Research shows that people give the same rating to an odor whether they
instructed to take a strong or weak sniff. We take the strength of our sniffs into
account when judging the intensity of an odor.
Perceiving speech – when we hear people speak in another language (that we
don’t know) we hear an unbroken string of sound. If you knew that language, then
you would clearly hear distinct words and breaks in sound.
 Speech segmentation – process of perceiving individual words within the
continuous flow of speech. Our knowledge of language allows us to perceive
individual words.
Gestalt principles – people organize their perception according to certain
patterns. These aren’t really laws but more like heuristics (general guidelines,
won’t work 100% of the time).
 Figure-ground – tendency to perceive objects or figures as existing on a
background.
 Reversible figures – visual illusions in which the figure and the ground can
be reversed.
 Good continuation – tendency to form continuous lines; objects that are
overlapped by other objects are perceived as continuing behind the
overlapping objects.
 Pragnamz (simplicity) – tendency to perceive things as simply as possible;
simple continuous pattern rather than a complex broken-up pattern.
 Closure – tendency to complete figures that are incomplete.
 Similarity – tendency to perceive things that look similar to each other as
being part of the same group.
 Familiarity (meaningfulness) – things that form patterns that are familiar or
meaningful are likely to be grouped together.
 Proximity – tendency to perceive objects that are close to each other as part
of the same grouping.
Environmental regularities – perception is influenced by our knowledge of
regularities in the environment.
Physical regularities – regularly occurring physical properties of the
environment.
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 Oblique effect – tendency to perceive horizontal and vertical orientations

easier in comparison to oblique (angled) orientations. We have more
neurons that respond to horizontal and vertical lines/edges than slants.
 Light-from-above-heuristic – we assume that light comes from above.
Semantic regularities – the meaning of a scene or setting, we have knowledge of
what objects/details belong in a certain scene.
 Palmer (1975) – demonstrated that our knowledge of a scene guides our
perception. First showed participants a line drawing of a scene, then
participants were asked to identify certain objects.
Neurons are influenced by knowledge
Evolution/theory of natural selection – people who had more neurons that
responded to horizontals and verticals were more likely to survive and had more
offspring: assumes that we are born with more of these neurons.
Experience dependent plasticity – experience and learning change the
structures and response properties of the brain.
 Blakemore and Cooper (1970) – found that learning shapes the response
properties of neurons.
 Gauthier (1999) – found evidence that the environment influences the
human brain.
Interaction between perceiving and taking action
Movement (action) and perception interact with one another.
Movement aids perception – seeing a stimulus from different viewpoints gives us
a better idea of the true nature of the stimulus; gives additional information.
What (perception) pathway – responsible for determining an objects identity;
pathway from the occipital lobe to the temporal lobe. Determines identity of
sounds.
Where (action) pathway – responsible for determining the location of an object;
pathway from the occipital lobe to the parietal lobe. Determines location of sounds.
Brain ablation – removing/damaging brain tissue in animals; monkeys are used to
study vision because their visual system is similar to ours.
 Object discrimination task – demonstrates that they can identify objects.
 Landmark discrimination task – demonstrates that they determine an objects
location.
Mirror neuron – neurons that respond to actions performed by the self and by
observed others. Found in premotor cortex in monkeys and humans, specialized to
respond to one type of action.
 Audiovisual mirror neurons – respond to seeing or hearing an action.
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CHAPTER FOUR
Attention – cognitive resources, mental effort or concentration devoted to
cognitive process, the ability to focus on something.
Selective Attention
Focusing of cognitive resources (mental energy) on one task; ignoring other tasks.
Broadbent’s filter theory of attention – also referred to as bottleneck model,
information that doesn’t get through does not have access to our consciousness.
Messages >>> sensory memory >>>FILTER > detector > short term memory
 Sensory memory – holds all of the information for a fraction of a second or a
couple seconds.
 Filter – only lets certain information through; selection is based on physical
characteristics.
 Detector – processes information and sends it to STM.
 Short term memory (STM) – holds information from 15-30 seconds and has
the ability to transfer information to long-term memory.
Cherry’s dichotic listening task – participants are exposed to two different
messages, one in each ear; instructed to only attend to one message. Participants
were unaware of the other message, it was not getting through the filter.
Attenuation theory of attention – research has demonstrated that people were
processing information in the unattended message.
 Cocktail party effect – 1/3 of people noticed when their name was mentioned
in the unattended message.

Treisman’s attenuation theory

 Attenuator – replaces filter; analyzes information based on physical
characteristics and meaning.
 Dictionary unit – analyzes information; important words don’t have to have a
strong signal in order to be processed, words that are expected also don’t
need a strong signal. Words that are uncommon/unimportant need a strong
signal.
Cognitive load – the amount of cognitive resources that are needed to carry out a
certain task.
 Low-load tasks – small amount of resources: listening to music. More likely
to attend to task-irrelevant stimuli while doing these tasks.
 High-load tasks – large amount of resources: writing a paper.
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Stroop Effect – difficult to name the color when the word meaning is a different
color. Demonstrates that reading is an automatic task.
Divided Attention
Focusing of cognitive resources on two tasks that are carried out simultaneously.
Automatic process – occurs without intention; does not involve conscious
awareness; consumes little cognitive resources. Occurs for well-learned, easy tasks
such as reading, color perception or driving.
Controlled processing – deliberate allocation of cognitive resources; occurs for
difficult/unfamiliar tasks and requires attention.
Divided attention can become automatic if tasks are easy or well-practiced;
becomes difficult and can require controlled processing when the tasks are too
hard.
Attention and Visual Perception
Attention has a strong influence on visual perception.
Inattentional blindness – the phenomenon of not perceiving a stimulus because
you are not paying attention to it.
Change blindness – difficulty deflecting changes in a scene
Overt attention – process of shifting attention from one place to another by
moving the eyes.
Exogenous attention – automatic attention to sudden visual or auditory stimulus.
Endogenous attention – conscious scanning of the environment.
Eye trackers – technology that is able to record eye movements, can tell what
people are looking at in their environment. Eye movements often indicate where a
person is directing attention.
 Fixations – places where people’s eyes pause at.
 Saccadic eye movement – movements of the eye from one fixation to the
next.
Feature Integration Theory
Attention allows us to perceive an object’s individual features as belonging
together; this cognitive process of combining features is unconscious.
Treisman’s feature integration theory
 Preattentive stage – objects are analyzed into separate features; this stage is
outside of consciousness.
 Focused attention stage – features are combined; we are aware of this stage
and once the features have been combined, perceive object.
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 Illusory conjunctions – combinations of features from different stimuli;

interchanging colors/shapes.

CHAPTER FIVE
Memory – the processes involved in retaining, retrieving and using information
about stimuli, events, ideas and skills after the original information is no longer
present.
 Memory trace – mental representation of stored information.
Sensory memory – temporary storage; holds ALL incoming information for a very
brief time (fractions of a second to a couple of seconds).
Short-term memory (STM) – temporary storage; holds 5-7 items for 15-30
seconds, only attended to information gets into this storage.
Long-term memory (LTM) – long-term storage; only some of the information
from our STM gets transferred to our LTM. Can possibly store and retrieve
information for the rest of your life.
 Encoding – process of storing information in LTM.
 Retrieval – process of remembering information that is stored in LTM;
information goes back to STM and we become aware of the memory.
 Control processes – processes that can be controlled, strategies people use
to remember information.
 Rehearsal – repeating information over and over, which keeps information in
STM and increases the likelihood that it will be sent to LTM (encoded).
Sensory Memory
Holds data in “raw form”, data rapidly fades and is a very brief record of our
perception. We have separate storage system for each sense.
Iconic memory – visual memory. The continued perception of an image for a
fraction of a second even though the original stimulus has changed or been
extinguished. We have a storage system that is storing images in raw form for a
very brief period of time.
 Apparent movement – refers to the illusion of perceiving a moving image
rather than individual images, we have the same illusion when viewing
flipbooks.
Whole report method – people can’t store the entire matrix or their memory
fades while they are reporting.
 Decay – process by which information is lost from memory due to the
passage of time.
Partial report method – they could store the whole matrix but weren’t able to
report it because their memory decays so quickly.
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Delayed partial report method – we have short-lived (<second) sensory memory

system that holds most of the information that our visual receptors receive.
Masking – the memory of the second stimuli erased the image of the first
(masking), images are held very briefly and quickly replaced.
Echoic memory – auditory memory, holds auditory memory for a couple of
seconds. Only holds one type of information, holds all information received by our
sensory receptors but information decays very rapidly.
Short-term Memory
Not all information is transferred to STM, duration is longer than sensory memory.
Recall test – presented stimuli and after a delay they are asked to remember as
many of the stimuli as possible.
 Recognition test – identify stimuli that had previously been exposed to.
Digit span – measure of STM capacity by determining the number of digits a
person can remember. 5-9 items, capacity is limited.
Chunking – combining smaller units into larger, meaningful units.
Coding – the way information is represented.
Physiological approach – the neural code, how the pattern of action potentials
creates a representation in the brain.
Mental approach – how we experience the representation in our mind.
 Auditory/acoustic – representing information in STM by sound, when we are
remembering phone numbers, we repeat the sound of the numbers (most
common).
 Visual – representing information by images.
 Semantic – representing information by meaning or category of a word.
Working Memory
Limited capacity temporary storage system that underpins complex human
thought. For storage and manipulation of information for complex tasks such as
comprehension, learning and reasoning. A much more active version of short-term
memory; part of our consciousness.
Attentional system – controls attention and deals with the way resources are
allocated to cognitive tasks. Controls the other systems and directs the flow of
information but has a limited amount of resources and capacity.
Phonological loop – system specialized for language; plays a big role in
comprehending language and learning to read.
 Phonological store – limited capacity; holds information for a couple of
seconds.
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 Articulatory rehearsal process – carries out subvocal rehearsal (repeating

something in your head) to delay decay.
Visuospatial sketch pad – mental imagery, helps maintain visual material
through visualization.
Episodic buffer – temporary storage for the phonological loop and the
visuospatial sketch pad. Increases storage capacity and pulls information from
long-term memory.

CHAPTER SIX
Long-term Memory
Memories that span from about 20 seconds ago to your earliest memories (around
age 3). Provides us with an archive of background information and constantly
interacts with our working memory.
Capacity – very large, possibly unlimited.
Duration – recent memories tend to be more detailed, details fade with the
passage of time and forgetting increases over time (Ebbinghaus forgetting curve).
Serial position curve – tendency for superior memory for information at the
beginning and end of a body of information.
Primary effect – superior memory for information at the beginning of a sequence.
More rehearsal time makes it more likely to be stored in LTM.
Recency effect – superior memory for information at the end of a sequence, still
in STM.
Auditory coding – sound: recognizing people based on the sound of their voice;
most common coding for STM.
Visual coding – imagery: recognizing people based on their appearance.
Semantic coding – meaning: most common coding in LTM.
Research demonstrates that people tend to encode the general idea of information
as opposed to the specifics.
Explicit/Declarative LTM
Information you can talk about; recall is something that you re conscious of and
may be deliberate.
Episodic memory – memory for personal events (episodes); autobiographical,
remembering and mental time-travel. Temporarily organized: first this happened
then this.
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Semantic memory – stored knowledge, memory for facts or the meaning of

words. Can influence episodic memories; what you pay attention to and remember
is influenced by your prior knowledge. Organized based on meanings and
relationships.
 Source amnesia – we tend to forget the source of semantic information (who,
when, where).
Often, you have episodic and semantic memories for the same information but the
episodic memory fades, this is very common for general knowledge facts. These
two types of memory are very separate, as they live in different areas of the brain
and there have been cases where people lost one kind of memory and not the
other.

Implicit/Nondeclarative LTM
Memories that are used without awareness, cannot be talked about and recall is
unconscious and not deliberate.
Procedural/skill memory – memory for doing things such as walking or typing.
Difficult to verbalize these memories.
Priming – when the presentation of a priming stimulus changes the response to a
subsequent test stimulus.
 Positive priming – causes an increase in the speed or accuracy of the
response to the test stimulus.
 Repetition priming – occurs when the test stimulus is the same as or
resembles the priming stimulus, easier for recently activated (used)
memories to be retrieved.
 Conceptual priming – occurs when the enhancement caused by the priming
stimulus is based on the meaning of the stimulus. If a memory is activated,
then it is easier for related memories to be retrieved.
Memory Loss
Retrograde amnesia – loss of memories, semantic and/or episodic can be
impaired but tends to be autobiographical memories. Tends to be more recent
memories that are lost, older memories are less disrupted, and procedural
memories are often retained.
Anterograde amnesia – loss of the ability to store new long-term memories,
“stuck” at the time of injury/disability. Individuals with severe AA report that they
feel like they’ve just woken up and cannot remember anything past the span of
their STM.
 Korsakoff’s syndrome – anterograde amnesia due to B1 deficiency, typically
the result of alcoholism.
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Childhood amnesia – inability for adults to retrieve episodic memories before age
2-4, age of first memory is around age 3. Children can remember events before the
age of 3 but adults cannot, this might be due to development in the hippocampus
or language.
Dementia – serious impairment in thinking along a number of dimensions,
including memory. No impairment of consciousness but includes a decline in the
ability to learn new information as well as a loss of previous memories.
Alzheimer’s disease – deterioration of the mind and memory, severe
deterioration in brain structures and function (primarily the cerebral cortex) and
loss of neurons and connections between neurons.
 Initial stages – mild forgetfulness, similar to natural effects of old age.
 Early stage – increased word finding problems (tip of the tongue), decline in
spatial memory (getting lost in familiar locations).
 Intermediate stage – general cognitive deficits in reasoning and judgement,
require assistance with daily tasks (feeding and bathing).
 Late stage – severe memory deficits, person may not recognize family
members or even their own reflection. Loss of communicative skills,
reemergence of infantile reflexes.
 End stage – death.

CHAPTER SEVEN
Encoding Memory Traces
Encoding – transferring information over to LTM.
Coding – how information is represented in the mind.
Rehearsal – repeating information over and over, increases likelihood that the
information will be encoded.
Maintenance rehearsal – rehearsal that involves repetition without any
consideration of meaning or making connections to other information. Prolongs
duration of the material in STM, isn’t very effective at getting information into
LTM.
Elaborative rehearsal – rehearsal that involves thinking about the meaning of the
information and making connections between that item and prior knowledge, more
effective way to encode information.
Levels of processing theory – memory depends on the depth of processing.
 Deep processing – attention to meaning and relating an item to something
else. Associated with elaborate rehearsal; deeper processing leads to better
encoding which makes retrieval more likely.
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 Shallow processing – little attention to meaning, focus on physical features,

maintenance rehearsal is an example of this. Shallow processing leads to
poor encoding which makes retrieval less likely.
Self-reference effect – enhanced memory for information that is related to the
self.
Generation effect – memory is better when material is actively generated rather
than passively received.
Retrieving Memory Traces
Retrieval cues – other information that helps a person retrieve/recall a memory
trace, typically related to the memory trace.
 Free recall – a participant is asked to recall stimuli, no retrieval cues.
 Cued recall – participants are provided with retrieval cues; cued retrieval >
free recall.
Testing effect – enhanced performance on a memory test caused by being
previously tested on the material to be remembered.
Spread of activation – activation spreads to similar or connected memories,
related information becomes more activated.
Encoding specificity – matching the context, we encode information along with
the context, context serves as a retrieval cue.
State-dependent learning – matching the internal state, memory is better when
the internal state is the same during encoding and retrieval. Internal state serves
as retrieval cue.
Enhancing Memory
Familiarity effect – rereading information makes it seem like you know the
information much more than you actually do. People interpret familiarity as
learning, and they think they remember the information.

Memory and the Brain

Representation – memories are probably represented by a pattern of activation.
Pattern of action potentials, certain neurons firing at certain rates.
Consolidation – new memories are more fragile (can be disrupted); older
memories are less susceptible. Consolidation transforms new memories from a
fragile state to a more permanent state, this can take weeks, months or years.
 Standard model of consolidation – memory retrieval depends on the
hippocampus during consolidation, once consolidation is complete, retrieval
no longer depends on the hippocampus.
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Reactivation – the hippocampus replays neural activity that represents that

memory trace.

CHAPTER EIGHT
Autobiographical Memories
Past, personal events; episodic memories but also contain semantic components;
can transform from episodic to semantic over time and recent memories are rich in
perceptual detail but this detail fades over time. Personal milestones
(graduation/marriage), highly emotional events (death of loved one), significant
events (meeting spouse) and transition points (beginning/end of college).
Life narrative – life story, meaningful episodes, high and low points.
Redemptive narrative – bad events are redeemed, overcome or made better in
light of future events; these events are associated with physiological well-being.
More predictive than the overall affective quality of the narrative.
Reminiscence bump – enhanced memory for adolescence and young adulthood
found in people over 40.
Self-image hypothesis – memory is enhanced for events that occur as a person’s
identity is formed. Older adults created “I am” statements (measures self-concept)
average origin of statements were age 25.
Cognitive hypothesis – periods of rapid change that are followed by stability
cause stronger encoding of memories. People who emigrated in their mid 30s had
a later reminiscence bump in comparison to people who emigrated in their mid
20s.
Memory for Exceptional Events
Emotional events can be remembered more easily and vividly than less emotional
events. People who have better memory for high arousal words in comparison to
neutral words.
Amygdala – active during emotional events and might help us remember these
events. Individuals with a damaged amygdala don’t demonstrate enhanced memory
of emotional stimuli.
Flashbulb memories – vivid memories of an unexpected and significant event,
detailed memories that last for a lifespan. People who were at the epicenter tend
to remember details of the actual event while people who were further away
remember what was going on when they heard about it (9/11).
Narrative rehearsal hypothesis – we rehearse the special events after they
occur.
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Constructive Nature of Memory

Memory is not 100% accurate, two people who witness the same event can have
conflicting memories because memory is not like a tape recorder.
When people retrieve memories, they are reconstructing the memory; people tend
to encode the general meaning of the information rather than the specific details.
Source monitoring – the process of determining origins of our memories,
knowledge and beliefs.
 Source monitoring errors – misidentify the source of a memory.
 Source amnesia – forgetting the source of semantic memories.
Cryptomnesia – unconscious plagiarism, individuals forget the source of
information and think that they are the source.
Pragmatic inference – inference that occurs when reading or hearing a
statement leads a person to expect something that is not explicitly stated or
necessarily implied by the statement.
Schema – knowledge of a stimulus, these influence memory.
Script – knowledge of a sequence of actions that occur during a particular
experience.
Misinformation effect – misleading information presented after an event can
change how the person recalls the event.
 Memory trace replacement hypothesis – the MPI (misleading post event
information) replaces the original memory.
 Retroactive interference – recent learning interferes with previous
information; old information isn’t replaced but harder to retrieve.
 Source monitoring errors – misidentifying the source of a memory.

CHAPTER NINE
Concepts
Mental category/representation of stimulus: includes information about and your
schema of the stimulus; allows us to label and identify a stimulus quickly.
Categorization
Process by which stimuli are placed into groups. Functions of categorization:
allows us to generalize, allows us to predict how concept will behave in the future,
allows us to plan our behavior, provides us with a sense of control and allows us to
communicate.
Organization of Categories
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Hierarchical organization – larger more general categories are divided into

small, more specific categories.
 Superordinate/global level – highest, largest category.
 Basic level – middle level.
 Subordinate/specific – specific, smallest category.
Semantic Networks
Semantic network approach – how categories or concepts are organized in the
mind (not the brain), concepts are arranged in a network and are
related/associated with other concepts.
Categories and the Brain
Category-specific knowledge impairment – when patients have trouble
recognizing objects in one category.

CHAPTER TEN
Mental imagery – ability to recreate sensory world in the absence of physical
stimuli.
Visual Imagery – seeing in the absence of visual stimuli.
History of Imagery
Aristotle – “thought is impossible without an image”.
Wundt – images accompany thought.
Galton – images do not necessarily accompany thought.
Mental scanning – participants create visual images and scan them in their mind.
Tactic knowledge explanation – participants unconsciously use knowledge about
the world in making their judgements.
Imagery Debate
Is visual imagery spatial or propositional, perceptual or language-based?
Spatial representation – spatial layout, mental picture.
Propositional representation – related to language.
 Epiphenomenon – something that accompanies recall mechanism but isn’t
actually part of the mechanism.
Imagery neurons – type of category specific neuron that is activated by
perceiving and imagining that category.
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CHAPTER ELEVEN
Language
A system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our
feelings, thoughts, ideas and experiences.
Displacement – language allows one to converse about things that do not exist,
exist in other places or are abstractions.
Infinite generativity – an infinite number of meaningful statements or ideas can
be communicated.
Skinner Behaviorism – language is a product of observational learning and
operant conditioning.
Noam Chomsky – language is an evolved capability, programmed in our
genes/brain is set up to acquire and use language.
Psycholinguistics – the process by which humans acquire and process language.
 Comprehension – how people understand written and spoken language.
 Speech production – how people produce language, physical and mental
processes.
 Representation – how language is represented in the mind and brain.
 Acquisition – how people learn language, primary and secondary languages.
Perceiving Words, Phonemes and Letters
Lexicon – stored knowledge of what words mean, how they sound and how they
are used in relation to other words.
Phonemes – shortest segment of speech, basic units of sound.
Morpheme – smallest unit of meaning, words with one syllable.
Phonemes restoration effect – when we hear phonemes even though they have
been obscured or replaced by an extraneous noise.
McGurr effect – the movement of people mouths influences what we hear.
Speech segmentation – the process of perceiving individual words within the
continuous flow of speech, we hear breaks when they aren’t there.
Word superiority effect – letters are easier to recognize when they are contained
in a word then when they appear alone or contained in a nonword.
Understanding Words
Word frequency – the relative usage of a word in a particular language.
 Word frequency effect – we respond more to high-frequency words than low-
frequency words.
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Lexical decision task – indicate if a string of letters is a word or not, response

time is faster for high frequency words.
Eye-tracking research – readers look at low frequency words longer.
Lexical priming – priming of a word primes words with similar meanings.
Understanding Sentences
Semantics – meaning of words and sentences.
Syntax – rules for combining words into sentences.
Parsing – grouping words into phrases.
Temporary ambiguity – the initial words of a sentence can lead to more than one
meaning.
Garden path sentence – leads the reader down the garden path (a path that
seems right but turns out to be wrong).
Late closure principle – each new word is added to the phrase unless it is
necessary to create an additional phrase.
Understanding Text and Stories
Coherence – information in one part of the story is related to information in
another.
Anaphoric inference – connect an object or person in one sentence to an object
or person in another sentence.
Instrument inference – inferences about tools/methods.
Causal inference – events are caused by previously described events.
Situational model – representation of the situation in terms of the people, object,
locations and events that are being described in the story.
Producing Language
Given-new contract – sentence should include two types of information.
 Given information – information listener already knows.
 New information – information listener didn’t know before.
Syntactic priming – hearing a statement with a particular construction increases
the chances that a sentence will be produced with the same construction.
Culture and Language
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – language influences cognition.
Linguistic relativism – the way we construct reality is affected, but not
necessarily determined, by our language.
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CHAPTER TWELVE
Problem
When there is an obstacle between the present state and a goal state and there is
not an immediately obvious solution.
Well-defined problems – a certain procedure will lead to the goal state.
Ill-defined problems – do not necessarily have one “correct answer”, there is not
a specific procedure.
Gestalt
Restructuring – the process of changing the problems representation.
Insight – sudden realization of a problem’s solution.
Fixation – people’s tendency to focus on a specific characteristic of the problem.
Functional fixedness – only thinking of an object in terms of its typical functions.
Mental set – a preconceived notion of how to solve a problem.
Information-Processing Approach
Initial state – conditions at the beginning of the problem.
Goal state – solution to the problem.
Intermediate state – conditions after each step is made toward solving a
problem.
Operators – actions that take the problem from one state to another.
Problem space – the initial state, the goal state and all possible intermediate
states.
Means-end analysis – strategy to solve a problem by reducing the difference
between the initial and goal state.
Think aloud protocol – participants say what they are thinking as they work on
the problem.
Analogies to Solve Problems
Analogy – making a comparison in order to show a similarity between two
different things.
Analogical problem solving – using an analogy as an aid in order to solve
problems, the solution to one problem is similar to the solution of another problem.
Analogical transfer – transfer of one problems solution to another problem.
 Target problem – problem the participants are trying to solve.
 Source problem/source story – illustrates a way to solve the target problem.
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Structural features – the underlying principle of the problem.

Expert Problem Solving
Expert – person who has devoted a large amount of time to learning about a field
and practicing and applying that knowledge.
Creative Problem Solving
Creativity – involves innovative thinking, generating novel ideas or making new
connections between existing ideas to create something new.
Divergent thinking – open-ended thinking, generate many possible solutions.
Convergent thinking – thinking about finding a solution that produces the
correct answer.
Design fixation – previous designs influence the development of later designs.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Decisions – making choices between alternatives.
Reasoning – the process of drawing conclusions, the cognitive processes by which
people start with information and come to conclusions that go beyond that
information.

Deductive Reasoning
Reasoning from general case that we know to be true to a specific instance.
Aristotle – father of deductive reasoning.
Syllogism – series of three statements: two premises followed by conclusion.
 Categorical syllogisms – when the premises and conclusion describe a
relation between categories by using all, none or some.
Falsification principle – to test a rule, it is necessary to look for situations that
would falsify the rule.
Pragmatic reasoning-schema – way of thinking about cause and effect in the
world that is learned as a part of experiencing everyday life.
 Permission schema – if a person satisfies condition A, then they get to carry
out action B.
Evolutionary perspective on cognition – many of our mental properties have an
evolutionary basis.
Social exchange theory – an important aspect of human behavior is the ability for
people to cooperate in a way that is beneficial to both people.
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Inductive Reasoning
Reasoning from specific observations to make generalizations.
Availability heuristic – events that are more easily remembered are judged as
being more probable than events that are less easily remembered.
Representative heuristic – probability that A is a member of class B is influenced
by how well the properties of A resemble the properties we usually associate with
class B.
 Illusory correlations – when a correlation between two events appears to
exist, but in reality, there is no correlation, or it is weaker than it is assumed
to be.
 Stereotype – generalizations about a group of people.
Base rate – relative proportion of different classes in the population.
Conjunction rule – probability of a conjunction between two events cannot be
higher than the probability of a single event.
Law of large numbers – larger number of individuals that are randomly drawn
from a population, the more representative the resulting group will be of the entire
population.
Confirmation bias – our tendency to selectively look for information that confirms
our hypothesis and to overlook information that argues against it.
Decision Making
Expected utility theory – assumes people are rational and that they make
decisions that result in the maximum expected utility.
Utility – outcomes that achieve a person’s goal.
Expected emotions – how people predict they will feel after a certain outcome.
Risk aversion – the tendency to avoid taking risks.
Immediate emotions – emotions that are experienced when a person is making a
decision, these can influence a decision.
Framing effect – decisions are influenced by how the choices are stated or
framed.
 Opt-in procedure – person must take an active step to choose a course of
action.
 Opt-out procedure – person must take an active step to avoid a course of
action.