Sensory Memory

the immediate, very brief recording of sensory information in the memory system

Iconic Memory

momentary sensory memory of visual stimuli

Selective Attention

ability to focus memory on individual stimulus

Echoic Memory

a momentary sensory memory of auditory stimuli; if attention is elsewhere, sounds and words can still be recalled within 3 or 4 seconds.

Chunking

organizing items into familiar, manageable units

Mnemonic Devices

memory aids especially those techniques that use vivid imagery and organizational devices

Rehesarsal

the conscious repetition of information, either to maintain it in consciousness or to encode it for storage

Episodic Memory

portion of LTM that stores personally experienced events

Semantic Memory

portion of LTM that stores general facts and information

Procedural Memory

portion of LTM that stores information relating to skills,habits, and other perceptual-motor tasks

Explicit Memories

memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and declare

Implicit Memories

retention independent of conscious recollection

Eidetic Memory

ability to reproduce unusually sharp and detailed images of something someone has seen

Retrieval

the process of getting information out of memory storage

Recognition

a measure of memory in which the person need only identify items previously learned

Recall

a measure of memory in which the person must retrieve information learned earlier

Primacy Effect/Recency Effect

tendency to remember items at beginning or end of list

Serial Position Effect

the tendency to recall best the last and first items in a list

Tip-of-the-tongue Phenomenon

a temporary inability to remember something accompanied by a feeling that it's just out of reach

Flashbulb Memories

a clear memory of an emotionally significant moment or event

State-dependent Memory

the impact of a physiological state on recall

Mood Congruent Memory

the tendency to recall experiences that are consistent with one's current good or bad mood

Relearning Effect

a memory measure that assesses the amount of time saved when learning material for a second time

Retroactive Interference

newly learned material interferes with previously learned material

Proactive Interference

previously learned information interferes with newly learned information

Anterograde Amnesia

loss of ability to create new memories after the event that causes the amnesia, leading to a partial or complete inability to recall the recent past, while long term memories from before the event remain inapt.

Retrograde Amnesia

loss of memory from the point of some injury or trauma backwards, or loss of memory for the past.

Phonemes

basic sound units

Morphemes

smallest meaningful units of speech; simple words, suffixes, prefixes

Syntax

system of rules that governs how words are combined/arranged to form meaningful phrases and sentences; determined by word order

Overgeneralization

process of extending the application of a rule to items that are excluded from i

Language Acquisition Device

hypothetical module of the human mind posited to account for children's innate predisposition for language acquisition. First proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s, the LAD concept is an instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language

Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis

way people think is strongly affected by their native languages; Sapir and Worf

Prototypes

objects or events that best represent a natural concept

Heuristic

problem-solving strategy; mental shortcut

Representative Heuristic

mental shortcut that involves people deciding whether an example belongs in a certain class on the basis of how similar it is to other items in that class

Belief Bias

endency to judge the strength of arguments based on the plausibility of their conclusion rather than how strongly they support that conclusion

Functional Fixedness

the inability to use objects in new ways

Convergent/Divergent Thinking

convergent-only one answer; answers are narrow in focus; divergent-thinking outside the box; generating as many unique answers as possible

Availability Heuristic

mental shortcut that involves making decisions on the basis of information that is available in a person's immediate consciousness.

Albert Bandura

Bodo dolls; observational learning

George Spearling

sensory and iconic memory

Hermann Ebbinghaus

memory, nonsense syllables-learning and forgetting curves

Memory

Learning that persisted over time, information that has been stored and can be retrieved.

Parallel Processing

The brain's ability to make sense of several different incoming stimuli at the same time