General Psychology Exam Four Study Guide

Chapter Six
1. Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of cognition which is reasoning, problem solving, memory, use of language. Cognitive perspective is how thoughts, ideas and beliefs influence behavior.
2. Short term memory is limited in two ways: time and amount; forgetting occurs within 15-25 seconds. (use repetitive rehearsal)
3. A chunk is “a meaningful grouping of stimuli that can be stored as a unit in short-term memory” (201). It can be individual letters or numbers, permitting us to hold a seven –digit phone number in short term memory.
4. The best way to enter material into ‘long-term memory’ is by doing it over long period of time. Elaborative rehearsal is a memory technique that involves thinking about the meaning of the term to be remembered. Deep processing involves elaboration rehearsal which involves a more meaningful analysis (images, thinking) of info. And leads to better recall
5. Mnemonics are formal techniques for organizing information in a way that makes it more likely to be remembered. An example of this is PEMDAS.
6. Prime is a non-conscious form of human memory concerned with perceptual identifications of words and objects.
7. Procedural memory is skills and habits ( riding a car), semantic memory is for general knowledge and facts about the world (type of car you drive) and episodic memory is memory for events that occur in particular time, place or context (where you parked today). Procedural is implicit (unconscious) no deliberate recall is necessary, semantic and episodic is explicit which memory requires deliberate recall.
8. When someone experiences the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon they often resort to a prime because it gets the person to think about that description to get the correct word.
9. Recall is the meaning to bring back from memory, while recognition is defined as the act of recognizing or the identification of something as have been previously seen, heard and known
10. Flash bulb memory is centered on a specific, important, or surprising event that is so vivid it is as if they represented a snapshot of the event. An example is the high school Graduation.
11. “one reason eyewitnesses are prone to memory-related errors is that the specific wording of questions posed to them by police officers can affect the way they recall info”(217). In the experiment the participants were shown a film of two cars crashing to each other. Some were asked the question if how fast they were going when they smashed, on average they estimated the speed to be 40.8. In contrast the other group was asked about how fast were the cars going when the cars going when the contacted each other. They responded the estimated speed was only 31.8.
12. There is no benefit in over learning because that person over time will forget what he learned.
13. Distributive is learning the material over time and mass is the cramming of material. Distributive is the best technique because little by little you’ll learn the material instead of cramming it in one day.
Chapter seven
14. Concept = cognitive category. Groups things into a cognitive category that share similar distinguishing characteristics.
15. Assimilation fits new info into what you already know and accommodation changes what you already know to fit new info.
16. Insight or sudden awareness is often an unconscious process involving incubation because of the relationships among various elements that had previously appeared independent of one another.
17. Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits a person to using an object only in the way it is. For example, a person uses a clothes hanger for what is used for and the other uses the hanger to open a locked car. Divergent thinkers avoid this.
18. Divergent thinkers are creative thinker’s
19. Convergent thinking differ from divergent thinking by the ability to produce responses that are based