3278609
| Question | Answer |
| Cognitive psychology | aims to understand human cognition by observing the behaviour of people performing a variety of cognitive tasks. brain activity and structure |
| cognitive neuroscience | using information about behaviour and the brain to understand human cognition |
| Bottom Up processing | processing that is directly influenced by environmental stimuli |
| Serial processing | Processing in which one process is completed before the next one starts |
| Top Down processing | Stimulus processing that is influenced by factors such as the individual's past experience and expectations. |
| parallel processing | Processing in which two or more cognitive processes occur at the same time |
| Ecological Validity | The applicability(or otherwise) of the findings of laboratory studies to everyday settings. |
| Implacable Experimenter | The situation in experimental research in which the experimenter's behaviour is uninfluenced by the participant's behaviour. |
| Paradigm Specificity | This occurs when the findings with a given experimental task or paradigm are not obtained even when apparently very similar tasks or paradigms are used. |
| Modularity | The assumption that the cognitive system consists of many fairly independent or separate modules or processors, each specialised for a given type of processing. |
| Domain specificity | The notion that a given module responds selectively to certain types of stimuli (e.g. faces) but not others |
| Dissociation | As applied to brain damaged patients, intact performance on one task but severely impaired performance on a different task. |
| Double dissociation | The finding that some brain damaged individuals have intact performance on one task but poor performance on another task, whereas other individual's exhibit the opposite pattern. |
| Association | The finding that certain symptoms or performance impairments are consistently found together in numerous brain-damaged patients. |
| Syndrome | The notion that symptoms that often co-occur have a common origin. |
| Case series study | A study in which several patients with similar cognitive impairments are tested; this allows consideration of individual data and of variation across individuals. |
| Sulcus | A groove or furrow in the surface of the brain. |
| Gyri | Prominent elevated areas or ridges on the brain's surface ('gyrus' is singular) |
| Dorsal | Superior, or towards the top of the brain |
| Ventral | Inferior, or towards the bottom of the brain |
| Rostral | Anterior, or towards the front of the brain |
| Posterior | Towards the back of the brain |
| Lateral | Situated at the side of the brain |
| Medial | Situated in the middle of the brain |
| Single unit recording | An invasive technique for studying brain function, permitting the study of activity in single neurons. |
| Event related potentials (ERPs) | The pattern of electroencephalograph (EEG) activity obtained by averaging the brain response to the same stimulus (or very similar stimuli) presented repeatedly. |
| Positron Emission Tomography (PET) | A brain scanning technique based on the detection of positrons; it has reasonable spatial resolution but poor temporal resolution. |
| Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) | A technique based on blood oxygenation using an MRI machine; it provides information about the location and time curse of brain processes. |
| Event related functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (efMRI) | This is a form of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in which patterns of brain activity associated with specific events (e.g. correct vs. incorrect responses on a memory test) are compared |
| Magnetic Encephalography (MEG) | A non-invasive brain scanning technique based on recording the magnetic fields generated by brain activity. |
| Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) | A technique in which magnetic pulses briefly disrupt the functioning of a given brain area. TMS causes interference when the brain area to which it applied is involved in task processing as well as activity produced by the applied stimulation. |
| Repetitive Transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) | The administration of tanscranial magnetic stimulation several time sin rapid succession. |
| Lesions | Structural Alterations within the brain caused by disease or injury. |
| Electroencephalography (EEG) | Recording the brain's electrical potentials through a series of scalp electrodes |
| BOLD | Blood Oxygen Level Dependent Contrast; this is the signal measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging. |
| Meta Analysis | A form of statistical analysis based on combining the findings from numerous studies on a given issue. |
| Functional Specialisation | The assumption that each brain area or region is specialised for a specific function (e.g. colour processing, face processing) |
| Reverse Inference | As applied to functional neuroimaging, it involves arguing backwaards from a pattern of brain activation to the presence of a given cognitive process. |
| Computational Modelling | This involves constructing computer programs that stimulate or mimic human cognitive processes. |
| Artificial intelligence | This involves developing computer programs that produce intelligent outcomes. |
| Cognitive Architecture | A comprehensive framework for understanding human cognition in the form of a computer program. |
| Connectionist Models | Models in computational cognitive science consisting if interconnected networks of simple units; the networks exhibit learning through experience and specific items of knowledge are distributed across numerous units. |
| Back propagation | A learning mechanism in connectionist models based on comparing actual responses to correct ones. |
| Production Systems | These consist of very large numbers of 'if...then' production rules and a working memory containing information. |
| Production rules | 'If....then' or conditional rules in which the action is carried out whenever the appropriate condition is present. |
| Working Memory | A system holding information currently being processed. |
| Converging operations | An approach in which several methods with different strengths and limitations are used to address a given issue. |
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