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83 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
What is Cognition?
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(also called mental activity) describes the acquisition, storage, transformation, and use of knowledge.
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What is the cognitive approach?
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a theoretical orientation that emphasizes people's thought processes and their knowledge
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What is empirical evidence?
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scientific evidence obtained by careful observation and experimentation
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What is introspection?
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carefully trained observes would systematically analyze their own sensations and report them as objectively as possible, under standardized conditions
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Who is Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909)?
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An important German psychologist who was the first person to scientifically study human memory. Ebbinghaus examined a variety of factory that might influence performance, such as the amount of time between two presentations of a list of items. He frequently chose nonsene syllable
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What is the recency effect?
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recall is especially accurate for the final items in a series of stimuli.
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Who was Mary Whiton Calkins (1862-1930)?
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reported the phenomenon of the "recency effect" and emphasized that psychologists should study how real people use their cognitive processes in the real world, as opposed to the psychology laboratory
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Who was the first woman to be president of the American Psychological Association?
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Mary Whiton Calkins
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Who is William James (1842-1910)?
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a American central figure in the history of cognitive psychology. James preferred to theorize about our everyday psychological experiences. Best known for his textbook "Principles of Psychology" (1890)
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Who is Wilhem Wundt?
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Founder of psychology, proposed that psychology should study mental processes, using a technique called introspection.
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What is behaviorism?
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Psychology must focus on object, observable reactions to stimuli in the environment, rather than introspection
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Who was the most prominent early behaviorist?
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John B. Watson (1913, USA)
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what is the "operational definition"?
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a precise definition that specifies how a concept is to be measured
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what is Gestalt psychology?
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it emphasizes that we humans have basic tendencies to actively organize what we see; furthermore, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts
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define "gestalt"
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an overall quality that transcends the individual elements
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Who was Frederic Bartlett?
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A British psychologist in the early 1900s who conducted his research on human memory. Bartlett rejected the carefully controlled research of Ebbinghaus. Instead, he used meaningful materials, such as lengthy stories.
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What is the "information-processing approach"?
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a. our mental processes are similar to the operations of a computer
b. information progresses through our cognitive system in a series of stages, one step at a time |
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what is the "Atkinson-Shiffrin model"?
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it proposes that memory involves a sequence of separate steps; in each step, information is transferred from one storage area to another
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What is "sensory memory"?
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a storage system that records informationfrom each of the senses with reasonable accuracy
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What is working memory?
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it holds only the small amount of information that you are actively using. These memories can be lost within about 30 seconds, unless they are somehow repeated.
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What is long-term memory?
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it has an enormous capacity because it contains memories that are decades old, in addition to memories of events that occurred several minutes ago.
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Studies are high in "ecological validity" if what?
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if the conditions in which the research is conducted are similar to the natural setting where the results will be applied.
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What is cognitive neuroscience?
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it combines the research techniques of cognitive psychology with various methods for assessing the structure and function of the brain
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What is social cognitive neuroscience?
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a new discipline that uses neuroscience techniques to explore the kind of cognitive processes that we use in our interactions with other people
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what does the term "brain lesions" refer to?
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the destruction of an area in the brain, most often by strokes, tumors, blows to the head, and accidents
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what is a positron emission tomography (PET scan)?
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researchers measure blood flow in the brain by injecting the participant with a low dose of a radioactive chemical just before this person works on a cognitive task. This chemical travels through the bloodsteam to the parts of the brain that are activated during the tasks
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what is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)?
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its based on the principle that oxygen-rich blood is an index of brain activity. The research participant reclines with his or her head surrounded by a large, doughnut-shaped magnet. This magnetic field produces changes in the oxygen atoms. A scanning device takes a "photo" of these oxygen atoms while the participant performs a cognitive task.
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how fast can an fMRI measure brain activity?
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it measures brain activity that occurs fairly quickly-- in about 1 second
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what is the "event-related potential (ERP) technique"?
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it records the very brief fluctuations in the brain's electrical activity, in response to a stimulus such as an auditory tone
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What is artificial intelligence (AI)?
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a branch of computer science that seeks to explore human cognitive processes by creating computer models that show "intelligent behavior" and also accomplish the same tasks that humans do
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what is the "computer metaphor"?
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our cognitive processes work like a computer, that is, a complex, multipurpose machine that processes information quickly and accurately.
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what is "pure artificial intelligence (pure AI)"?
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an approuch that designs a program to accomplish a cognitive task as efficiently as possible, even if the computer's processes are completely different from the processes used by humans
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what is computer simulation/computer modeling?
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it attempts to take human limitations into account. The goal of computer simulation is to program a computer to perform a specific cognitive task in the same way that humans actually perform this task
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what is the connectionist approach?
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it argues that cognitive processes can be understood in terms of networks that link together neuron-like units; in addition, many operations can proceed simultaneously--rather than one step at a time. In other words, human cognition is often parallel, not strictly linear
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What are two other names that are often used interchangeably with connectionism?
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"parallel distributed processing (PDP) approach" and the "neural-network approach"
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what is the cerebral cortex?
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the outer layer of the brain that is essential for your cognitive processes
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what happens during serial processing?
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the system must complete one step before it can proceed to the next step in the flowchart.
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what is parallel processing?
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when numerous signals are handled at the same time, rather than serial processing
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what is cognitive science?
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an interdisciplinary field that tries to answer questions about the mind. Cognitive science includes three disciplines we've discussed so far: cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence
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What is bottom-up processing?
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it emphasizes the importance of information from the stimuli registered on your sensory receptors.
It uses only a low-level sensory analysis of the stimulus |
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What is top-down processing?
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it emphasizes how our concepts, expectations, and memory influence our cognitive processes
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what are "individual differences"?
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it refers to the systematic variation in the way that groups of people perform on the same cognitive task
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what is major depression?
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a psychological disorder in which feelings of sadness, discouragement, and hopelessness interfere with the ability to perform daily mental and physical functions
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What is perception?
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it uses previous knowledge to gather and interpret the stimuli registered by the senses.
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what is object/pattern recognition?
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when you identify a complex arrangement of sensory stimuli, and you perceive that this pattern is separate from its background
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what is the distal stimuls?
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the actual object that is "out there" in the enviornment
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what is your sensory memory?
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a large-capacity storage system that records information from each of the senses with reasonable accuracy.
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what is iconic memory (visual sensory memory)?
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it preserves an image of a visual stimulus for a brief period after the stimulus has disappeared
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what is the primary visual cortex?
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its located in the occipital lobe of the brain; it is the portion of your cerebral cortex that is concerned with basic processing
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what is one important principle in gestalt psychology?
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humans have basic tendencies to organize what they see; without any effort, we see patterns, rather than random arrangements
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what is an ambiguous figure-ground relationship?
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the figure and the ground reverse from time to time, so that the figure becomes the ground and then becomes the figure again
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what are illusory contours (subjective contours)?
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we see edges even though they are not physically present in the stimmules
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what are templates?
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specific patterns that you have stored in memory
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what are feature-analysis theories?
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they propose a relatively flexible approach, in which a visual stimulus is composed of a small number of characteristics or components
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what is a distinctive feature?
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each visual characteristic in a visual stimulus
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what is the recognition-by-components theory?
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a specific view of an object can be represented as an arrangement of simple 3-D shapes called geons. geons can be combined to form meaningful objects
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what is the viewer-centered approach?
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this approach proposed that we store a small number of views of three-dimensional objects, rather than just one view
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what does bottom-up processing emphasize?
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that the stimulus characteristics are important when you recognize an object
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what does top-down processing emphasize?
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how a person's concepts, expectations, and memory can influence object recognition
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What is the word superiority effect?
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we can identify a single letter more accurately and more rapidly when it appears in a meaningful word than when it appears alone by itself or else in a meaningless string of unrelated items
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what is change blindness?
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we fail to detect a change in an object or a scene
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inattentional blindess
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when we are paying attention to some events in a scene, we may fail to notice when an unexpected but completely visible object suddenly appears
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prosopagnosia
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people cannot recognize human faces visually, though they perceive other objects relatively normally
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face-inversion effrect
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people are much more accurate in identifying upright faces, compared to upside-down faces, a phenomenon called the face-inversion effect
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individual differences
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refers to the systematic variation in the way that groups of people perform on the same cognitive task
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schizophrenia
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do not show intense emotions, may have hallucinations, disordered thinking, and perform poorly on many cognitive tasks
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speech perception
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your auditory system must record the sound vibrations generated by someone you hear talking, then translate these vibrations into a sequence of sounds that you perceive to be speech
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phoneme
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the basic unit of spoken language, such as the sounds a, k, and th. The English language uses between 40 and 45 phonemes, including both vowels and consonants.
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coarticulation
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when you are pronouncing a particular phoneme, your mouth remains in somewhat the same shape it was when you pronounced the previous phoneme
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phonemic restoration
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filling in a missing phoneme, using contextual meaning as a cue
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What is the McGurk effect?
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the influence of visual information on speech perception, when individuals must integrate both visual and auditory information
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special mechanism approach
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humans are born with a specialized device that allows us to decode speech stimuli
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phonetic modile (speech module)
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a special-purpose neural mechanism that specifically process all aspects of speech perception.
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general mechanism approaches
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argure that we can explain speech perception without prposing any special phonetic mudule. believe that humans use the same neural mechanisms to process both speech sounds and nonspeech sounds
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attention
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a concentration of mental activity that allows you to take in a limited portion of the vast stream of information available from both your sensory world and your memory
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divided-attention task
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you try to pay attention to two or more simultaneous messages, responding appropriately to each message
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multitask
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try to accomplish two or more tasks at the same time. it strains the limits of attention, as well as the limits of their working memory and their long-term memory
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selective-attention task
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requires people to pay attention to certain kinds of information, while ignoring other ongoing information
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dichotic listening
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listening to a phone on one ear and a loud nearby conversation with the other ear
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cocktail party effect
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noticing your name is mentioned in a nearby conversation while you paying attention to a different conversation
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Stroop effect
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people take a long time to name the ink color when that color is used in printing an incongruent word; in contrast, they can quickly name that same ink color when it appears as a solid patch of color
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emotional Stroop task
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people are instructed to name the ink color of words that could have strong emotional significance to them
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a
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b
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