Cognitive Psychology

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12 domain-specific abstractions whose origin domain is Cognitive Psychology.

• Attenuation theory — A selective-attention model in which unattended inputs are weakened rather than completely blocked, allowing sufficiently salient or low-threshold content to reach awareness.
• Echoic memory — A brief high-capacity auditory sensory store that preserves a fading trace of recently heard information for perceptual integration.
• Frequency format hypothesis — The cognitive hypothesis that people often reason more accurately about uncertainty when probabilities are expressed as natural frequencies with explicit reference classes.
• Mood-dependent memory — Improved retrieval when a person’s mood at recall matches the mood present during encoding.
• Narrative bias — A cognitive tendency to privilege coherent stories over complex, statistical, fragmented, or causally unrelated information.
• Next-in-line effect — A memory impairment for information presented immediately before one's anticipated turn to perform, attributed to self-focused preparation and anxiety.
• Numerical Stroop effect — Interference in numerical comparison when an irrelevant physical-size dimension conflicts with digit magnitude, slowing or biasing responses relative to congruent trials.
• Perceptual learning — Experience-dependent, relatively durable improvement in extracting or discriminating sensory information through practice or exposure.
• Pollyanna principle — A positivity bias favoring pleasant information in memory, attention or judgment under specified conditions.
• Transfer-Appropriate Processing — Treat memory performance as a joint function of the cognitive operations engaged at encoding and demanded at retrieval: an operation is effective when the test reuses it, so a nominally shallow encoding can outperform a deeper one on an appropriately matched test.
• Universal law of generalization — Shepard's cognitive hypothesis that generalization probability decreases approximately exponentially with distance between stimuli in an appropriately constructed psychological space.
• Visual short-term memory — A capacity-limited temporary store that maintains visual representations for seconds after fragile iconic persistence has faded, supporting comparison and ongoing visual cognition without long-term retention.