Cognitive Psychology Study Guide: Memory Stages, Attention Systems and Dual Process Theory
Study 59 cognitive psychology flashcards: sensory, short-term and working memory, serial position effect, exogenous attention, System 1 and System 2.
Studying. But it's also a video game. 🎮
Flashcards, quizzes and games that make you actually remember.
Posted by
FLIP IT TeamRelated reading
Memorize Cognitive Biases and Heuristics: 59 Flashcards from Anchoring to the Dunning-Kruger Effect
Learn 59 cognitive biases and heuristics with flashcards: availability, anchoring, conjunction fallacy, loss aversion, Dunning-Kruger, groupthink and more.
The exam question is almost always the definition, not the term: "Which memory store holds information for a very brief period?" or "Which attentional system is responsible for the orienting reflex?" You answer sensory memory and exogenous control, or you lose the point. The Memory, Attention & Cognitive Foundations deck (code QE6689, 59 cards) on Flip It drills exactly that direction — term on the front, a compact definition on the back.
Study this deck: Memory, Attention & Cognitive Foundations
1 / 10Cognitive psychology
Tap the card for the answer · swipe right if you knew it, left if not
One thing to know before you start: the deck is broader than its title. Memory and attention take the first 23 cards; the rest is a full Cognitive Psychology 101 survey — perception, aphasia, dual process theory, CBT, cognitive science, embodied cognition.
Eight cards from the deck
| Front | Back |
|---|---|
| Working memory | The ability to process and maintain temporary information in a wide range of activities in the face of distraction |
| Capacity of short-term memory | 7 plus or minus 2 items, as described by George Miller |
| Serial position effect | The tendency to better recall items at the beginning and end of a list than those in the middle |
| Exogenous control | Bottom-up attention responsible for orienting reflex and pop-out effects |
| Cocktail party effect | The ability to attend to one conversation in the face of many distractions |
| Episodic memory | Memory of autobiographical events that can be explicitly stated, temporal in nature |
| Cryptomnesia | Generating a thought believing it is unique but it is actually a memory of a past experience (unconscious plagiarism) |
| 4E cognition | An approach viewing cognition as embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted, rather than solely internal mental processes |
The full vocabulary list
You will be able to define: cognitive psychology, sensory / short-term / long-term memory, working memory, the Baddeley and Hitch model (1974, updated 2000), procedural, semantic and episodic memory, declarative and procedural knowledge, decay theory, interference theory, primacy and recency effects, the Von Restorff effect, attention, endogenous and exogenous control, the dichotic listening task, the cocktail party effect, perception, structuralism, Titchener, Broca's and Wernicke's areas and their aphasias, phonemes, language acquisition, metacognition, déjà vu, cryptomnesia, the validity effect, imagination inflation, the false fame effect, dual process theory, System 1 and System 2, Kahneman, cognitive behavioral therapy, Aaron T. Beck, the cognitive revolution, information theory, artificial intelligence, social cognition, Theory of Mind, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, embodied cognition and 4E cognition.
Read it as four blocks
Cards 1–17 are memory stores and list effects, 18–23 attention, 24–46 perception, language and the memory illusions (déjà vu, cryptomnesia, false fame, imagination inflation — a natural quartet, learn them together), 47–59 the modern map of the field. One block per session on the first pass, then shuffle everything.
Two fixes to make as you go
1. Update the capacity card. The deck gives Miller's 7 ± 2 (1956) without the modern revision: Cowan's work puts pure working-memory capacity closer to four chunks. Also note that cards 4 and 6 overlap — the short-term memory card describes retrieval from long-term memory, which is really working memory's job. Edit the short-term card down to "brief passive storage" and keep the distinction clean.
2. Two attributions need a correction. The AI card credits Allen Newell and Herbert Simon with the concept; they built the Logic Theorist, but the term artificial intelligence was coined by John McCarthy for the 1956 Dartmouth workshop. And the cognitive revolution card dates it to Chomsky's 1959 critique of behaviorism — the date is right, but most textbooks date the revolution to 1956. Add McCarthy and 1956 to the backs and you will not be caught out.
Two smaller repairs: cards 26 and 59 ask the same Titchener fact twice (suspend one), and the "cognitive model of anxiety" back is circular — "a model explaining anxiety through cognitive processes". Rewrite it with Beck's cognitive triad.
Next
Once the vocabulary is solid, the applied companion is our guide to the 59 cognitive biases and heuristics deck — same field, judgment errors instead of architecture.
Log in to Flip It, find Memory, Attention & Cognitive Foundations (QE6689) in the library, and let spaced repetition handle the schedule.
Ready to learn faster? 🚀
Join FLIP IT for free and turn studying into a game.