Each room briefing includes room-specific IVs, DVs, and operational definitions. This page collects shared vocabulary across 10 protocols.
- Amygdala
- Subcortical structure that flags affective significance and modulates early attention.
- Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)
- Conflict monitoring region engaged when competing responses are co-activated.
- Articulatory suppression
- Interfering with rehearsal (e.g., repeating an irrelevant word) to isolate storage capacity.
- Asch effect
- Elevated error rate when a unanimous majority gives wrong answers on unambiguous trials (Asch, 1956).
- Attentional set
- The task-defined filter that determines which features or objects receive processing resources.
- Change blindness
- Failure to detect a change between two displays; distinct from inattentional blindness, which concerns a single display (Simons & Rensink, 2005).
- Change blindness blindness
- Metacognitive overconfidence in one's ability to detect changes (Levin et al., 2000).
- Cognitive avoidance
- Strategy of diverting attention from emotional material; can reduce interference.
- Diffusion of responsibility
- Reduced personal accountability when authority or group shares causal responsibility.
- Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)
- Implements top-down biasing toward task-relevant dimensions (color, not word).
- DRM paradigm
- Lists of associates converging on a critical lure; reliably induces false recognition (Roediger & McDermott, 1995).
- Inattentional blindness
- Failure to notice an unexpected object in plain view because attention is occupied by another task (Mack & Rock, 1998; Simons & Chabris, 1999).
- Invariance axiom
- Rational choice requires preferences over outcomes to be independent of description; violated by framing.
- Legitimate authority
- Institutionally endorsed figure whose commands are perceived as binding.
- Magical number seven
- Miller's (1956) synthesis that immediate memory span clusters near 7 ± 2 items before chunking.
- Milgram experiment
- Participants administered believed electric shocks on experimenter's orders; 65% continued to maximum in baseline (Milgram, 1963).
- Mudsplash
- High-contrast distractors that do not cover the change but still impair detection (O'Regan et al., 2000).
- Multi-armed bandit
- Sequential choice among options with unknown payoff distributions; formal model of exploration.
- Phonological loop
- Baddeley's subsystem for maintaining verbal sequences via subvocal rehearsal.
- Private acceptance vs. public compliance
- Whether the individual believes the group (acceptance) or only acts as if they do (compliance).
- Prospect theory
- Descriptive model of choice under risk: value is defined over gains/losses, not final wealth (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979).
- Remember vs. know
- Subjective distinction between recollective detail (remember) and familiarity without context (know).
- Rescorla–Wagner rule
- ΔV = αβ(λ − ΣV): associative strength updates proportionally to surprise.
- Reversal learning
- Contingency switch requiring extinction of old associations and acquisition of new ones.
- Risk seeking in losses
- Convex value function for losses leads people to gamble to avoid sure losses.
- Spreading activation
- Semantic priming whereby studied words activate related nodes, including the lure.
- Stroop effect
- Classic interference when naming ink color of incongruent color words (Stroop, 1935).
- Threat hypervigilance
- Faster detection or slower disengagement from threat cues in anxious individuals.
- Transsaccadic integration
- Combining information across eye movements; change detection often fails when transients are masked.
- Unanimity
- All confederates agree; breaking unanimity with one dissent sharply reduces conformity.