Cognitive concepts

Anchoring bias: an individual relies too heavily on an initial piece of information offered (known as the "anchor") when making decisions.

Availability heuristic: a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when making a decision.

Central Executive: The part of Baddeley & Hitch's Working Memory Model responsible for the control and regulation of cognitive processes. It binds information from a number of sources into a coherent "episode", coordinates the sub-systems, shifts between tasks and handles selective attention and inhibition.

Cognitive bias: a systematic error in thinking that impacts one's choices and judgments.

Cognitive misers: the tendency of people to think and solve problems in simpler and less effortful ways rather than in more sophisticated and more effortful ways, regardless of intelligence.

Confabulation: a memory error that produces fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world.

Displacement: In the MSM this is what happens to information in STM if it is not rehearsed. It is displaced - or "knocked out" of the STM store by other incoming stimuli.

Encoding: the initial learning of information by placing information into memory storage.

Episodic buffer: The component of Baddeley & Hitch's Working Memory Model dedicated to linking information across domains to form integrated units of visual, spatial, and verbal information with time sequencing (or chronological ordering), such as the memory of a story or a movie scene.

Framing effect:  When people react to a particular choice in different ways depending on how it is presented.

Heuristic: a mental shortcut that allows people to solve problems and make judgments quickly and efficiently.

Misinformation effect: when misleading information is incorporated into one's memory after an event.

Peak-end Rule: people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak (i.e., its most intense point) and at its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.

Phonological loop: The component of Baddeley & Hitch's Working Memory Model responsible for processing auditory information.

Primacy effect/recency effect: Primacy and recency effect are two components of the Serial Positioning Effect. The primacy effect results in a participant recalling information presented earlier in a list of information better than information presented later on. It is believed that covert rehearsal has already moved this information to LTM. The recency effect results in a participant recalling information presented at the end of a list of information better than information presented in the middle of a list. It is believed that this is because the information is still in STM and has not been displaced.

Retrieval: the ability to access information from memory when you need it.

Schema: mental representations that are used to organize our knowledge, assist recall, guide our behaviour, predict likely happenings and help us to make sense of current experiences. Schemas are cognitive structures that are derived from prior experience and knowledge. They simplify reality, setting up expectations about what is probable in relation to particular social and textual contexts.

Visuospatial Sketchpad: The component of Baddeley & Hitch's Working Memory Model which holds information about what we see. It is used in the temporary storage and manipulation of spatial and visual information, such as remembering shapes and colors, or the location or speed of objects in space. It is also involved in tasks that involve planning of spatial movements, like planning one's way through a building.

Working memory: Another term for Short-Term Memory, it is the system that actively holds multiple pieces of transitory information in the mind, where they can be manipulated. Baddeley & Hitch called it working memory because they wanted to differentiate their concept from the "Memory Store Model" which made it appear that STM was simply a temporary, passive store for information.