Chapter 3-5 Flashcards
Transduction
Tendency of the brain to stop attending to constant, unchanging information.
Sensation
The process that occurs when special receptors in the sense organs are activated, allowing various forms of outside stimuli to become neural
Habituation
The process of converting outside stimuli, such as light, into neural signals in the brain.
Visual accomidation
The change in the thickness of lens as the eye focuses on the objects that are far away or close.
Rods
Visual sensory receptors found at the back of the retina, responsible for non-color sensitivity to low levels of light.
Cones
Visual sensory receptors found at the back of the retina responsible for color vision and sharpness of vision
Cochlea
Snail shaped structure of the inner ear that is filled with fluid.
Organ of corti
Contains receptor cells for the sense of hearing.
Auditory nerve
Bundle of axons from the hair cells in the inner ear.
Olfactory bulbs
Areas of the brain located just above the sinus cavity and just below the frontal lobes that receive information from the olfactory receptor cells.
Somesthetic senses
The body senses consisting of the skin senses, the kinesthetics sense, and vestibular senses.
Skin Senses
The sensation of touch, pressure, temperature, and pain.
Kinesthetic senses
Sense of location of body parts in relation to the ground and each other.
Vestibular senses
The sensations of movement, balance, and body position.
Perception
The method by which the sensations experienced at any given moment are interpreted and organized in some meaningful fashion.
Depth perception
The ability to perceive the world in three dimensions.
Extinction
The disappearance or weakening of a learned response following the removal or absence of the unconditioned stimulus or the removal of a reinforcer.
Spontaneous recovery
The reappearance of a learned response after extinction has occurred.
Vicarious conditioning
Classical conditioning of a reflex response or emotion by watching the reaction of another person.
Operant conditioning
The learning of voluntary behavior through the effects of pleasant and unpleasant consequences to responses.
Reinforcement
Any event or stimulus that, when following a response, increases the probability that the response will occur again.
Positive reinforcement
The reinforcement of a response by the addition or experience of a pleasurable stimulus.
Negative reinforcement
The reinforcement of a response by the removal, escape from, or avoidance of an unpleasant stimulus.
Punishment
Any event or object that when following a response, makes that response less likely to happen again.
Shaping
The reinforcement of simple steps in behavior that lead to a desired, more complex behavior.
Successive approximations
Small steps in behavior, one after the other, that lead to a particular goal behavior.
Learned helplessness
The tendency to fail to act to escape from a situation because of a history of repeated failures in the past.
Observational learning
Learning new behavior by watching a model perform that behavior.
Encoding
The set of mental operations that people perform on sensory information to convert that information into a form that is usable in the brain’s storage systems.
Sensory memory
The very first stage of memory; the point at which information enters the nervous system through the sensory systems.
Iconic memory
Visual sensory memory, lasting only a fraction of a second.
Eidetic imagery
The ability to access a visual memory for 30 seconds or more.
Echoic memory
The brief memory of something a person has just heard.
Selective attention
The ability to focus on only one stimulus from among all sensory output.
Working memory
An active system that processes the information in short-term memory.
Maintenance rehearsal
Practice of saying information to be remembered over and over one’s head in order to maintain it in short-term memory.
Long-term memory
The system of memory in which all the information is placed to be kept more or less permanently.
Elaborative rehearsal
A method of transferring information from STM into LTM by making that information meaningful in some way.
Declarative memory
Type of long-term memory containing information that is conscious and unknown.
Semantic memory
Type of declarative memory containing general knowledge, such as knowledge of language and information learned in formal education.
Episodic memory
Type of declarative memory containing personal information not readily available for others, such as daily activities and events.
Explicit memory
Memory that is consciously known, such as declarative memory.
Recall
Type of memory retrieval in which the information to be retrieved must be “pulled” from memory with very few external cues.
Recognition
The ability to match a piece of information or stimulus to a stored image or fact.
Hindsight bias
The tendency to falsely believe , through revision of older memories to include newer information, that one could have correctly predicted the outcome of an event.
Consolidation
The changes that take place in the structure and functioning of neurons when memory is formed.
