Exam 2 Flashcards
Teratogens
harmful agents such as viruses and drugs that can cause problems with the baby later in life.
Habituation
a simple form of learning that occurs when an organism shows a decrease in response to some stimulus after repeated presentation of that stimulus.
Cognition
all mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.
Infantile amnesia
a phenomenon in which a person’s earliest memory seldom predates their third birthday.
Jean Piaget
studied how cognition develops, believed that the child’s mind develops through stages, and that the driving force of cognitive development is the urge to make sense of our experiences.
Schema
a mental model of something in the world.
Assimilation
the process of interpreting experiences in terms of our schemas.
Accomodation
the process of adjusting our schemas.
Piaget’s stages of development (4)
- Sensorimotor
- Preoperational
- Concrete operational
- Formal operational
Birth to nearly 2 years, experiencing the world through senses and actions, object permanence, stranger anxiety.
sensorimotor stage.
2 to about 6 or 7 years, representing things with words or images, using intuitive rather than logical reasoning, pretend play, egocentrism.
preoperational stage.
About 7 to 11 years, thinking logically about concrete events, grasping concrete analogies, performing arithmetical operations, conservation, mathematical operations.
concrete operational stage.
About 12 through adulthood, abstract thinking, abstract logic, potential for mature moral reasoning.
formal operational stage.
Object permanence
the awareness that objects still exist even when they are not being perceived.
Conservation
the principle that quantity remains the same despite the changes in shape.
Preconventional morality
children obey rules to avoid punishment and gain rewards.
Conventional morality
adolescents follow rules to gain social approval.
Postconventional morality
judging actions based on a well-developed set of ethical principles.
When do physical abilities peak?
Mid-twenties.
Presbycusis
a loss of sensitivity to high pitched tones.
Fluid intelligence
tests of abstract reasoning where prior experience is of no benefit.
Crystallized intelligence
tests that tap our accumulated knowledge.
Zygote
the fertilized egg.
Embryo
the developing human organism from about 2 weeks after fertilization through the second month.
Fetus
the developing human organism from 9 weeks after conception to birth.
Cognitive neuroscience
the interdisciplinary study of the brain activity linked with our mental processes, including consciousness.
“High road”
conscious, deliberate processing of which we are aware.
“Low road”
unconscious, automatic processing of which we are unaware.
Blindsight
a condition in which a person can respond to a visual stimulus without consciously experiencing it.
Selection attention
a mental spotlight that focuses conscious awareness on a very limited aspect of all that you experience.
Inattentional blindness
missing something when attention is directed elsewhere, failure to notice existence of something unexpected.
Circadian rhythm
our biological clock, occurs on a 24 hour cycle and includes sleep and wakefulness, can be altered by artificial light.
Suprachiasmatic nucleus
decreases melatonin from the pineal gland in the morning and increases it at night, triggered by light.
Early, light sleep with hallucinations; near-waking; transition from alpha waves to theta waves; muscles are active.
NREM-1
Theta waves; sleep spindles; harder to awaken; conscious awareness of the external environment disappears; occupies 45-55% of total sleep in adults.
NREM-2
Deep sleep; slow delta waves; hard to awaken; night terrors and sleep walking occur during this stage.
NREM-3
Brainstem blocks messages to motor cortex; difficult to awaken; when most dreams happen; 20-25% of total sleep time in adults and 80% in newborns.
REM
Why do we sleep? (3)
- Protection
- Recuperation
- Consolidation of memories
Effects of sleep loss (5)
- Impaired concentration
- Emotional irritability
- Depressed immune system
- Greater vulnerability
- Death
How much time does the average person spend dreaming per year? About how many dreams?
600 minutes, 1500 dreams.
What percent of dreams are marked by at least one negative event?
80%
Wish fulfillment
dreams provide a “psychic safety valve” through which we express unacceptable feelings, and fulfill forbidden wishes.
Information processing
dreams play a role in filing away memories. Consistent with this theory, hippocampus place cells that fire as a rat learns a maze also fire during REM sleep.
Physiological function
brain activity during REM sleep provides the brain with periodic stimulation, and especially in infants, this may help to establish neural pathways.
Activation synthesis
dreaming is nothing more than the brain’s attempt to make sense of random neural activity that spreads upward through the brain from the brainstem.
Sensation
refers to the stimulation of the sensory organs by physical energy from the external world, and the conversion of this energy into neural signals.
Perception
refers to our interpretation of what we sense based on experience, expectations, and surroundings.
Prosopagnosia
when people are able to recognize the specific spatial layout and characteristics of facial features, but are unable to process them as one entire face.
Absolute threshold
the minimum stimulation necessary to detect physical stimulation half the time.
Psychophysics
the study of the relationship between physical characteristics of physical stimuli and our perceptual experiences of them, and makes use of signal detection to measure absolute thresholds and other properties of sensation and perception.
What is the absolute threshold for vision?
12 lumens
Perceptual set
a set of mental tendencies and assumptions (motivations, attitudes, culture, emotions, expectations) that greatly affects what we perceive.
How does vision work?
Light enters through the cornea, passes through the pupil, then the lens focuses the light on the retina.
Retina
the light-sensitive inner surface of the eye, containing receptor rods and cones in addition to layers of other neurons that process visual information.
Cones
enable color vision and are concentrated in the fovea.
Fovea
the retina’s area of central focus.
Rods
enable black and white vision and are concentrated away from the fovea.
Who were the first people to discover feature detectors?
David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel.
Parallel processing
brain cell teams process combined information about color, movement, form, and depth.
Retinal processing
receptor rods and cones > bipolar cells > ganglion cells.
Feature detectors
brain’s detector cells respond to different features - edges, lines, and angles.
Steps of vision
- Scene
- Retinal processing
- Feature detection
- Parallel processing
- Recognition
Young-Helmholtz trichromatic theory
we have cones specialized for perception of three colors (red, blue, and green), and patterns of firing across these cones give us our perception of other colors.
Hearing process
the outer ear funnels sound waves to the ear drum; the bones of the middle ear amplify and relay the vibrations through the oval window into the cochlea; the resulting pressure changes in the cochlear fluid cause the basilar membrane to ripple, bending the hair cells on the surface.
Kinesthetic sense
your sense of the position and movement of your body parts.
Vestibular sense
monitors the position and movement of the head.
Conditioning
the process of learning associations.
Neural stimulus (NS)
a stimulus that elicits no response before conditioning.
Unconditioned stimulus (US)
the stimulus that elicits an automatic/natural response before conditioning.
Unconditioned response (UR)
the automatic/natural response to a stimulus before conditioning.
Conditioned stimulus (CS)
the stimulus that is paired with the US (has to come before) and following conditioning it elicits a response.
Conditioned response (CR)
the response to the CS.
Classical conditioning
a type of learning in which one learns to link two or more stimuli and anticipate events.
Acquisition
the initial stage of learning when a neural stimulus is linked to an unconditioned stimulus so that the neutral stimulus begins triggering the conditioned response.
Extinction
the diminished responding that occurs when the conditioned stimulus no longer signals an upcoming unconditioned stimulus.
Spontaneous recovery
the reappearance of a weakened conditioned response after a pause.
Generalization
the tendency, once a response has been conditioned, for stimuli similar to the conditioned stimulus to elicit responses.
Discrimination
the learned ability to discriminate between a conditioned stimulus and stimuli that do not signal an unconditioned stimulus.
John Garcia
discovered that organisms are predisposed to learn associations that help them adapt and survive, and some associations are learned more readily than others. Also, US does not have to immediately follow CS.
Thorndike’s law of effect
behavior followed by a pleasant outcome (reward) is likely to happen again.
Shaping/successive approximations
a procedure in which reinforcers (such as food) guide an animal’s actions toward desired behavior.
Reinforcement
anything that increases the chances of a behavior happening again.
Conditioned reinforcer
a stimulus that gains its power to reinforce through its association with a primary reinforcer, i.e. money or good grades.
Continuous reinforcement schedule
every time a rat pushes the lever they get a food pellet.
Fixed ratio schedule
every 5 times the lever is pushed the rat gets a food pellet.
Variable ratio schedule
every 1-10 times the liver is pushed the rat gets a pellet, random.
Fixed interval
new food pellet given to rat every 2 minutes.
Variable interval
new food pellet given to rat every 2-5 minutes.
Dual processing
the principle that information is often simultaneously processed on separate conscious and unconscious tracks.
Cocktail party effect
the ability to attend to only one voice among many, but hearing your name will bring that unattended voice into consciousness.
What percent of traffic accidents occur when someone is talking/texting on their phone?
28%
Sleep spindles
bursts of rapid, rhythmic brain-wave activity.
Alpha waves
the relatively slow brain waves of a relaxed, awake state.
Delta waves
the large, slow brain waves associated with deep sleep.
Ghrelin
Hunger-arousing hormone.
Leptin
Hunger-suppressing hormone.
Cortisol
a stress hormone that stimulates the body to make fat.
