Exam #2 PSY Flashcards
What is sensation?
The brain receives input from the sensory organs
What is perception?
The brain makes sense out of the input from sensory organs
What are the three steps basic to all sensory systems?
reception, transduction, and transmission
what is top down processing?
using models, ideas, and expectations to interpret sensory information
what us bottom up processing?
taking sensory information and then assembling and integrating it
What is an absolute threshold?
the minimum level of stimulus intensity needed to detect a stimulus half the time
What is priming?
an individual’s exposure to a certain stimulus influences their response to a subsequent prompt, without any awareness of the connection
What is sensory adaptation
to help detect novelty in our surroundings, our senses tune out a constant stimulus such as: a rock in your shoe
what determines brightness?
the perceived intensity or luminance of a visual stimulus
What determines color/hue?
the wavelength of light that reaches our eyes
what is the pupil?
the dark circular opening in the center of the eye
What are rods and cones? What is each responsible for? Which is more color sensitive?
Rods and cones are receptor cells, rods help us see the black and white actions in our peripheral view and in the dark. Cones help us see sharp colorful details in bright light. Cluster around the fovea. Cones are more sensitive
What is the opponent processing theory? Which cells are turned off by which cells?
refers to the neural process of perceiving white as the opposite of perceiving black
What is retinal disparity? What is it a cue for?
the two eyes have slightly different views. The more different the views are the closer the object must be. depth perception
What are monocular cues?
visual clues that allow a person to perceive depth using only one eye
what determines pitch
high frequency sound waves
What determines loudness?
higher amplitudes
What is on the basilar membrane?
the hair cells
What is place theory?
At high sound frequencies, signals are generated at different locations in the cochlea, depending on pitch. The brain reads pitch by reading the location where the signals are coming from
What do hair cells do?
They send signals through the auditory nerves to the temporal lobe of the brain
What is the definition of learning?
the process of acquiring new understanding
What is conditioning?
the process that teaches a person how to respond to a stimulus by associating a stimulus with a particular behavior
Generally, what are unconditioned responses?
a stimulus which triggers a response naturally without any conditioning
What is extinction?
Target behavior decreases when reinforcement stops
What is discrimination?
the learned ability to only respond to a specific stimuli, preventing generalization
What is generalization?
the tendency to have conditioned responses triggered by related stimuli
What is reinforcement? What is the difference between positive and negative reinforcement?
feedback from the environment that makes a behavior more likely to be done again. Positive: the reward is adding something desirable
Negative: the reward is ending something unpleasant
What is punishment? What is the difference between positive and negative punishment?
These consequences make the target behavior less likely to occur in the future. Positive: you add something unpleasant/aversive
Negative: You take away something pleasant/ desired
What is associative learning?
the process by which living organisms learn to connect two or more things together, such as events, objects, or abstracts concepts
What is observational learning?
watching what happens when other people do a behavior and learning from their experience
What are mirror neurons?
when we watch others doing or feeling something, neurons fire in patterns that would fire if we were doing the action of having the feeling ourselves
What is memory?
Learning that has persisted over time, information that has been stored over time, information that can be retrieved over ie
What is storage?
the information is held in a way that allows it to later be retrieved
What is retrieval?
reactivating and recalling the information, producing it in a for similar to what was encoded
What is short term memory?
the ability to temporarily store information for a short period of time
What is long-term memory?
the ability to store information for a long period of time
What is automatic processing?
information that goes straight from sensory experience into long term memory
What is explicit memory? What is another name for this?
facts and experiences that we can consciously know and recall, declarative memory
What is implicit memory?
the ones we are not fully aware of and thus don’t “declare”/talk about
What is echoic memory?
the brains ability to temporarily store and recall sounds that have been heard
What is chunking?
technique to break down information into smaller, more manageable pieces
What type of memory would be impaired with damage to the hippocampus?
episodic memory
What are the two different types of amnesia?
anterograde amnesia and retrograde amnesia
What is cognition?
refers to mental activities and processes associated with thinking, knowing, remembering and communicating information
What is a prototype?
a mental representation of an object or concept
What is a category/concept?
similar characteristics
What is confirmation bias?
refers to our tendency to search for information which confirms our current theory, disregarding contradictory evidence
What is fixation?
The tendency to get stuck in one way thinking; an inability to see a problem from a new perspective
What is availability heuristic?
cognitive bias that leads people to make quick judgments based on info that’s most easily available to them
What are phonemes?
are the smallest units of sound (vowels and consonants)
What are morphemes?
are the units of meaning
What is telegraphic speech?
a stage of language development where young children speak in short phrases. adding verbs and making sentences but missing words
What are critical periods?
a specific time in development
What is linguistic determinism?
the idea that our specific language determines how we think
What is the difference between aptitude and achievement tests?
aptitude tests attempt to predict your ability to learn new skills and achievements tests measure what you already have learned
What is framing?
is the focus, emphasis, or perspective that affects our judgements and decisions
What is belief perseverance?
Clinging to ones’s belief in the face of contrary evidence
what is sensory memory?
The immediate, very brief recording of sensory information before it is processed into short term or long term memory
