Psychology Flashcards
What is psychology the study of?
Study of mental and behavioral processes.
Heuristics
Quick mental strategies that people use to solve problems.
Availability Heuristics
Help people judge the probability or likelihood of an event occurring by using examples based on what they can remember.
This can often lead to biases because instead of relying on complete data to make a judgment about likelihood, a person relies solely on his or her memories.
Gestalt Psychology
Looking at behavior and mind as a whole.
A school of thought based on the notion that behavior and the intricacies of the mind should not be studied separately but looked at as a whole, because this is often how humans experience events.
What is the basic theory regarding social psychology?
When a person is alone, he or she is more relaxed and not concerned about the appearance of their behavior.
When attempting to do something that is new or difficult around another person, performance level will
decrease
Social Facilitation
Due to the presence of other people, we try harder and our performance level actually declines in new or difficult tasks
Groupthink
When a group agrees on most issues, there is a tendency to stifle any dissent. The group anticipates harmony. If everyone agrees and is content, they do not appreciate hearing opposing arguments.
Group Polarization
This takes root when a group begins to create extreme positions that are fueled by the group and would not have occurred in any of the individuals were alone.
Bystander Effect
As a group gets larger, the internal drive to help other people in need actually decreases.
Top-Down Processing
processing based on pattern recognition and using contextual information.
eg.) If you are trying to read someone’s poor handwriting, it will be harder to understand a single word than it will be to understand a complete sentence, because the meaning of the other words will help you understand by providing context.
Afforances
Environmental cues that support perception and provide meaning.
Invariants
Every time we move our eyes, head, or walk around, things start to shift in and out of our viewing field.
Optical array
The patterns of light from the environment that reach the eye
Relative brightness
Objects that feature clearer and brighter images are perceived as being closer
Relative size
As an object moves away, the image seen by the eye appears smaller, and objects that have smaller images are seen as being farther away.
Height in the visual field
When an object is farther away, this means that it is usually higher in the visual field.
Texture gradient
When an object moves away, the grain of texture will become smaller
Superimposition
When an image of one object is blocking another object’s image from being seen, this means the first object is viewed as being closer than the second’s object
The Law of Pragnanz
The Law of good figure, we view objects in their simplest possible form.
Figure-Ground
People have an innate tendency to recognize the only one part of an event as the figure (aka foreground) and the other as the background.
Cognitive psychology
Understanding what’s really going on in your head.
It is a branch of psychology that focuses on how a person acquires, processes, and stores information.
Focused attention
A short-term response, which can be as short as 8 seconds, to very specific auditory, tactile, or visual stimuli.
Sustained attention
A level of attention that will produce consistent results involving a task performed over time that is continuous and repetitive.
