Review from Book: Mod 6, 17-19, 23-24

Question 1

What are the association areas?

Answer 1

Areas of cortex involved in higher mental functions - learning, speech, memory.

Question 2

What is neuroplasticity?

Answer 2

The brain’s ability to change, especially during childhood, by reorganizing after damage or by building new pathways based on experience

Question 3

What is neurogenesis?

Answer 3

The formation of new neurons

Question 4

What are bottom-up and top-down processing?

Answer 4

Bottom-up: What am I seeing?
Taking sensory information and then assembling and integrating it - data driven

Top-down: Is this something I’ve seen before?
Using models, ideas, and expectations to interpret sensory information - background knowledge influences perception

Question 5

What is transduction?

Answer 5

conversion of one form of energy into another. In sensation, the transforming of stimulus energies, such as sights, sounds, and smells, into neural impulses our brain can interpret

Question 6

What is the absolute threshold?

Answer 6

the minimum stimulus energy needed to detect a particular stimulus 50 percent of the time

Question 7

What is Weber’s law?

Answer 7

two stimuli must differ by a constant minimum PERCENTAGE (rather than a constant amount) to a just noticeable difference

ex: shout in loud room
whisper in quiet room

Question 8

What is sensory adaptation?

Answer 8

decreased sensitivity from constant stimulation

Question 9

What is accommodation?

Answer 9

the eye’s lens changes shape to focus near or far objects on the retina

Question 10

What is the blind spot?

Answer 10

where the optic nerve leaves the eye, no receptor cells creates a “blind spot”

Question 11

What is the Phi Phenomenon?

Answer 11

an illusion of movement created when two or more adjacent lights blink on and off in quick succession

Question 12

What are frequency and pitch?

Answer 12

Frequency - the number of complete wavelengths that pass a point in a given time
Pitch - a tone’s experienced highness or lowness; depends on frequency

Question 13

What is gate control theory?

Answer 13

Spinal cord has “gate” that blocks or passes pain signals to the brain

Question 14

What is kinesthesia?

Answer 14

our movement sense—our system for sensing the position and movement of individual body parts

Question 15

What is parallel processing?

Answer 15

processing many aspects of a stimulus or problem simultaneously

Question 16

What is automatic processing?

Answer 16

unconscious encoding of:

incidental information - space, time, and frequency,
familiar information - sounds, smells, and word meanings

Question 17

What is the spacing effect?

Answer 17

You retain more with spaced out study sessions rather than a mass study session - go figure.

the tendency for distributed study or practice to yield better long-term retention than is achieved through massed study or practice

Question 18

What is the testing effect?

Answer 18

enhanced memory after retrieving information, rather than simply rereading

Question 19

What is a flashbulb memory?

Answer 19

a clear memory of an emotionally significant moment or event

Question 20

What is long term potentiation?

Answer 20

an increase in a nerve cell’s firing potential after brief, rapid stimulation; a neural basis for learning and memory

Question 21

What is priming?

Answer 21

exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention. For example, the word NURSE is recognized more quickly following the word DOCTOR than following the word BREAD

eg.) word association

Question 22

What is the serial position effect?

Answer 22

our tendency to recall best the last (recency effect) and first (primacy effect) items in a list