AP Psych Unit 2 Vocab

Amish lock in

Confirmation Bias:

a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort evidence against them

Fixation:

the inability to see a problem from a new perspective; an obstacle to problem solving

Divergent thinking:

Expanding the number of possible problem solutions. creative thinking that expands in different directions

Algorithm:

A methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem

takes longer

Heuristic:

A simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgements and solve problems efficiently, usually speedier, but also more error prone

A short cut

Representativeness heuristic:

estimating the likelihood of events in terms of how wells they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes; may lead us to ignore other relevant information

Can lead to stereotypes as after 9/11 a young arab represented the terrorist prototype and representativeness heuristic kicked in

Availability heuristic:

estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory; if instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), we presume such events are common

Talking about how quickly something comes to mind like a fear of airplanes after hearing of a plane crash

Mental set:

a prime example of fixation is mental set, our tendency to approach a problem with a mind set of what has worked for us previously

Intuition:

an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning

Framing:

the way an issue is posed; how an issue is worded can significantly affect decisions and judgements

Nudge:

framing choices in a way that encourages people to make beneficial decisions

Overconfidence:

the tendency to be more confident that correct–to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgements

Sometimes our decisions and judgements go awry simply because we are more confident that we are correct

Gambler’s fallacy:

the belief that the odds of a chance event increase if the event hasn’t occurred recently

Gambling on roulette and seeing a bunch of spins of black and thinking it will be red

Related to representativeness heuristic

Planning Fallacy:

estimating our future leisure time and income

Belief Perseverance:

clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited

Sunk-Cost fallacy:

a cognitive bias that makes you feel as if you should continue pouring money, time, or effort into a situation since you’ve already “sunk” so much into it that makes it difficult to walk away since you don’t want it wasted

Memory:

the persistence of learning over time through the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information

Recall

retrieving information that is not currently in your conscious awareness but that was learned at an earlier time

a fill in the black question or short answer or essay prompt

telling a friend about the time you won a goldfish at a carnival

Recognition

identifying items previously learned

multiple choice or matching

seeing a brand of cereal and recognizing it from the commercial

Relearning

learning something more quickly when you learn it a second or later time

studying for a final exam over the entire year’s course content

traveling to Costa rica and remembering Spanish your years ago

Encoding:

(put in) the new information

Memory Degeneration:

like Alzheimer’s begins with difficulty remembering new info and progresses into an inability to do everyday tasks

Hermann Ebbinghus test speed of relearning:

Randomly selected a sample of syllables and practiced and tested himself on his ability to recall them and the more times he practiced on day 1l, the less time to relearn on day 2

Storage:

(organize) the information

Retrieval:

(pull out) the information

Sensory Memory

the immediate, very brief recording of sensory information in the memory system

allows us to hold immediate sensory information long enough to use

visual

verbal

very brief

Short-term Memory

memory that hotels a few items briefly before the information is stored or forgotten

now called more so by working memory

a newer understanding of short term memory that adds conscious active processing of incoming auditory and visual information, and of information retrieved from long term memory

includes visual spatial and auditory rehearsal of new information and pulls info from long term memory to make sense of new information

Long-term Memory

relatively permanent and limitless storehouse of the memory system

Automatic Processing:

you automatically process information without consciously attending to it

Working memory:

a newer understanding of short term memory, conscious active processing of both incoming sensory information and information retrieved from long term memory

Central executive:

a memory component that coordinates the activities of the phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad

Visuospatial sketchpad:

a memory component that briefly holds information about object’s appearance and location in space

Phonological loop: 

a memory component that briefly holds auditory information

Neurogenesis:

e formation of new neurons

Long-term potentiation:

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

Levels of Processing:

how long & how well we remember info depends on how deeply we process that info when encoded

Structural Encoding:

emphasizes physical structure of stimulus as comes in (all caps/font)

Phonemic Encoding:

Emphasizes acoustic cues (sounds/rhymes)

Semantic Encoding:

emphasizes meaning (connects words, achemas)

Self Referent Encoding:

Relate new information to self

find personal relevance

one of the Best ways to facilitate later recall

Explicit memory:

retention of facts and experiences from long term memory that one can consciously know and declare

also called declarative memory

example: remembering that the day of the week using the date

Semantic memory:

a long term store of general world knowledge, facts, and concepts that are not tied to a specific personal experience or memory

Episodic memory:

a type of long term explicit memory that stores specific personal experiences and events tied to a particular time and place

Implicit memory:

retention of learned skills or classically conditioned associations in long term memory independent of conscious recollection

also called nondeclarative memory

example: muscle memory like typing

Prospective memory:

the cognitive ability to remember to perform a planned action or intention at a future time or in response to a specific cue

Iconic Memory:

a fleeting sensory memory of visual stimuli

for a few tenths of a second, our eyes register a picture image memory of a scene and we can recall any part of it in amazing detail

Echoic Memory:

fleeting, sensory memory for auditory stimuli

picture yourself in class, as your attention drifts to the weekend

if your mildly irked teacher tests you by asking what did I just say?

you can recover the last few words from your mind’s echo chamber

Auditory echoes tend to longer for 3 to 4 seconds

We can hold on to echoic memory longer than iconic memory

Chunking:

is organizing items into familiar, manageable units

16 units would be too much for the Short Term Memory to hold but chunked into 5 meaningful items, fits the capacity of short term memory

Mnemonics:

memory aids, especially those techniques that use vivid imagery and organizational devices like acronyms or acrostics

We more easily remember concrete visualizable words (like bicycle or book) than we do abstract words (like peace or love)

Method of Loci:

to use the technique someone imagines a physical location, then places objects in that mental space which correspond to the things which must be remembered

Hierarchies

when we organize words or concepts into hierarchical groups as illustrated here since if the concepts from this section, we remember than when we see them presented randomly

Spacing effect:

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

We tend to remember more over a longer period of time

Massed practice:

Cramming can produce speedy short term learning and a feeling of confidence but can be forgotten easily

Testing effect:

one effective way to distribute practice is repeated self testing

testing does more than learning and memory: it improves them

Shallow processing

encoding on a basic level, based on the structure or appearance of words

Deep processing:

encoding semantically based on the meaning of the words: tends to yield the best retention

putting meaning to the subject that you are trying to remember

Semantic:

when you relate it to your own life

Semantic vs. Episodic

Explicit memories are either semantic (facts and general knowledge) or episodic (a personal experience)

Both are stored in the frontal lobe

Explicit memories are processed in the hippocampus and fed to other brain regions for storage

Self-referencing effect:

most people excel at remembering personally relevant information

Asked how well certain adjectives describe someone else, we often forget them; asked how well the adjectives describe us, we often remember them

Memory consolidation:

Memories are not permanently stored in the hippocampus

Instead its acts as a loading dock where is is temporarily registers the elements of an experiences

Then when it is not immediately needed it is shifted to a basement storeroom

Memories migrate for storage elsewhere

When our learning is distributed over days we experience more sleep induced memory consolidation through the spacing effect

Frontal Lobes:

store explicit memories

Hippocampus:

stores explicit memories

Cerebellum:

plays a key role in forming and storing the implicit memories created by classical conditioning

With a damaged cerebellum, people cannot develop certain condition reflexes

Basal Ganglia:

involved in motor movement and facilitates formation of our procedural memories like how to perform a skill like picking up a pencil

Stores implicit memories

Infantile Amnesia:

• our conscious memory of our first four years is largely blank

• Two influences:

  • We index much of our explicit memory with language young children do not possess

  • The hippocampus is one of the last brain structures to mature 

Amygdala:

processes emotions

Stores implicit memories

stores memories and encodes emotional memories such as stress to boost activity in memory forming areas

Emotions can focus our attention through tunnel vision memory to recall the emotional response rather than irrelevant details

Flashbulb Memory:

clear sustained long term memory that is emotionally significant to a person

Long-term memory

our capacity for storing long term memories is essentially limitless

Retrieval:

When we pull out information we learned from our long term memory

Recall:

Involves actively retrieving information from memory

Ex: essay test

Typically more difficult

When you recall you are not given options

Recognition:

involves identifying items when they are presented

Ex: multiple choice test

Priming:

the activation, often unconsciously, of particular associations in long term implicit memory

Perceptual Set:

a tendency to perceive or notice some aspects of the available sensory data and ignore others

Ex:

After seeing or hearing the word rabbit, we are later more likely to spell the spoked word hair/hare as harre even if we don’t recall seeing or hearing rabbit

Encoding Specificity Principle:

the idea that cues and contexts specific to a particular memory will be most effective in helping us recall it

Context effects:

Putting yourself back in the context where you earlier experienced something can prime your memory retrieval

Remembering in many ways depends on our environment

When you visit your childhood home or neighborhood, old memories surface

State-dependent memory:

What we learn in one physiological state be it drunk or sober may be more easily recalled when we are again in that state

What people learn when drunk they don't recall well in any state as alcohol disrupts memory storage

But they recall it slightly better when again drunk

If you study while on the treadmill increasing your heart rate likely you will better recall the material when your heart rate is accelerated again

Mood-congruent memory:

the tendency to recall experiences that are consistent with one’s current good or bad emotional state (mood)

Serial Position Effect:

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

Uses both smaller effects to make up the Serial Position Effect

What are the primacy and recency effects

the first position and the last position

Retrieval practice:

when you actively try to retrieve from your long term memory

Testing effect:

also known as the retrieval effect or test enhanced learning, is the idea that retrieving information from memory can increase long term memory

It is believed to occur because testing encourages active retrieval of information which strengthens memory and increases the ability to recall the material in the future

Metacognition:

thinking about one’s thinking

More precisely it refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one’s understanding and performance

Self reflecting on what works and what does not

Forgetting:

our ability to remove information from our long term memory

Can occur at any stage

Anterograde amnesia:

an inability to form new memories due to injury or illness

Ex: recall one’s past but not being able to make new memories

Retrograde amnesia:

an inability to retrieve information from one’s past due to injury or illness

Ex: after a car crash, one cannot remember that past event

Encoding failure:

much of what we sense we never notice, and what we fail to encode we will never remember

Failing to remember irrelevant information into long term memory

Forgetting curve:

At first memory will decay but after a certain amount of time that information will level out

Storage Decay:

At first we can remember the new information, we then proceed to forget part of that information

Retrieval Failure:

Often, forgetting is not memories faded but memories unretrieved

We store in long term memory what’s important to us or what we’ve rehearsed

But sometimes important events defy our attempts to access them

Proactive interference:

the forward acting disruptive effect of older learning on the recall of new information

so the old stuff you learned last month is getting in the way of the new information you are trying to remember now

Retroactive interference:

the backward acting disruptive effect of newer learning on the recall of old information

so the new stuff you learned this week is making it hard to remember the stuff you learned a few months ago

Repression:

the basic defense mechanism that banishes from consciousness anxiety arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories

Sigmund Freud

Reconsolidation:

a process in which previously stored memories when retrieved are potentially altered before being stored again

Like Wikipedia that are revised and changed and we have to replace the original with a slightly modified version

Inadequate retrieval:

the inability to access information that is already stored in long-term memory because of missing or inadequate retrieval cues

Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon:

temporary inability to pull a specific word or piece of information from memory, paired with the strong feeling that recall is right around the corner

Misinformation effect:

Misinformation effect:

occurs when misleading information has distorted one’s memory of an event

Source amnesia:

faulty memory for how, when, or where information was learned or imagined

Source Amnesia tends to affect a person’s explicit memory and along with the misinformation effect, is at the heart of many false memories

EX: we may recognize someone but have no idea where we have seen the person

Deja Vu:

that sensation that you have experienced that before

May be an unconscious trigger of source amnesia

Imagination inflation:

repeatedly imagining nonexistent actions and events can create false memories

Misinformation and imagination effects occur partly because visualizing something and actually perceiving it active similar brain areas

Intelligence:

the ability to learn from experience. solve problems,, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations

Tends to be school sports

Not a quality like height or weight with the same meaning