Chapter 4- AP Psychology

What is Processing?

the mental operations used to make sense of information involving activities like organizing, transforming, and manipulating sensory inputs and experiences

What is Top-Down Processing?

information processing guided by higher-level mental processes, as when we construct perceptions drawing on our experiences and expectation

What is Bottom-Up Processing?

analysis that begins with the sensory receptors and works up to the brain’s integration of sensory information

What is Parallel Processing?

processing many aspects of a problem simultaneously; the brain’s natural mode of information processing for many functions

What are thresholds?

a point at which a change in a stimulus is detected or a response is triggered

What are Absolute Thresholds?

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

What are Difference Thresholds?

“just noticeable difference” the minimum difference between 2 stimuli required for detection 50% of the time

What is Weber’s Law?

the principle that to be perceived as different, 2 stimuli must differ by a constant minimum percentage; the more stimuli you have, the more you are going to need to tell the different (proportion)

What is signal detection theory?

a theory predicting how and when we detect the presence of faint stimulus amid background stimulation; our threshold might be impacted by your psychological state

What is selective attention?

is the cognitive process of focusing on one specific stimuli while ignoring others in the environment; name can capture attention

What is Sensory Adaptation?

if stimuli is unchanging or irrelevant, it filters out

What is change blindness?

we don’t notice changes that we aren’t paying attention to

What is vision?

a sense of sight, involving the physical and neural processes of seeing

What is wavelength (vision)?

• frequency of the waves

• Red is longest and violet is shortest

What is intensity?

the height of the wave is the brightness of a color; the amount of energy in a light wave influences what we perceive as brightness it is determined by the wave’s amplitude

What are feature detectors?

nerve cells in the brain that respond to specific features of the stimulus, such as shape, angle, or movement