Psychology - Exam 2

Sensation

Sensation

when our sensory and nervous systems represent stimulus from our environment

Perception

interpreting sensory information to enable us to recognize meaningful events.

Bottom up - BU

focuses on the stimulus (outside world).

Top Down - TD

inside stimulation, starts with you brain and expectation.

Difference from stimulation and sensation

stimulation is the outside sensation: sensation is the external stimuli

Transduction

light goes through the cornea, through the pupil, then goes through the ganglion cells and then the bipolar cells then to the fovea in your retina and then your rods and cones to determine the light and color

Absolute threshold

the minimum amount of stimulus needed to notice it 50% of the time

Absolute difference

the amount needed to determine the difference between two stimulus

Webbers law

small amount of stimulus = small amount of stimulus to notice change

Larger amount of stimulus = larger amount of stimulus to notice change

Response bias

when its ambiguous if something is working or not, someone has the tendency to report that its working or that it’s not working with no evidence

Error management theory

stimulus about why the brain would want you to be careful. Ex. ^ men would think that women are being more subjective that they really are.

Signal detection theory

detection of a stimulus is not an objective process. It includes topdown processing relying on your own judgment

Visual sensation

when light transformed into neural massages

Retina

outside of the back of the eye, convers light into neural impulses

Rods and cones are located

in the retina

Rods are

light detecting

cones are

color detecting

Fovea

part of the retina, sharpest point of vision

Dark sensitivity

When the rods and cones are sensitive to the darkness

Opponent processing theory

Colors in complementary pairs (Red/green) (blue, yellow) (light, dark)

Gestalt psychology

rules that your brain follows to get visual information from what they are seeing. 3 laws of perceptual grouping: similarity, continually, proximity. Bonus! closure is filling in the gaps

Figure and ground

figure would be the foreground and the ground would be the ground

Object constancy

recognize an object with a different appearance

Types of object constancy

Color, size, shape

Facial perception

remember faces in much more detail than other things

Two different hypotheses

Evolutionary hypothesis (know whose who), Experience hypothesis (we need to recognize faces because we interact with them so much)

Learning

change and enduring change in behavior

Associative learning, Observational learning, and Non-Associative learning.

Classical conditioning

Classical conditioning is like training a dog to salivate at the sound of a bell by pairing it with food

Extinction

the unconditioned stimulus and the conditioned stimulus no longer have correlation to one another

Generalization

Similar stimulus give a conditioned response even though it’s not the same thing

Discrimination

learn how to distinguish two stimuli from each other

Operational

consequences

Continuous

continuous punishment or reinforcement over a period of time

Partial reinforcement

enforcement schedule that doesn’t happen regularly

Unintended consequences of punishments

behavior not suppressed but forgotten

Effective punishment

reasonable, unpleasant, and immediate.

Cognitive map

creating a mental map of where were going

Latent learning

learning without any reinforcement

Insight learning

problem solving that comes from relationships

Social learning

watching others behavior

Memory

learning that persists overtime

3 basic processes

encoding, storage, retrieval

Encoding

registering and processing

Effortful processing

taking more steps to encoding so that you will. Remember something.

How can you make information accessible?

information cue’s

How do you measure memory

recall, recognition, relearning

Three types of memory

sensory, short-term, long-term

Sensory memory

remembering the feeling (stimuli) of things

Working memory

executive functions, like a temporary sticky note on the brain

How many things can you fit in sensory memory

12

How long does sensory memory last?

0.5-3 seconds

How long does Working memory last?

20 seconds

How many things can you fit into working memory

7+-2

Maintenance rehearsal

rehearsing something a certain number of times to be able to remember it long term.

Chunking

placing things into meaningful chunks

Retrieval practice

locating and recovering information from cues

2 types of longterm memory

explicit and implicit memory

Semantic

facts and general knowledge

Explicit memory

long term memory that requires conscious awareness, semantic and episodic

Implicit memory

does not require conscious awareness

Procedural memory

motor and cognitive skills

Episodic memory

personally experienced events

Explicit memory happens in the

frontal lobes and hippocampus

implicit memory happens in the

cerebellum which encodes classical conditioning and Basal Ganglia

Basal ganglia

procedure memory

Priming

recent events have changed you due to enhanced identification words

Amygdala

involved in all types of memory positive and negative

Encoding specificity principle

however you learned the concept is what will help you retrieve it

Encoding errors

you never fully encoded

Storage errors

memory fading overtime

Retrieval errors

proactive interference (older information inhibit newer information), retroactive interference (new information interferes with recalling old information)

Retrograde amnesia

can’t recall old memory

Anterograde amnesia

can’t encode new memories

Proactive interference

when old information interferes with learning new information

Retroactive interference

when new information interferes with retrieving old information

Motivated forgetting

suppression

Memory constructing errors

imagination (we don’t remember anything we just fill in the gaps), misinformation (when someone tells you something, but it really isn’t true), source information (you don’t remember how the information Is learned)

Reality monitoring

try to distinguish between what happened and things you imagined

Source monitoring

when information is retrieved but you don’t remember where you got that information from. (source amnesia and source misattribution)

Source misattribution

wrong place, time or person associated with the memory

Cereal position effects

when your given a list you’re most likely to remember what’s at the top and what’s at the bottom

Context dependent retrieval

include external environment as well as inside environment (state dependent + mood congruent memory)

Mood congruent memory

memory that is triggered by an emotion, when you’re listening to a sad song you might be inclined to think of sad memories (encoding specificity = context dependent)

Spacing effect

studying spaced out to lead to improved performance

Levels of processing

acoustic, sematic and visual