UoA-Intro to Psych: Test 3

Maturation

How people grow, develop, and change in other ways starting at birth and ending at death

Brain Development and Experience

Unused neuron connections degenerate. Stimulation during the early years is critical.

Piaget’s Stages of Development

Sensory motor, pre-operational, concrete, operational, formal operational

Piaget and Cognitive Development

Mental activities of thinking, knowing, and remembering

Schema

Mental representation that enables us to organize our knowledge. Example: stereotypes. Helps us to interpret and make sense of our world. Can be good and bad.

Assimilation

Understand a new experience using existing schemas

Accommodation

Change schema to incorporate new information

Object Permanence

You know, an object or person still exists, even when they are hidden and you can’t see or hear them. Babies struggle with this.

Conservation

Illogical thinking ability that allows a person to determine that a certain quantity will remain the same despite adjustment of the container shape or apparent size. Example: same amount of water and a skinnier cup.

Egocentrism

The inability to accurately assume, or understand any perspective other than one’s own

Vygotsky’s Theory, importance of inner speech

Each stage of life builds on the previous ones. Children learn how to think through their interactions with others. Inner speech is the outcome of a developmental process.

Autism

Deficits in communication and social skills. Repetitive behaviors. Difficulty understanding other states of minds.

Stranger Anxiety

Starts at around eight months old. Manifested by crying when unfamiliar person approaches.

What are critical periods?

A maturational stage in the lifespan of an organism during which the nervous system is especially sensitive to certain environmental stimuli

Attachment types

Emotional ties with another person

Parenting styles

Permissive, authoritative, neglectful, authoritarian

Physical changes in adulthood

Vision and hearing diminish. Immune system weekends. We accumulate antibodies. Cognitive changes like dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Longitudinal studies

Studying one person throughout their lifetime

Cross sectional studies

Studying many people in different stages of life at one singular moment

Gender differences and similarities

Males are more physically aggressive. Females are slightly more verbally aggressive. Boys prefer competition girls prefer less competition

Male answer syndrome

Answer questions when asked, even if they don’t know about the subject

Nature vs nurture of gender

Nature: biological sexes have certain characteristics

Nurture: Gender is socially constructed

Gender roles

A set of expectations about how men and women should behave

Sexual aggression

Any physical or verbal behavior of a sexual nature that is intended to harm someone physically or emotionally

Androgyny

The possession of both masculine and feminine characteristics

Sexual orientations

The attraction (or no attraction) to differing genders

Correlations of sexual orientation

genetic, hormonal, and environmental influences

Fraternal birth order effect

Men with older brothers, who share the same mother are more likely to be gay. May be due to different fetal environment.

Fertile females theory

Natural selection designed women to signal their fertility in order to attract a mate

Top down processing

Information processing guided by higher level mental processes. Is that something I have seen before?

Bottom up processing

Begins with sense receptors and works up to higher level processing. What am I seeing?

Feature detectors

Specialized neurons that respond to specific features. Shape, angle, and movement.

Sensory adaptations

Diminished sensitivity as consequence of constant stimulation

Schemas

Behavior scripts that show us how to act. Patterns of thinking and behavior that people use to interpret the world.

Perceptual sets

A mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another

Context effects

Influence of environmental factors on one’s perception of a stimulus

Context

The environment in which a stimulus event occurs

Motivation

A desire to act in service of a goal

Emotion

Conscious mental reactions usually directed towards someone or something

Priming

Subliminal priming

Transduction in vision

Transduction in Hearing

Neural receptors

Outer ear

Middle ear

Inner ear

Cornea

Pupil

Iris

Lens

Retina

Cones

Rods

Optic nerve

Blind spot

Theories of color vision

Order in which sounds travel through the ear

Theories of hearing

Locating sounds

Taste receptors

Sensory interaction

As people get older, what happens to taste sensitivity?

Effect of mental expectations on taste

Sensory receptors of taste

Gestalt psychology

Figure ground perception

Grouping principles

Monocular depth cues

Binocular depth cues

Sensory deprivation

Circadian rhythms and the sleep cycle

Sleep stages

Characteristics of REM sleep

Sleep apnea

Night terrors

Narcolepsy

REM

REM rebound

Effects of sleep deprivation

Why do we dream?

Selective attention and in-attentional blindness

Dual processing

Parallel processing

Sequential processing

Sensorimotor

Birth to nearly 2 years. Experiencing the world through taste and actions. Looking, hearing, touching, mouthing, and grasping. Object permanence and stranger anxiety.

Preoperational

2 to 6 or seven years. Representing things with words and images. Using intuitive rather than logical reasoning. Pretend play and ego centrism

concrete operational

7 to 11 years. Thinking logically about concrete events. Grasping concrete analogies and performing arithmetical operations. Conservation and mathematical transformations.

Formal operational

12 through adulthood. Reasoning abstractly. Abstract logic and potential for mature moral reasoning

theory of mind

The capacity to understand other people by describing mental states to them. People with ASD struggle with this.

Secure attachment

Caregiver is responsive, sensitive, and loving

Insecure attachment

Unresponsive, insensitive, only respond when they feel like it, ignore child completely

Permissive

Rarely gives or enforces rules, overindulges child to avoid conflict

Authoritative

Sets clear rules and expectations. Open communication and natural consequences.

Neglectful

Provides a little nurturance or guidance. Indifferent to child, social, emotional, and behavioral needs.

Authoritarian

Such strict rules and punishment. One way communication with little consideration of child’s social, emotional, and behavioral needs.