Unit 1 AP Psych Terms

Identical twins

You share all genes.

Fraternal twins

You share about half your genes.

Gene environment interaction

Your genes influence how you respond to experiences.

Neuron

You send electrical and chemical messages.

Reuptake

You absorb leftover neurotransmitters back into the sending neuron.

Acetylcholine

You support muscle movement and memory.

Norepinephrine

You support alertness and arousal.

GABA

You slow neural activity.

Dopamine

You support movement, reward, and attention.

Endorphins

You reduce pain and boost pleasure.

Oxytocin

You support bonding and social connection.

Sympathetic nervous system

You raise heart rate and prepare your body for action.

Parasympathetic nervous system

You slow your body and restore calm.

Brain plasticity

You change connections after learning or injury.

Left hemisphere

You support language and analytic tasks.

Right hemisphere

You support spatial tasks and face recognition.

Hippocampus

You form new memories.

Hypothalamus

You control hunger, thirst, temperature, and hormones.

Amygdala

You process fear and anger.

Cerebellum

You coordinate movement and balance.

Brainstem

You control breathing, heart rate, and basic survival functions.

Medulla

You control breathing and heart rate.

Pons

You support sleep and movement coordination.

Broca's area

You control speech production.

Wernicke's area

You support language understanding.

Motor cortex

You control voluntary movement.

Sensory strip

You receive touch information.

Occipital lobes

You process vision.

Frontal lobes

You support planning, judgment, and movement.

Temporal lobes

You process hearing and memory.

Parietal lobes

You process touch and spatial awareness.

Lesion

You destroy brain tissue for study.

Stimulation

You activate brain areas for study.

Dual processing

You handle conscious and unconscious processing at the same time.

Parallel processing

You handle many sensory features at once.

MRI

You show brain structure.

FMRI

You show brain activity through blood flow.

EEG

You record electrical activity.

REM sleep

You show fast brain waves and dream.

NREM sleep

You show deeper, slower sleep stages.

Somnambulism

You walk during sleep.

REM sleep behavior disorder

You act out dreams because muscles fail to stay still.

Sleep apnea

You stop breathing during sleep.

Narcolepsy

You fall asleep suddenly.

Night terrors

You show intense fear during NREM sleep.

Opioids

You reduce pain, examples include heroin and morphine.

Depressants

You slow neural activity, examples include alcohol and benzodiazepines.

Stimulants

You raise alertness, examples include nicotine and cocaine.

THC marijuana

You alter perception and mood.

Sensory adaptation

You stop noticing unchanging stimulation.

Absolute threshold

You detect a stimulus fifty percent of the time.

Subliminal perception

You respond to stimuli below your awareness level.

Difference threshold

You detect the smallest change in a stimulus.

Weber's law

You need proportional change to notice a difference.

Vestibular sense

You track balance and head position.

Kinesthetic sense

You track body movement and limb position.

Gate control theory

You feel pain when a spinal gate opens and stops pain when the gate closes.

Transduction

You convert stimulus energy into neural signals.

Gustation

You sense taste through taste buds.

Olfaction

You sense smell.

Sensory interaction

You use one sense to influence another.

Rods

You sense low light and motion.

Cones

You sense color and detail.

Retina

You receive visual signals.

Fovea

You hold cones for sharp vision.

Blind spot

You miss vision where the optic nerve leaves the eye.

Optic nerve

You send visual signals to the brain.

Trichromatic theory

You use three cone types for color.

Opponent process theory

You use pairs of colors that oppose each other.

Hearing

You detect sound waves.

Cochlea

You turn sound waves into neural signals.

Sound localization

You use timing and intensity to find sound direction.

Prosopagnosia

You cannot recognize faces.

Synesthesia

You blend sensory experiences.

Bottom up processing

You build perception from sensory input.

Top down processing

You use expectations and prior knowledge to guide perception.