AP Psychology Unit 2

What does cognition refer to?

All mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.

What is a concept?

A mental grouping of similar things.

What is a schema?

A framework that organizes/interprets information.

What is an algorithm?

A methodical rule or procedure that guarantees a solution to a problem.

What is a heuristic?

A simple strategy that allows us to make judgments or solve problems efficiently, but doesn’t guarantee a solution.

What is intuition in decision making?

An effortless and automatic feeling or thought with explicit conscious reasoning.

What is priming in cognition?

A phenomenon in which exposure to a stimulus affects how one might respond to a separate stimulus.

What does framing refer to in problem-solving?

The way that an issue is presented to impact how people respond to it.

What is belief perseverance?

Clinging to one’s initial beliefs after the bias they saw was destroyed.

What are the components of creativity as identified by Robert Sternberg?

Expertise, imagination, venturesome personality, intrinsic motivation, and creative environment.

What is divergent thinking?

The ability to expand the number of outcomes of a situation.

What is the definition of memory?

The persistence of learning over time through different processes of information.

What is the difference between recall and recognition?

Recall involves retrieving information not currently in conscious mind, while recognition involves identifying previously learned terms.

What are the three stages of memory?

Encoding, storage, and retrieval.

What is semantic memory?

General knowledge.

What is chunking in memory processes?

Organizing info into manageable units.

What is the serial position effect?

The tendency to best remember items at the beginning and end of a list.

What is implicit memory?

Retention of already learned skills that are not explicitly recalled.

What is anterograde amnesia?

The inability to form new memories.

What is traumatic amnesia?

Memory loss caused by a severe and non-penetrating blow to the head.

What is infantile amnesia?

The inability to recall events from early childhood.

Prototypes

A mental image or best example of a category which provides a quick method for sorting items into categories.

Representative Heuristic

estimating the likelihood of events in reference to how closely an item resembles a particular prototype.

Availability Heuristic

estimating the likelihood of events on how fast they come to mind.

Perceptual set

A mental predisposition to precive one thing but not another.

Fixation

A inability to see a problem or solution from a different perspective.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

A cognitive bias that makes you stay in a situation despite all of the cons.

Gambler’s Fallacy

A cognitive bias that one will believe that something will happen in the future if it hasn’t already.

Convergent Thinking

The mindset that narrows down all of the possible solutions to the best possible one.

Episodic Memory

Memories of life events

Procedural memory

How to do a task

Prospective Memory

Remembering to do something in the future

Mnemonics

They are memory aids, especially methods that use vivid imagery.

Spacing Effect

The tendency for a distributed study (study over multiple days) to enhance memorization.

Self-referent encoding

It’s when info is more meaningful/understood, the student is more likely to remember that information.

Autobiographical Memory

A collection of episodic memories( things that have already happened to you)

Sensory Memory

The immediate belief recording of sensory info in the memory system.