Psych/Soc - more

meaning on the same side of the body, meaning senses from your right nasal cavity are processed by the right brain. All other senses are contralateral

Ipsilateral - olfaction

what is special about olfaction

it bypasses the thalamus

a type of mechanoreceptor that responds to muscles stretching, like when a doctor hits your knee, that causes a muscle spindle to detect a stretch and create a neural reflex response

spindle receptors

fast to slow vibers

a - beta (fastest), a delta, c fibers (slowest)

a thermoreceptor that has a conformational change in the presence of heat, but can also stimulate pain responses via the same mechanism, which is why extreme heat can be painful, or why spicy foods with capsaicin feel “hot”/painful

TrpV1 receptor-

a plate that separates the brain from the nasal cavity

Cribriform plat

nerves (mitral cells) that connects the olfactory epithelium, through the cribriform plate, getting messages from the olfactory receptors to the brain

olfactory bulb

each taste bud receptor has 5 different axons, each corresponding to a  different taste (sweet/salty/etc.), each axon type going to a specific region of the primary gustatory cortex that corresponds to that type of taste

Ex.  if you eat sugar (something sweet), we have sweet taste buds that are activated by that sugar molecule, which activates a certain part of the gustatory cortex that registers it as sweet

labeled line theory

mushroom shaped, at the front of your tongue

fungiform

visible bumps on your tongue that contain taste buds

papillae

taste buds on the sides of the tongue

foliate

Weber's stratification =

Class + Status + Power.

papillae that fill the middle portion of your tongue the only type of papillae that actually doesn’t carry any taste buds

filiform

What occurs whenever photoreceptors receive light?

They are hyperpolarized and produce less glutamate

occurs when we have large amounts of light, allowing cones to be very active

photopic vision

occurs at dawn or dusk, when we have less light than photopic vision, where both rods and cones are utilized

mesotopic vision

 occurs when we have very low levels of light (like at night), mainly controlled by rods

scotopic vision

when the brain alternates between two different images presented to each eye, since each eye sees a slightly different image

Example- if your left eye was being shown a person, and the right eye a house, you’d rotate between seeing each picture instead of both at the same time

binocular rivalry

the illusion of motion from images that are rapidly alternating

Ex.  

the loading wheel on websites isn’t actually a wheel that’s rotating, it’s just a pixel turning on and off in a way that makes it look like a circle that’s rotating

phi phenomenon

when a stationary objects appear to move in the despite it not actually moving

autokinetic effect

color vision is based on three types of cones, the color we perceive is based on how much each of the three cones is activated

• Example- if you see Yellow, that means you probably have a lot of green and red being activated and not much blue

trichromatic theory

processes fine detail and color, such as reading text or identifying the color of a wall

• Mostly controlled by cones

parvocellular pathway

- colors are processed by opposing pairs of colors

• Example- if you stare at the image below for a long time, then look away, the flag will be different colors when you close your eyes, theorized to be because you’re tiring out the receptor combos for yellow and blue which causes their opposites to dominate when you close your eyes

Opponent-Process Theory

processes motion and the outlines of objects, such as tracking a moving train

• Mostly controlled by rods

Magnocellular Pathway

 if you have a song memorized, even if we delete some words/letters (small details) you still can read the lyrics just fine

top down processing

how you prioritize your attention in aims to complete a certain goal, such as having a project due tomorrow so you focus on that instead of cleaning your room

executive attention

form of selective attention where, despite receiving info from all 5 senses, we pick one at a time to be conscious of and can potentially shift to another (like shifting a spotlight)

Spotlight model of attention-

• an example of the spotlight model of attention where exposure to one stimulus affects our ability to respond to other stimuli, where stimuli we have been primed to are more often shifted into our spotlight than others

  • Example- we are primed to hearing our name, so if you hear it, you put that person saying your name in your spotlight and then are only unconsciously aware of everything else

priming

• inhibits processing of stimuli by suppressing or ignoring previous similar stimuli

  • Example- if you’re told to ignore the word red for task A, you’ll do worse if then asked to focus on the word red in task B

negative priming

•  because we have limited resources as individual humans (we only have one set of eyes, one set of ears, etc.), we can be overwhelmed and overtasked if presented with too many stimuli if we try to focus on many stimuli at once

  • Example- you may become more tired (and do worse) if you are listening to a podcast and studying at the same time rather than just studying, since doing both requires a larger use of energy

Resource Model of Attention-

• aka hemispatial neglect, where a person fails to pay attention to or perceive one side of a space, usually due to damage to a lobe, even if their vision is intact

  • Example- Patients with this would only be able to draw one half of a picture, or only eat one half of food on their plate, almost as if they thought the other half didn’t even exist

Neglect syndrome

 the tendency for tasks that are similar in nature to be easier to devote divided attention to, which explains why listening to classical music while studying is often easier than listening to a podcast about space while studying

task similarity

where your prior knowledge and expectations dictate how you interpret the smaller details

deductive reasoning

the act of bringing something to your attention without any physical movement

• Example- listening to someone talk to you while you are watching TV, your attention is on them but you didn’t move to do it

covert orienting

• when a person turns all or part of the body to maximize their ability to maintain their attention on that object

  • Example- turning your head to listen to someone talk to you, you are physically moving to better focus on the stimuli

overt orienting

•  the actual light, sound wave, etc. that hits your sensory receptors, creating a sensation that your body can respond to

proximal stimulu

• objects and events out in the world around you that create proximal stimuli you can respond to

  • Example- a tree that you’re looking at is a distal stimuli, the light that hits your eye off that tree is proximal stimuli

distal stimulu

• we have a selective filter that, after we sense the stimulus, the filter decides what is and isn’t worth our attention, followed by the perception of that stimuli, then to conscious thought

  • Sensory register → selective filter → perceptual process → conscious thought

Broadbent’s Early Selection Theory-

• conversely to Broadbent’s theory, the selective filter that determines what will have our attention comes after we perceive it, not before, then ultimately leading to conscious thought, thus being why it’s called the late selection theory (since the selective filter is later)

• Sensory register → perceptual process → selective filter → conscious thought

Deutsch and Deutsch’s Late Selection Theory

• there is an attenuator that replaces the selective filter that simply weakens the input from unattended stimuli, rather than outright eliminating them or having them occupy our full attention, potentially allowing for later processing

  • Sensory register → attenuator → perceptual process → selective filter → conscious thought

  • An explanation of why sometimes you don’t understand what someone is saying at first but can then think about it and then you understand

Treisman’s Attenuation Theory

• proposed by Johnson and Heinz, the idea that Treisman’s attenuator is flexible and can change its position of either being before or after the selective filters or perceptual processes (in other words, it can follow either early or late detection theories and the attenuator can change positions within each type of attention detection)

Multimodal Attenuator Theory-

• the interpretation of new information into existing schemas, potentially incorrectly, like seeing an otter swimming and thinking it’s a fish, or seeing a green cookie and thinking it’s a vegetable

assimilation

• the opposite of assimilation, where the schema changes to fit the new information, like seeing Corgi’s as baby dogs but then being told that Corgi’s are in fact just short adult dogs changes your view of what an adult dog is

accomadation

• awareness and understanding of your own ability to think, such as the realization that you don’t understand a topic and need to swap to a different studying method to understand it

metacognition

• when you have too many options that can make decision-making and cognition much harder, often also reducing satisfaction

  • Example- the insanely large menu at some restaurants like the Cheesecake Factory, having a large menu makes it harder to make a choice

tyranny of choice

•  if A relates to B, and B relates to C, A relates to C

• Example- if Alex is taller than Ben, and Ben is taller than Chris, Alex is taller than Chris even though you didn’t directly measure the two against each other

Transitive Property

•  developed intelligence tests, used to detect giftedness or intellectual disabilities. IQ

binet

believed that intelligence is hereditary

Galton’s Hereditary Genius

the ability to reason quickly and abstractly, like solving new problems, decreases with age

fluid intelligence

• accumulated knowledge and verbal skills, simply how good you are at retrieving knowledge rather than understanding new, increases with age

crystallized intelligence

• breaking a problem into steps to better understand how to get from the start to the finish

  • Example- when trying to figure out how to get into medical school, chunking the pieces into your GPA, MCAT score, clinical hours, etc. rather than just looking at your application as a whole

means end analysis - type of heuristic

•  people take more risks with money they have won from someone or something else than with their own money because it doesn’t feel like theirs, it feels like it belongs “to the house”

  • Example- if you win $50 on Roulette, you’re more likely to spend that $50 since you don’t perceive it as your own, rather than walking away with a win

house money effect

• belief that past random events affect future events, even if they have nothing to do with the past events

  • Example- if you have a 50% chance of getting into 3 different medical schools, getting rejected from one makes you think you’re more likely to get into the others

gambler’s fallacty

• the error of believing that two events occurring together is more likely than them occurring alone

  • Example- which probability is more likely? It will rain tomorrow, or it will rain and there will be thunder? Most people pick B, despite it being more likely to just rain, rather than having both rain AND thunder.

conjuction fallacy

•  how people perceive and think things is relative to their language, your language influences how you think

Linguistic Relativity hypothesis (the Weak Hypothesis)

• the Whorffian hypothesis, opposite of linguistic relativity, the language someone knows dictates how they think, if you don’t know the word, you don’t know how to think about it

Linguistic Determinism (the Strong Hypothesis)-

 inability to produce the motor movements necessary for speech

apoxia

• the patterns and rhythms of sounds, controlled by the right side of the brain

  • Example- “You’re going?” and “You’re going.” have different prosody and are understood differently

prosody

• the actual vocabulary terme

lexicon

• the actual sound of a language, like how British english sounds different than American english

phonolgy

• the actual meaning of words and sentences, like how “he passed away” means something different than “he passed out”

semantics

• the rules that dictate the order of words in sentences

  • Example- dog bites man means the exact opposite of man bites dog, so the order of words is important

syntax

• how context affects the meaning of words

  • Example- if you say, “it’s cold in here”, you actually are saying that you’d like the window closed

pragmatics

the partial or complete loss of the sense of smell.

anosmia

better retrieval when the external environment (room, location) matches the encoding environment.

context dependent effects

better retrieval when the internal state (mood, drug influence) matches the encoding state.

state dependent effects

Temporal lobe for ____; Frontal lobe for ____

olfaction, gustation

 a network of neurons in the brainstem responsible for regulating wakefulness, arousal, and transitions between sleep and wake states.

Reticular Activating System (RAS)

brief, vivid sensory hallucinations (like hearing a voice or seeing a flash of light) that occur right as a person is falling asleep (Stage 1).

Hypnagogic hallucinations-

developing a physical tolerance for one specific drug, which simultaneously causes you to develop a tolerance for entirely different drugs that happen to act on the exact same neurotransmitter pathways (usually the GABA pathway for depressants).

cross tolerance

happen when you are waking up from sleep, not falling asleep.

Hypnopompic hallucinations 

prosopagnosia -

facial blindness

the reduction in time or effort required to relearn information a second time, proving that the information was never fully lost from long-term memory.

memory savings

linguistic determinism vs linguisitc relativism

linguistic determinism is more extreme

a mild, specific type of aphasia where the patient has completely intact comprehension and fluent speech, but suffers from a severe inability to retrieve specific words or name objects

anomic aphasia

• a rare behavioral impairment caused by bilateral damage to the amygdala. Symptoms include a complete lack of fear, extreme docility, hyperorality (putting everything in the mouth), and hypersexuality.

Kluver-Bucy Syndrome

• chronic, low-grade, environmental stressors that are often in the background and generally hard to control or change (like pollution, crowding, or noise).

ambient stressor

• drives related to survival, reproduction, health, and building things up.

eros (life instinct

• drives related to aggression, self destruction, thrill seeking, and tearing things down

thanatos (death instinct)

• The theory that willpower and self-control are finite resources. If you use up all your willpower resisting one thing (like the urge to stop studying), you will have zero willpower left to resist later temptations.

ego depletion

“ you are so smart and brilliant can you help me with this “

altercasting

proactive -  

thinking about future 

• An actor who secretly participates in a psychological experiment pretending to be a normal subject, but who is actually working directly for the researcher to manipulate the social environment of the true participant.

confederate

sweating

physioglocial

deals with how we attribute dispositional traits to unexpected behaviors.

correspondant interference

Individuals with similar phenotypes mate with one another more free

assortative mating

• The attribution of human traits, complex human emotions, or human intentions to non-human entities, animals, or inanimate objects.

anthropomophorism

we dream of threatening situations in order to prepare for real world, problem solving scenarios

• Example- if you’re running away from a bear in your dream, that is your brain preparing you to flee from danger if it ever does happen

evolutionary theory of dreaming

linking new information to an already memorized set of information that rhymes, such as one = bun, two = shoe, three = tree, etc. (you already have the order of numbers memorized, you’re tying the new words to those numbers based on rhyming)

peg word system

integrates information from different sources into a coherent memory, such as combining someone’s face, voice, and what restaurant you’re at in memorizing them long-term

episodic buffer

states that a psychological disorder results from the interaction between a biological vulnerability and an environmental stressor.

diathesis stress model

Two students receive the same failing grade, but one views it as devastating while the other sees it as a chance to improve.

psychological appraisal theory of stress

A society believes advanced education is morally superior and highly desirable. What cultural component is this?

cultural value

prioritize group and family needs over individual achievement.

Ex. An employee declines a promotion because it would separate them from family.

collectivist culture

innate, biologically based behavioral tendencies present early in life.

ex. A newborn is consistently fussy and irritable regardless of environment.

temperament

A person integrates their conscious ego with both personal and collective unconscious material.

viewed the Self as the achievement of psychological wholeness through individuation.

Jung's archetype of self

love/support depends on behavior.

Conditional

support regardless of performance.

unconditional

A father restricts allowance when his daughter drops out of medical school; a mother supports her son after he fails exams.

conditional vs unconditional suport