Psych High Yield Vocab

Prefrontal cortex

Decision-making and attention

Hippocampus

Forms new memories

Arousal

Level of physiological activation

Stress

Response to perceived demands

Neuroplasticity

Brain's ability to change

Attention

Focused awareness

Selective attention

Focusing on one stimulus

Working memory

Holding and manipulating information

Encoding

Processing information into memory

Retrieval

Accessing stored memories

Schema

Mental framework

Heuristic

Mental shortcut

Metacognition

Thinking about thinking

Cognitive offloading

Using tools to reduce mental effort

Motivation

Processes that direct behavior

Intrinsic motivation

Internal desire to succeed

Extrinsic motivation

Motivation from external rewards

Conformity

Adjusting behavior to a group

Normative social influence

Conforming for approval

Social facilitation

Better performance around others

Self-efficacy

Belief in ability

Locus of control

Beliefs about control

Yerkes-Dodson law

Moderate arousal improves performance

Resilience

Ability to recover from stress

Meta-analysis

Combines results from multiple studies