AP Psychology: Sensation, Perception, and Evidence-Based Writing (EBQ)

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the AP Psychology curriculum on Sensation, Perception, and the Evidence-Based Question (EBQ) rubric and research methods.

Evidence-Based Question (EBQ)

FRQ 2 on the AP Psychology Exam, worth 7 total points (16.67% of the total exam score), requiring students to formulate a defensible claim and justify it using evidence from provided sources and psychological science concepts.

CERA-ERA Framework

The structural writing format for the EBQ consisting of Claim, Evidence, Reasoning, and Application for Part B, followed by Evidence, Reasoning, and Application from a different source and concept for Part C.

SODA Criteria

The four benchmark qualities required for formulating a strong, point-earning EBQ claim: Specific, Original, Defensible, and Arguable.

ICE Framework

A three-step strategy for incorporating source material in an EBQ: Introduce the evidence, Cite the evidence (via direct quotation or data), and Explain the evidence with an applied psychological concept.

Claim (EBQ Part A)

A specific, defensible, and relevant stance that responds to the prompt by proposing a positive or negative effect, recommendation, or outcome, earning 0 to 1 point regardless of Parts B and C.

Parenthetical Citation

A formal citation method used in the EBQ where the source identifier is placed in parentheses at the end of the evidence sentence (e.g., '…(Source 1)').

Embedded Citation

A citation method where the source attribution is integrated directly into the text of the sentence (e.g., 'According to Source 1,…').

AP Psych Task Verbs

Standard command words used on AP Psychology Free Response Questions, including Describe, Explain, Identify/State, Propose, Support or Refute, and Use Evidence.

Adolescent Phase Delay

A biological shift of up to $2\text{ hours}$ in the circadian sleep-wake cycle occurring during puberty, causing adolescents to naturally fall asleep later and wake up later than children or adults.

Spaced Repetition

A learning technique involving reviewing material across increasing intervals of time (such as 1, 3, 7, and 14 days), which significantly improves long-term memory consolidation and retention compared to massed practice.

Interleaving

A practice strategy that involves alternating between different types of problems, categories, or concepts, enhancing category discrimination and transfer of knowledge to novel problem-solving tasks compared to blocked practice.

Sensation

The bottom-up process by which sensory receptors and the nervous system receive and represent raw stimulus energies from our external and internal environments.

Perception

The top-down process by which the brain organizes, interprets, and gives meaning to incoming sensory input using prior experience, expectations, and context.

Bottom-Up Processing

Sensory analysis that begins at the sensory receptors and works up to higher levels of brain integration, detecting basic stimulus features like lines, angles, and colors.

Top-Down Processing

Information processing guided by higher-level mental processes, as when we construct perceptions drawing on our experience, expectations, motivations, and schemas.

Transduction

The conversion of one form of energy into another; specifically, transforming external stimulus energies into electrochemical neural impulses that the brain can interpret.

Absolute Threshold

The minimum stimulus energy needed to detect a particular light, sound, pressure, taste, or odor at least $50\%$ of the time, as formulated by Gustav Fechner.

Signal Detection Theory

A theory predicting how and when we detect the presence of a faint stimulus (signal) amid background stimulation (noise), assuming there is no single absolute threshold and that detection depends on alertness, experience, expectation, and motivation.

Subliminal Stimulation

Sensory stimuli that fall below one's absolute threshold for conscious awareness, meaning they cannot be consciously detected at least $50\%$ of the time.

Difference Threshold (Just Noticeable Difference)

The minimum difference between two stimuli required for detection $50\%$ of the time; it increases in proportion to the magnitude of the stimulus.

Weber's Law

The principle that to be perceived as different, two stimuli must differ by a constant minimum percentage (such as $2\%$ for weight, $8\%$ for light intensity, and $0.3\%$ for tone frequency), rather than a constant numerical amount.

Sensory Adaptation

Diminished sensitivity to an unchanging stimulus as a consequence of constant exposure, freeing attention to focus on informative environmental changes.

Selective Attention

The focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus to the exclusion of others, operating like a flashlight beam on a minute fraction of incoming information.

Cocktail Party Effect

The ability to attend selectively to one specific voice among a multitude of competing background conversations, while remaining cognitively primed to register personally relevant stimuli like one's own name.

Inattentional Blindness

The failure to see prominent, visible objects when attention is purposefully directed elsewhere, demonstrated by Ulric Neisser and Simons & Chabris's selective-passing gorilla study.

Change Blindness

A form of inattentional blindness in which an observer fails to notice significant changes in the visual environment after a brief visual interruption, such as someone switching places during the 'door study.'

Perceptual Set

A mental predisposition or readiness to perceive one thing and not another, shaped top-down by schemas, prior experiences, expectations, context, motivation, and emotion.

Context Effect

The environmental and situational influence that surrounds a stimulus, creating top-down expectations that guide immediate perceptual interpretation.

Wavelength

The distance from the peak of one light or sound wave to the peak of the next; in vision, light wavelength determines the perceived hue (color).

Amplitude

The height of a wave from peak to trough; in vision, it determines perceived intensity and brightness; in audition, it determines sound wave pressure and perceived loudness.

Cornea

The eye's clear, transparent outer tissue layer where light first enters, bending incoming light rays to begin focusing an image.

Pupil and Iris

The pupil is the adjustable central opening in the eye; the iris is the ring of pigmented muscle surrounding the pupil that constricts or dilates to control the amount of light entering.

Lens

The transparent structure located behind the pupil that changes its curvature and thickness to focus light rays onto the retina.

Accommodation (Visual)

The process by which the eye's lens changes its curvature and shape to focus near or far images sharply onto the retina.

Nearsightedness (Myopia)

A visual condition in which light rays from distant objects converge and focus at a point in front of the retina, resulting in near objects being seen more clearly than distant objects.

Retina

The light-sensitive multilayered inner surface lining the back of the eyeball, containing photoreceptor rods and cones as well as layers of bipolar and ganglion cells.

Rods

Retinal photoreceptors ($\sim 120\text{ million}$) concentrated in the peripheral retina that detect black, white, and gray, functioning with high sensitivity in dim light and detecting peripheral motion.

Cones

Retinal photoreceptors ($\sim 6\text{ million}$) clustered in the central fovea that function best in daylight or well-lit conditions, providing fine spatial detail and color perception.

Fovea

The central focal point of the retina around which the eye's cones cluster, providing the highest visual acuity and direct individual pathways to bipolar cells.

Blind Spot

The point at the back of the eye where the optic nerve exits the retina, creating a region void of receptor cells that the brain automatically fills in.

Visual Pathway to the Brain

The neural route where rods and cones synapse with bipolar cells, which trigger ganglion cells whose axons form the optic nerve; impulses cross at the optic chiasm, synapse at the thalamus, and project to the primary visual cortex in the occipital lobe.

Feature Detectors

Specialized nerve cells discovered by David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel located in the occipital lobe's visual cortex that respond selectively to specific stimulus features such as edges, lines, angles, and movement.

Fusiform Face Area

A dedicated neural region on the underside of the right temporal lobe specialized for recognizing and processing human faces.

Prosopagnosia

A neurological condition characterized by face blindness, where sensory vision remains intact but the ability to recognize familiar human faces, including one's own, is impaired.

Parallel Processing

The brain's ability to process multiple subdimensions of a stimulus—such as color, depth, form, and motion—simultaneously across distinct neural networks.

Young-Helmholtz Trichromatic Theory

The theory proposing that the retina contains three distinct types of color receptors (cones) maximally sensitive to red (long), green (medium), or blue (short) wavelengths, whose combined stimulation creates all perceivable hues.

Opponent-Process Theory

Ewald Hering's theory that color vision is enabled by opposing retinal and thalamic processes (red-green, blue-yellow, and black-white), where neurons are excited by one color and inhibited by the other.

Negative Afterimage

A visual sensation that persists after the original stimulus has ceased, caused by receptor fatigue in one channel of an opponent-process pair, allowing the opposing color to fire when viewing a white surface.

Audition

The sense or act of hearing, in which airborne pressure waves are captured, amplified, and transduced into neural impulses in the brain.

Decibel ($\text{dB}$)

The unit of measurement for sound intensity or loudness, where $0\,\text{dB}$ represents the absolute threshold, each $10\,\text{dB}$ step represents a tenfold increase in intensity, and prolonged exposure above $85\,\text{dB}$ risks permanent hearing damage.

Pinna and Auditory Canal

The outer ear structures: the pinna is the visible external cartilage designed to funnel sound waves down the auditory canal toward the tympanic membrane.

Tympanic Membrane (Eardrum)

The tight, thin membrane separating the outer ear from the middle ear that vibrates mechanically when struck by incoming sound waves.

Ossicles

The three tiny mechanical bones of the middle ear—the hammer (malleus), anvil (incus), and stirrup (stapes)—that amplify eardrum vibrations and transmit them to the oval window.

Cochlea

A coiled, bony, fluid-filled snail-shaped tube in the inner ear through which sound waves trigger ripples in the basilar membrane and stimulate hair cells.

Basilar Membrane and Hair Cells

The membrane lining the cochlea whose rippling motion deflects cilia on surface hair cells, triggering transduction into action potentials along the auditory nerve.

Sensorineural Hearing Loss

Hearing loss caused by damage to the cochlea's receptor hair cells or to the auditory nerve (also called nerve deafness), frequently linked to aging, disease, or toxic loud noise.

Conduction Hearing Loss

Hearing loss caused by mechanical damage to the physical systems—the eardrum or the ossicles—that conduct sound waves to the cochlea.

Place Theory

Georg von Békésy's pitch perception theory stating that different sound frequencies stimulate specific localized areas along the basilar membrane, explaining our perception of high pitches.

Frequency Theory

The pitch perception theory asserting that the rate of nerve impulses traveling up the auditory nerve matches the frequency of a sound wave, explaining our perception of low pitches.

Volley Principle

An extension of frequency theory stating that clusters of auditory neurons alternate their firing in rapid succession, enabling the collective neural transmission of frequencies above $1000\,\text{Hz}$.

Sound Localization

The ability to pinpoint the origin of a sound based on stereophonic differences in arrival time (as small as $0.000027\text{ seconds}$) and intensity between the two ears.

Four Basic Touch Sensations

The fundamental skin senses identified by researchers: pressure, warmth, cold, and pain, which combine to produce complex sensations like wetness, itching, or intense heat.

Nociceptors

Sensory receptors located in the skin, muscles, and organs that detect potentially harmful temperatures, mechanical pressures, or chemical damage and initiate pain signals.

Gate-Control Theory

Melzack and Wall's model proposing that a neurological 'gate' in the spinal cord regulates pain signals: small nerve fibers open the gate to transmit pain, while large-fiber activity or brain signals close it.

Phantom Limb Sensations

The perception of pain, itching, or movement in a missing limb, caused when the central nervous system misinterprets and amplifies spontaneous brain activity in the absence of normal sensory input.

Gustation

The chemical sense of taste, detecting five primary sensations: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami (savory), along with oleogustus (fat).

Supertasters

Individuals identified by Linda Bartoshuk who possess a significantly higher density of fungiform papillae and taste buds, experiencing heightened sensitivity to bitter tastes and intense flavors.

Olfaction

The chemical sense of smell, mediated by approximately 20 million receptor cells in the upper nasal cavity whose axons bypass the thalamus to project directly to the olfactory bulb and limbic system.

Kinesthesis

The system for sensing the position and movement of individual body parts using proprioceptors embedded in muscles, tendons, and joints.

Vestibular Sense

The sense of body movement, position, and balance, monitored by fluid movements in the semicircular canals and calcium-crystal-filled vestibular sacs of the inner ear communicating with the cerebellum.

Sensory Interaction

The principle that one sense may influence another, such as when the smell and texture of food dictate perceived flavor, or visual lip reading alters perceived speech.

McGurk Effect

A perceptual illusion occurring when conflicting auditory and visual speech cues are presented simultaneously, leading the brain to synthesize a third, distinct syllable (e.g., seeing 'ga' and hearing 'ba' produces 'da').

Embodied Cognition

The mutual influence of bodily sensations, physical postures, and gestures on cognitive preferences, social judgments, and mental states.

Synesthesia

A neurological condition where stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to involuntary, automatic experiences in a second, unrelated sensory pathway (e.g., hearing musical chords evoking vivid colors).

Gestalt

An organized whole; a school of psychology emphasizing that our tendency is to integrate pieces of information into meaningful forms because 'the whole may exceed the sum of its parts.'

Figure-Ground Relationship

The fundamental perceptual organization of visual or auditory fields into distinct objects (the figures) that stand out against their surroundings (the ground).

Grouping: Proximity

The Gestalt organizing principle stating that we tend to group nearby figures together rather than perceiving them as separate entities.

Grouping: Continuity

The Gestalt grouping principle asserting that observers perceive smooth, continuous patterns and lines rather than discontinuous, disjointed segments.

Grouping: Closure

The Gestalt principle whereby the brain fills in visual gaps to perceive an incomplete figure as a whole, finished object.

Visual Cliff

A laboratory apparatus designed by Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk to test depth perception in human infants and young animals using an elevated platform with a simulated drop-off covered by safety glass.

Retinal Disparity

A binocular cue for perceiving depth: because eyes are separated horizontally, each retina receives a slightly different image, with greater disparity signaling closer proximity.

Convergence

A binocular depth cue involving neuromuscular feedback from the eyes turning inward as they focus on a nearby object.

Monocular Depth Cues

Visual distance cues available to each eye separately, including relative size, interposition, relative height, relative motion, linear perspective, and light and shadow.

Interposition

A monocular depth cue occurring when one object partially blocks our view of another, leading us to perceive the blocking object as closer.

Linear Perspective

A monocular depth cue where parallel lines appear to converge with increasing distance toward a vanishing point.

Stroboscopic Movement

The perception of continuous motion generated by presenting a rapid series of slightly varying still images, as seen in flipbooks and cinema films ($24\text{ frames per second}$).

Phi Phenomenon

An illusion of apparent movement created when two or more adjacent stationary lights blink on and off in quick succession.

Perceptual Constancy

A top-down process enabling us to perceive familiar objects as unchanging in color, brightness, shape, and size even as illumination, retinal image size, and viewing angles shift.

Color Constancy

Perceiving familiar objects as possessing consistent color even when changing illumination alters the exact wavelengths reflected, computed relative to surrounding context.

Relative Luminance

The amount of light an object reflects relative to its surrounding environment, which governs brightness/lightness constancy across varying illumination levels.

Ames Room

A specially designed trapezoidal room that distorts monocular distance cues, making two people of equal height appear vastly different in size due to mistaken size-distance calculations.

Perceptual Adaptation

The brain's ability to adjust to an artificially displaced or inverted visual field, demonstrated by George Stratton wearing inverting optical prisms for 8 days.