(2025) U2 AP Psychology: Unit 2 Cognition

Notes and terms are from Barron's 2025 AP Book

Perception

The process by which individuals interpret and organize sensory information to understand their environment. It involves the recognition and interpretation of stimuli based on prior knowledge and experiences.

Psychophysics

Rules our minds use to interpret senses

Thresholds

Limits to our senses

Absolute Threshold

The smallest amount of a sense we can detect

Weber’s Law

The change needed in a stimulus for us to notice is proportional to the intensity of the stimulus

Signal Detection Theory

investigates the impact of distractions and interreference on perception. Additionally, it takes into account the impact of our motivations on perception.

False Positive

Perceiving a stimulus that isn’t there

False Negative

Not perceiving a stimulus that IS there

Top-Down Processing

is a cognitive process that uses context, experiences and senses to fill in gaps in memory

Bottom-Up processing

a cognitive process that builds up the senses to a final perception through characteristics and features.

Figure-ground

“What’s figure?’ What’s background?”

Gestalt Psychology

states that we perceive images in groups rather than individual elements.

Proximity

a gestalt principle stating items closer together are more likely to perceived as one group.

Similarity

gestalt principle stating that similar looking items may be perceived as a group

Continuity

gestalt principle stating that items arranged in a line or curve are perceived as a group

Closure

gestalt principle stating objects that make up a recognizable shape are also said to be perceived as a group

Constancy

maintaining a constant perception despite changes in the object

Size

Objects closer to our eyes produce bigger images on our retinas, but we take distance into account in our estimations of size. We keep a constant size in mind for an object (if we are familiar with the typical size of the object) and know that it does not grow or shrink in size as it moves closer or farther away.

Shape

Objects viewed from different angles produce different shapes on our retinas, but we know the shape of an object remains constant. For example, the top of a coffee mug viewed from a certain angle produces an elliptical image on our retinas, but we know the top is circular due to shape constancy. Again, this depends on our familiarity with the usual shape of the object

Brightness

We perceive objects as being a constant color even as the light reflecting off the object changes. For example, we perceive a brick wall as brick red even as the daylight fades and the actual color reflected from the wall turns gray

Perceived Motion

detecting how fast images pass through the retina

Stroboscopic Effect

like a flip book, still images presented at a certain speed will appear as moving.

Phi Phenomenon

Repeatedly turning lights on and off can cause the light to appear as moving.

Kinetic Effect

staring at a spot of light for a long time can make it appear as moving when you look away or close your eyes.

Depth Cues

refer to ‘3D Perceptions’ or visual cliffs that we develop as children.

Monocular Cues

Visual cues that aren’t dependent on us having 2 eyes. Such as: Linear perspective, texture gradient, relative size, and interposition cues.

Linear Perspective

a monocular depth cue in that causes parallel lines to appear to meet at some point in the distance.

Relative Size Cue

monocular cue in which we perceive distance based on the comparison of sizes between objects. It is the idea that when two or more objects are similar, we assume that the smaller one is farther away.

interposition cue

Monocular cue in which object/s blocking other objects are perceived as close to us

Texture Gradient

how our eyes see a slow change in how objects look the closer they get, going from fine to coarse

Binocular Cues

Visual cues that are dependent on having 2 eyes

Retinal Disparity

Each eye sees from a slightly different angle, the brain interprets these angles to create a mental picture and determine which objects are closer. the closer the object, the more disparity.

Convergence

When our eyes move downwards to keep focused on an object moving towards us.

Prototypes

Best example of specific cognitive rules/concepts

Algorithms

Rule/Formula that guarantees a solution to a problem

Heuristic

mental process by which humans use mental shortcuts to make quick choices

Availability Heuristic

a type of cognitive bias that helps us make fast, but sometimes incorrect, assessments. It involves relying on information that comes to mind quickly or is most available to us.

Representative Heuristic

where decisions are based on comparisons to mental representations of stereotypes, prototypes, or preconceived outcomes

Gambler’s Fallacy

a failure to recognize the independence of chance events, leading to the mistaken belief that one can predict the outcome of a chance event on the basis of the outcomes of past chance events.

Sunk-Cost Fallacy

Unwilling to make a specific change in a project or stop it because you put so much effort and time into it.

Mental Set:

AKA Rigidity, but is the process of falling into established thoughts & patterns that may be healthy or not.

Functional Fixedness

the perceived inability of someone to use an object for something other than its original intended purpose.

Framing

refers to whether an option is presented as a loss (negative) or a gain (positive). People are generally biased toward picking an option they view as a gain over one they view as a loss, even if both options lead to the same result.

Creativity

Thinking of new ways to use what we know how to use in a different way.

Convergent Thinking

focuses on coming up with the single, well-established answer to a problem. It is oriented toward deriving the single best, or most often correct answer to a question.

Divergent Thinking

the thinking process of creating multiple, unique ideas or solutions to a problem that you are trying to solve.

Overconfidence

tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our judgements

Belief Bias

Making illogical conclusions based off of pre-existing beliefs.

Belief Perseverance

the tendency to maintain held beliefs even when the evidence supporting such beliefs is fully invalidated.

Placebo Effect

when a person's physical or mental health appears to improve after taking a placebo or 'dummy' treatment.

Just-noticeable difference

the amount something must be changed in order for a difference to be noticeable, detectable at least half the time.

Confirmation Bias

our tendency to search for evidence that confirms our beliefs but ignore contradictory evidence.

Perceptual set

Predisposed perceptions of certain things. Otherwise a cognitive bias that affects the way people interpret things based on their expectations and past experiences.

Three-box processing

information processing begins in sensory memory, moves to short-term memory, and eventually moves to long-term memory.

Levels of Processing

the more deeply we think about and analyze something in our minds, the more likely we are to create a longer-lasting memory of this idea.

Sensory memory

a mental representation of how environmental events look, sound, feel, smell and taste. Most of these memories tend to fade very quickly.

Iconic Memory

the visual sensory memory register pertaining to the visual domain and a fast-decaying store of visual information. It is a component of the visual memory system.

Echoic Memory

the brief sensory memory of audible sounds.

Short-term memory

the capacity to keep a small amount of information in mind in an active, readily available state for a short period of time.

Selective attention

the act of focusing on a particular object for some time while simultaneously ignoring distractions and irrelevant information.

Cocktail party effect

a type of selective attention garnering the ability to focus one's attention a particular known stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli (i.e., noise).

Inattentional Blindness

occurs when an individual fails to perceive an unexpected stimulus in plain sight, purely as a result of a lack of attention rather than any vision defects or deficits.

Change Blindness

occurs when a person does not notice an otherwise noticeable change in something they observe.

Working memory

a type of short-term memory that stores information temporarily during the completion of cognitive tasks, such as comprehension, problem solving, reasoning, and learning.

Central executive

responsible for controlling attention, coordinating resources between different components of working memory, and integrating new information with long-term memory.

Visuospatial Sketchpad

the store that holds visual information for manipulation.

Auditory/phonological Loop

a component of working memory model that deals with auditory information.

Maintenance Rehearsal

Repetition of a piece of information to keep it within your active short-term memory.

Elaborative rehearsal

a technique to help the short-term memory store thoughts and ideas and pass them into the long-term memory

Long-term memory:

storage area where memories stay permanently and can be held for an indefinite period of time.

Episodic Memory

the ability to learn, store, and retrieve information about unique personal experiences that occur in daily life. These memories typically include information about the time and place of an event, as well as detailed information about the event itself.

Semantic memory

the long-term representation and processing of the concepts underlying objects, actions, abstract words, and the like.

Procedural memory

the process of retrieving information necessary to perform learned skills

Explicit Memory

the intentional recollection of newly learned information, including facts and specific events acquired during the study phase.

Implicit Memory

the information that we do not store purposely and is unintentionally memorized; we cannot consciously bring that memory into awareness.

Prospective memory

It refers to remembering to carry out an action at an appropriate future moment

retrospective memory

refers to remembering information about the past.

Shallowly encoded

the process of encoding information in a superficial or surface-level manner, resulting in weaker storage and retrieval from long-term memory.

Deeply encoded

when elements of any to-be-remembered experiences are meaningfully integrated with elements of previously “stored” memories

Long term potentiation

a synaptic strengthening process that allows for more efficient transfer of information.

Primacy effect

The tendency to remember the first piece of information we encounter better than information presented later on. For example, from items in a list.

Recency effect

a cognitive bias in which those items, ideas, or arguments that came last are remembered more clearly than those that came first.

Serial position effect/curve

the psychological tendency to remember the first and last items in a list better than those in the middle.

Method of Loci

a mnemonic device, a trick used to help store and retrieve information. To use the technique, someone imagines a physical location, then places objects in that mental space which correspond to the things which must be remembered.

Spacing effect

Learning is more effective when repeated in spaced repetitions. By repeating and spacing out the information that individuals learn, they can better recall that information in the future.

Massed effect

a learning procedure in which practice periods for an activity are not separated by any rest periods or are separated by short rest periods only.

Chunking

our ability to improve short-term memory by grouping – into “chunks” – information to reduce the overall number of items assigned to the act of remembering.

Mnemonics

memory aids that may appear to be unusual or artificial, but are based on the basic principles of learning and memory, acronyms, chunking, and rhymes work by tapping into how the brain naturally stores data.

Anterograde amnesia

where one cannot encode new memories but can still remember those that were already encoded

Retrograde amnesia

inability to recall past encoded memories due to a traumatic experience, but still able to encode new memories.

Retrieval

The act of getting information out of memory storage and back into conscious awareness

Recognition

a form of remembering characterized by a feeling of familiarity when something previously experienced is again encountered

Recall

The act of retrieving information or events from the past while lacking a specific cue to help in retrieving the information.

Retrieval cues

any piece of information that serves as a trigger for our memories and emotions.

Tip of the tongue phenomenon

a state in which one cannot quite recall a familiar word but can recall words of similar form and meaning.

Context-dependent memory

a phenomenon in which the retrieval of memories is stronger when it occurs in the same environment or context in which the memories were originally formed.

Mood-congruent memory

a psychological phenomenon where emotional memory is biased toward content affectively congruent with a past or current mood.

state-dependent memory

the phenomenon where people remember more information if their physical or mental state is the same at time of encoding and time of recall.

Constructed memory

A memory that is formed by filling in gaps with assumptions, imagination, or outside information, which may lead to inaccuracies.

Misinformation effect:

a type of memory impairment caused by the introduction of misleading information. Essentially, the misleading information becomes incorporated into the memory of the past event.