AP Psychology: Unit 2 Vocabulary

Vocab for Unit 2

Selective Attention

Focusing conscious awareness on a particular stimulus

“Flashlight” since our consciousness can only focus on one thing at a time.

• filters stimuli depending on each person. what’s important or interesting

Cocktail party effect

An example of selective attention. ability to attend to only one specific sound in a noisy environment.

What happens when we shift our selective attention?

Our brain activity for each activity decreases.

Shift attention → decreased brain activity → more room for error

• Driving & texting: the brain struggles to process both tasks effectively, leading to impaired driving performance.

Inattentional blindness

Inability to see or notice another stimuli when our attention is directed somewhere else

• inability to see the dancing chicken when we are focusing on the number of jumps from a person wearing a green t-shirt.

• proves that humans are very good at focusing attention to certain part of our environment

Change blindness

Inability to notice/see a change in the environment. A type of inattentional blindness

Perceptual Set

mental tendency of perceiving one thing over another

• affects what we hear: “stuffy nose” VS “stuff he knows”

• affects what we taste: fries in a McDonald bag vs plain white bag

• affects what we feel, see, etc.

Where does our perceptual set come from?

Comes from our past experiences, or also known as top-down processing

Schemas

What are the 3 ways that affects how we interpret something? Give an example of each

1. Context

• we will hear “stuffy nose” when someone is holding a tissue box

2. Motivation

• walking distance will feel longer when we are tired

3. emotion

• Our emotion can affect words that we hear: sad → Mourning/morning, die/dye, pain/pane

Module 2.1B

Gestalt

an organized whole of the big picture

• our visual sensations are organized into gestalts

Figure Ground

organization and tendency to view our objections (figure) as standing out from the background (ground)

Grouping (what are the different types of groupings?)

tendency to organize stimuli into groups

1. Proximity

2. Similarity

3. Closure

Depth Perception

ability to see in 3d although our retinal images are in 2d. Allows us to judge distance

Visual cliff. What are the findings?

a modeled cliff with a “drop” that is covered by glass panel

• visual cliff found that infants are born with an innate depth perception as they refused to go across the cliff

Binocular Cues

Depth cue that is dependent on the use of 2 eyes. Allows us to judge distance of nearby objects

Convergence

A type of binocular cue. A cue to nearby objects when brain combines retinal images.

As object moves closer, our eyes “converge” closer, vice versa.

Retinal Disparity

A type of binocular cue. Cue for perceiving depth.

The disparity is the difference of the placement of an object when using the right vs left visual field.

• More disparity between 2 images → the closer the object

Monocular Cues

Depth cue that is available to each eye separately. Both eyes are not needed to view the depth.

What does motion perception look like in humans?

• Brain computes shrinking objects as getting further away and enlarging objects as approaching us.

• When large & small object is moving at the same speed, the large object seems to be slower (how a train seems slower than cars)

Stroboscopic Movement

illusion of continuous movement in a rapid series of images that slightly varies

• cartoons, flipbooks

• explains why we often don’t notice when we blink

Phi Phenomenon

illusion of movement when adjacent lights blink in a succession

autokinetic effect

Illusion of movement of a stationary light in a dark room

Perceptual constancy

Perceiving objects as unchanging even from a different distance or angle because of our top-down processing

Color constancy

perceiving familiar objects as having a consistent color, even when the light changes its actual wavelength

Size Constancies

ability to perceive objects as having an unchanging size, even with varying distances

• size of a bus doesn’t seem smaller just because it’s further away.

Perceptual Adaptation

ability to adapt to a sensory input (artificially displaced or inverted vision). humans are ability to adapt to dramatic distortions.

• new prescription, invert goggles

Cognition

all mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communication

metacognition

cognition about our cognition. “thinking about thinking.

• assessing our knowledge, evaluating our performance

• students with metacognition tend to do better academically.

concepts

mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people

• high chair, dentist chair, massage chair, wheel chair, spinny chair = all chairs

• simplifies our thinking

prototype

mental image of the best example of a category.

• a crow may better fit into the prototype than an ostrich

assimilate

we use our schemas to interpret new experience

• toddler sees a 4-legged animal and learns that it’s a dog. Now every 4-legged animal, they categorize it as a dog (foxes, cats, etc.)

accommodate

adapts or adjusts our schema to incorporate new info

• toddler learns that the other 4-legged animals are other animals.

creativity

ability to produce new and valuable info

convergent thinking

narrow available problems to determine the best solution

divergent thinking

ability to expand the # of possible solutions to a problem

• What are 5 different ways you can use a brick?

Module 2.2B

Executive Functions

cognitive skills that work together to allow us to problem solve. effectively make decisions

Algorithms

a step-by-step procedure that will guarantee a solution

• can be long and be laborious

• unscramble SPLOYOCHYG by placing each letter in its possible placement.

  • would take 907,200 possible sequences to find the right word

Heuristics

a simpler thinking strategy that allows us to make quick judgements efficiently.

• faster but more error-prone

• unscramble SPLOYOCHYG by grouping letters together (letters that are often seen together)

• playing wordle

Insight

a sudden realization of a problem’s solution. No strategy or algorithm is used

confirmation bias

tendency to seek information that supports/affirms our beliefs, ignore those that contradicts

fixation

inability to approach a problem from a new perspective

• once we get hung up on one view, becomes difficult to approach it from a new angle

• can be an obstacle to problem solving

mental set

tendency to approach a problem in a way that was successful in the past

Find the sequence

• O-T-T-F-?-?-? → Five, Six, Seven → After recognizing, makes it easier to solve #2.

• J-F-M-A-?-?-?

Intuition

an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling/thought

• we often use our intuition when making every day decisions

Representativeness Heuristics

judging the likelihood of something based on how well we think it categorizes into a prototype. How well it seems to represent or match the prototype.

Short, slim, likes to read poetry → Ivy League English professor OR truck driver?

• people think Ivy league professor but they dismiss the fact that there is >400 Ivy league English professors compared to 3.5 billion truck drivers

Availability Heuristics

judging the likelihood of events based on the availability in our memory

• how often something (a memory) pops into our thoughts depends on the vividness of the memory

• Celebrity’s child get’s autism after getting vaccinated → this caused people to believe that there is a link between vaccination and autism

• Using vivid/graphic imagery on cigarette packaging to prevent people from buying it

Overconfidence

tendency to be more confident than correct. overestimates the accuracy of our beliefs and judgements

• can lead to planning fallacy: overestimates our future leisure time

  • students overestimate how much work they can get done in a certain time period, but in reality, it takes almost double the time

• can lead to sunk-cost fallacy: sticking to the original plan because time was already invested into that plan. however, trying a new approach could actually save time

Belief Perseverance

persistence of one’s belief even after the basis/foundation of that belief was discredited.

Framing

the way an issue is presented. can affect decisions and judgements

Nudge

framing choices to encourage people to make beneficial decisions

• appealing names of healthy snacks: “Herb n’ Honey Balsamic Glazed Turnips

Faming can nudge us to make certain attitudes and decisions