2.1a - 2.2a AP Psychology

Selective attention – focusing conscious awareness on a particular stimulus.

Cocktail party effect – hearing name in a loud setting

Inattention blindness - failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere

Change blindness – failure to notice a change in the environment (person asking directions is changed)

Perceptual set – a mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another.

Gestalt – an organized whole. Our tendency to integrate pieces of information into meaningful wholes.

Figure and Ground – organization of visual fields into objects (figure) that stand out from their surroundings (ground)

Grouping – perceptual tendency to organize stimuli into coherent groups

Depth perception – the ability to see objects in three dimensions (although images arrive at retina in two dimensions)

Visual cliff (Gibson and Walk) – a laboratory device for testing depth perception in infants and young animals. Depth seems to be innate.

Convergence – eyes move inward to nearby objects’ distance, brain combines retinal images

Retinal disparity – two eyes see different things. Brain computes distance by comparing images from two eyes.

Relative clarity – farther objects are hazy

Relative size – farther = smaller

Texture gradient – distant objects looks smoother

Linear perspective – parallel lines appear to meet in the distance

Interposition – one object partially blocks our view of another, we perceive it as closer

Stroboscopic movement – illusion of continuous movement (flip book, motion picture)

Phi phenomenon – an illusion of movement created when two or more adjacent lights blink on and off in quick succession

Auto-kinetic effect – illusory movement of a still spot of light in a dark room

Perceptual constancy – perceiving objects as unchanging even as illumination and retinal images change

Color and Brightness Constancy – perceiving familiar objects as having consistent color, even if changing illumination alters the wavelengths reflected by the object

Brightness constancy – perceive an object as having a constant brightness even as its illumination varies

Cognition – all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating

Meta cognition – thinking about thinking. Monitoring your learning

Concepts – a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas or people

Prototype – mental image or best example of a category

Schemas (Jean Piaget) – a concept or framework that organizes and interprets information

Assimilation – know schema for dog, and see cat

Accommodation – we adjust our schemas to include a schema for cat

Creativity – the ability to produce new and valuable ideas (5 components) Expertise, imaginative thinking skills, venturesome personality, intrinsic motivation, a creative environment

Convergent thinking – narrowing solutions to determine single best answer (aptitude tests)

Divergent thinking – expanding the number of possible solutions

Functional fixedness – unable to see object used for purposes other than intended purpose (umbrella only for rain).