Psyc 1 Final

What is an independent variable?

• Variable that the experimenters can control

What is an operational definition?

• What is measured 

What is a dependent variable?

• Variable that researchers measured & is not manipulated 

What is a correlational study?

• Scientists passively observe & measure 

• Not manipulation, ex: screen time & depression

What is an experimental study? How does it differ from a correlational study?

• Assigning participants to receive diff conditions of an experiment by chance

• Differs bc researchers manipulate independent variable

What is the benefit of random assignment?

• It's an equal chance for a representation of every group to be in each condition

How can we tell whether we have a causal relationship?

What are some reasons a study might not replicate?

• Faking data

• Chance 

• P-hacking: doing the same experiment over and over again until you get a certain result 

• Experimental result, sometimes it just poorly done 

• Study might apply to one group, but not another 

What is attention? Why is it important?

• Range of psychological & neural phenomena where an identical stimulus is processed in different ways

• Important bc it allows us to attend things to memory 

Describe the invisible gorilla experiment? What did researchers do? What were the (general) results?

• You had to count how many passes btw a ball, there was a gorilla that slipped in 

What is inattentional blindness?

• Paying attention to one thing and that causing us to miss things in our surroundings

Why is selective attention and inattentional blindness important? 

• Selective attention: only attending to relevant information

• Inattentional when we attend to one thing we often miss other, esp when unexpected

• Important because it allows us to process certain things into memory

Distinguish between overt and covert attention. Give examples of each.

• Overt: moving your eyes physically to something

• Covert: bringing your attention to something w ur mind, like sitting in a chair and not moving but bringing your mind to how ur butt feels against the wood

Describe the Posner cueing paradigm

• Study of attention & how it can be directed toward specific stimuli 

• Attention is not easily shifted, switching attention needs cognitive resources & ppl often experience delays when shifting focus

Distinguish between voluntary and involuntary attention

• Voluntary: choosing to bring your attention to something

• Involuntary: things we do not choose to give attn to but give it anyway, like a loud boom

Define the following memory stores and distinguish between them: sensory memory, working memory, long-term memory

• Sensory: brief story of sensory info, holds info long enough that basic sensory takes place

  • High capacity

• Working: short term

  • Limited capacity

• Long term: everything you know/have learned

  • Infinite capacity

What are the different capacities and durations of sensory memory, working memory, and long-term memory?

Describe how attention, maintenance rehearsal, encoding, and retrieval work in the context of memory

• Attention: allows deeper processing

• Maintenance rehearsal: keep things in your working memory

• Encoding: repeating/understanding something to get info from long term to working memory

• Retrieval: practicing getting something from long term memory into working memory

Why is sensory memory important?

• First insight to taking things in 

How does auditory sensory memory differ from visual sensory memory?

• Auditory: hearing 3-4 sec

• Visual: seeing 300 ms

What is chunking? How does it affect working memory capacity?

• Binding individual items to create a meaningful whole item 

• Increases working memory

Explain what predicts successful encoding  

• Deeper level of processing

Describe experiments related to depth of processing: What is it? How is it studied? What implications does it have for how we remember things