The Brain & Sleep
The chemicals in the brain that carry messages from one neuron to another.
What are neurotransmitters?
The ability to focus on a particular sound while partially filtering out other sounds.
What is the "Cocktail Party Effect"?
The tendency to recall best the last and first items in a list.
What is the "serial position effect"?
The culturally preferred timing of social events such as marriage, parenthood, and retirement.
What is "social clock"?
An observation technique in which one individual or just a few individuals are carefully studied in-depth.
What is a case study?
The part of the brain that controls body temperature, sexual arousal, hunger, thirst, and the endocrine system.
What is the hypothalamus?
The transparent, dome-like structure on the front part of the eye that gives the eye focusing or refracting power.
What is the cornea?
The breakdown in the process of getting information into the cognitive system.
What is "encoding failure"?
The space between what a learner can do independently and what they can do with guidance from a more knowledgeable person.
What is the "Zone of Proximal Development"?
The variable that the researcher deliberately manipulates to see how it affects another variable.
What is the "independent variable"?
The brain waves that appear during deep sleep.
What are delta waves?
The minimum difference between two stimuli required for detection 50% of the time.
What is "difference threshold"?
The vivid and detailed memories that people create during times of personal tragedy, accident, or emotionally significant world events.
What are flashbulb memories?
According to Erik Erikson's Psychosocial Stages of Development, this is the stage where middle-aged adults begin finding a way to contribute to society and future generations, or face feelings of being unproductive and disconnected.
What is "Generativity vs. Stagnation"?
The tendency for extreme or unusual scores or events to fall back toward the average.
What is "regression toward the mean"?
A major excitatory neurotransmitter, involved with most normal operations of the brain including thinking, long-term memory, and learning.
What is glutamate?
The difference between the visual images that each eye perceives because of the different angles in which each eye views the world.
What is retinal disparity?
The process by which synaptic connections between neurons become stronger with frequent activation.
What is "Long-term Potentiation"?
This developmental psychologist found that attachment happens through a complex set of interactions between mothers and infants.
Who is Mary Ainsworth?
The research design in which neither the experimenter nor the participants know who is in the experimental group and who is in the control group.
What is "double-blind"?
These vivid sensory experiences occur as you’re falling asleep, often causing people to hear sounds or see images that aren’t really there.
What are hypnagogic hallucinations?
This is a form of hearing loss caused by damage to the mechanical system (eardrum and middle ear) which conducts sound waves to the cochlea.
What is "conduction hearing loss"?
This encoding strategy involves using the first letters of a list of to-be-learned items to create a meaningful and/or odd sentence.
What is an acrostic mnemonic?
According to Kohlberg's Levels of Moral Thinking, this is the stage where young children act on self interest and obey rules in order to avoid punishment or gain concrete rewards.
What is "preconventional morality"?
In an experiment, the process that ensures all members have an equal chance of being placed in either control or experimental group(s).
What is "random assignment"?