Research Methods
This procedure involves choosing participants based on their availability, such as using students from a professor's own university.
What is a convenience sample?
This branch of the nervous system is composed of the brain and the spinal cord.
What is the Central Nervous System?
This cognitive bias occurs when someone only pays attention to information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs or expectations.
What is confirmation bias?
This Gestalt law explains why we tend to "fill in the gaps" to perceive a complete object even when it is broken apart.
What is closure?
According to developmental data, most infants are physically capable of standing without any support by this age.
What is 18 months?
This specific component of an experiment is necessary to ensure that any differences found between groups are likely due to the independent variable.
What is random assignment?
This part of the nervous system is responsible for the "fight or flight" response and helps the body respond to stress.
What is the Sympathetic Nervous System?
This memory aid involves making associations between a list of words and various physical areas or "locations" in a familiar room.
What is the method of loci?
Research indicates that as humans age, this specific sense tends to decrease, particularly due to a loss of nerve endings and decreased mucus production.
What is the sense of smell?
This term refers to a specific window of time in which learning most easily takes place before the ability to acquire that skill narrows
What is a sensitive period (or critical period)?
This research method is used when an experiment would be unethical because the independent variable would require inflicting harm or brain injury.
What is a case study?
Located in the left frontal lobe, this specific area is vital for the production of speech.
What is Broca’s Area?
This phenomenon explains why students often perform better on exams when they take them in the same physical space where they originally learned the material.
What is context-dependent memory?
This term refers to the minimum stimulus energy needed to detect a particular stimulus 50 percent of the time, such as the highest frequency of sound a person can hear.
What is absolute threshold?
When a child adds "-ed" to the word "throw" to say "throwed," they are demonstrating this common grammatical error.
What is overgeneralization?
To ensure findings are generalizable to an entire university population, a researcher should use this method, such as surveying every tenth student in a directory.
What is random selection?
These types of drugs block the reabsorption of neurotransmitters into the sending neuron during neural transmission.
What are reuptake inhibitors?
Repeating a student's name over and over to yourself to avoid forgetting it is an example of this memory boosting concept.
What is maintenance rehearsal?
This apparatus was famously used in psychological studies to determine when infants begin to develop depth perception.
What is the visual cliff?
Research into early childhood development suggests a strong relationship between the quality of early maternal attachment and these later life skills.
What are socialization skills?
This ethical requirement ensures participants are informed about potential risks and are given the option to withdraw at any time.
What is informed consent?
In split-brain patients like Arjun, severing the connections between these allows images flashed to the right visual field to be spoken, but not those flashed to the left.
What are the hemispheres (or the corpus callosum)?
When students recall a story and substitute a common word like "house" for an unfamiliar one like "dacha," they are often influenced by this mental shortcut.
What is the availability heuristic?
This committee would likely reject a study that might harm a baby’s natural language acquisition by exposing them to confusing phonemes.
What is an Institutional Review Board (IRB)?
A student who records which concepts they understand and creates a plan for further learning is engaging in this type of "thinking about thinking."
What is metacognition?