Chapter 1
What are mean, median, and mode? (Briefly define each).
Mean - statistical average
Median - middle value
Mode - most frequent value
What is plasticity?
The brain’s ability to change, especially during childhood, by reorganizing after damage or by building new pathways based on experience.
What are two forms of inattentional blindness?
Change blindness and choice blindness
This layer of fatty tissue on a neuron can help increase transmission speed of neural impulses.
What is the myelin sheath
What are the three different ways to test hypotheses?
Observation/Experimental
Correlation
Descriptive
What is action potential?
A neural impulse; a brief electrical charge that travels down an axon.
The relatively slow brain waves of a relaxed, awaken state are _______, while the large and slow brain waves associated with deep sleep are ________.
Alpha waves, delta waves
A near-death experience bears a striking resemblance to Ronald Siegel’s description of this.
What is a hallucinogenic experience
What are two of the three types of experimental conditions and how are they conducted?
Double-blind - Neither the participants nor data collectors know which group is receiving experimental treatment.
Placebo - Control group that receives no active agent.
Random assignment - Participants are unaware of their experimental group assignment.
What is the corpus callosum?
The large band of neural fibers connecting the two brain hemispheres and carrying messages between them.
What are the cell clusters in the hypothalamus that control circadian rhythm by adjusting melatonin production?
Suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN)
This term refers to the psychological tendency to perceive an event, which has already occurred, as significantly more predictable than it was.
What is hindsight bias
Describe one case study discussed in class and the ethical concerns surrounding the issue.
Genie - Became used as a test subject for psychological studies after several years of extreme isolation and abuse.
What are the 2 main parts of the nervous systems and what do they control?
Central nervous system - the brain and spinal cord.
Peripheral nervous system - the sensory and motor neurons that connect the central nervous system (CNS) to the rest of the body.
What happens in the brain during sleep that restores and strengthens our memories?
Recent experiences stored in the hippocampus are shifted elsewhere in the cortex for permanent storage.
The endocrine functions like this.
The glands of the endocrine system secrete hormones into the bloodstream, where they can travel to tissue throughout the body, including the brain.
What is the scientific method? Describe its purpose and name each of the 5 steps.
Process for evaluating ideas with observation and analysis.
Theory/hypothesis/operational definition/data collection/replication
What are the 4 main parts of the limbic system?
Hypothalamus, Pituitary Gland, Amygdala, and the Hippocampus
What are some differences between sequential and parallel processing?
Sequential: processes one aspect of a problem at a time, used for new information, slower, conscious
Parallel: processes many aspects simultaneously, used for well-learned information, faster, unconscious
These are the 5 major views on the function of dreams.
What are,
1) To provide a safety valve for our unconscious desires and thoughts(The Freudian explanation).
2) To sort out the experiences of a day and fix them to memory(the information processing explanation).
3) To preserve neural pathways in the brain through brain stimulation(the brain stimulation explanation).
4) To make sense of the neural static by weaving it into a story(the activation-synthesis explanation).
5) To provide a representation of the dreamers level of development.