Neurons
These neurons connect sensory and motor neurons and are found in the brain and spinal cord.
What are interneurons?
This is an intense, irrational fear of a specific object or situation.
What is a phobia?
This describes the tendency to more easily recognize faces of your own race compared to others.
What is the other-race effect?
This form of encoding focuses on the meaning of words or concepts, which leads to better memory.
What is semantic encoding?
This approach to perception starts with the senses and works up to the brain’s interpretation.
What is bottom-up processing?
This fatty tissue helps increase the speed of neural transmission along an axon.
What is the myelin sheath?
This is a sleep disorder in which breathing repeatedly stops and starts during sleep.
What is sleep apnea?
This refers to improvement caused by the expectation of treatment, not the treatment itself.
What is the placebo effect?
This brief type of memory holds sensory information for just a few seconds.
What is sensory memory?
This form of processing uses prior knowledge and expectations to interpret sensory input.
What is top-down processing?
This term refers to a drug that mimics a neurotransmitter and activates its receptor.
What is an agonist?
This term refers to the view that psychological disorders have physical causes that can be diagnosed and treated.
What is the medical model?
This law states that a stimulus must change by a constant percentage rather than a constant amount to be noticed.
What is Weber's law?
This effect happens when emotional or surprising events are remembered with vivid detail.
What is a flashbulb memory?
This refers to interpreting multiple aspects of a stimulus at once, like color, shape, and motion.
What is parallel processing?
This is the minimum level of stimulation needed to trigger a neural impulse.
What is the threshold?
In this final stage of the general adaptation syndrome, prolonged stress depletes the body’s resources, leading to burnout or illness.
What is the exhaustion stage?
This law says that performance improves with arousal—but only to a certain point.
What is the Yerkes-Dodson law?
This is the process of stabilizing a memory after it’s formed, often during sleep.
What is memory consolidation?
This occurs when you focus on one thing at a time, like solving a math problem step by step.
What is sequential processing?
These neurons carry messages from the body to the brain and spinal cord.
What are afferent or sensory neurons?
In this stage of the general adaptation syndrome, the body tries to adapt to the stressor and maintain balance.
What is the resistance stage?
This perceptual phenomenon shows that seeing and hearing conflicting information can change what you think you heard.
What is the McGurk effect?
This refers to the strengthening of neural connections over time as a result of repeated stimulation.
What is long-term potentiation?
This model of brain function proposes that we operate on both conscious and unconscious levels simultaneously.
What is dual processing?