Consciousness & Attention
Awareness of ourselves and our environment
What is consciousness?
The stage of sleep that includes vivid dreaming and sleep paralysis.
What is REM sleep?
A process by which a person or animal learns to connect two stimuli or events.
What is associative learning?
The ability to hold a few items in mind for a minute or two.
What is short-term memory (or working memory)?
The overall ability to act purposefully, think rationally, and deal effectively with one’s environment.
What is intelligence?
Focusing conscious awareness on one thing while tuning out everything else.
What is selective attention?
A disorder of problems in falling or staying asleep.
What is insomnia?
In Pavlov's experiments, this was both the unconditioned and the conditioned response.
What is salivation (or salivating or drooling)?
The process of getting information into the brain's memory system.
What is encoding?
A bias where our confidence in our judgments is typically greater than our accuracy.
What is the overconfidence phenomenon?
Our failure to see visible objects when our attention is focused elsewhere.
What is inattentional blindness?
The set of regular body changes (e.g., temperature, wakefulness) that occur on a 24-hour cycle.
What is the circadian rhythm?
The tendency for stimuli similar to the conditioned stimulus to elicit similar conditioned responses.
What is generalization?
The memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and “declare.”
What is explicit memory (or declarative memory)?
A therapy technique based on classical conditioning that is used to treat anxiety and phobias.
What is systematic desensitization?
A rare condition in which a person can respond to a visual stimulus without consciously experiencing it.
What is blindsight?
The brain's pattern of electrical activity during NREM-3 sleep.
What are delta waves?
The subject of John Watson's controversial conditioning experiments on fear.
Who was Little Albert (or baby Albert or Albert)?
Encoding verbal information based on the meaning of the words instead of just their sound or spelling.
What is deep processing (or deep thinking)?
Bits of information that we can use to access our memory network.
What are retrieval cues (or clues)?
A quick method of measuring a patient's level of consciousness.
What is the AVPU scale?
The part of the brain that responds to light and causes the pineal gland to adjust its production of melatonin, which affects our feelings of sleepiness.
What is the suprachiasmatic nucleus (or, SCN, or hypothalamus)?
Any consequence of behavior that decreases the likelihood of that behavior in the future.
What is punishment (or a punisher)?
A mental memory aid that associates new information with a pattern (e.g., letters, numbers, rhymes, acronyms, images)
What are mnemonics?
The given and family names of two behavioral psychologists.
Who are John Watson, Ivan Pavlov, or B. F. Skinner (Burrous or Fred or Frederick)?