Science of Psychology
The physical organ that acts as the control center for all human behavior, emotion, cognition, and perception.
What is the brain?
This is the measured outcome of the experiment.
What is the dependent variable?
The lobe of the brain responsible for visual processing.
What is the occipital lobe?
These are drugs that decrease behavioral and mental activity.
What are depressants?
This processing begins with the sensory receptors and works up to the brain.
What is bottom-up processing?
He created more accurate anatomical drawings of the brain.
Who is Leonardo da Vinci?
A variable (separate from the independent variable) that interferes with another in an experiment.
What is the confounding variable?
The part of the neuron that receives incoming messages from other neurons.
What is the dendrite?
What is stage 1?
The detection of physical stimuli and the transmission of that information to the brain.
What is sensation?
Testing that is the gold standard for diagnosing epilepsy.
What is an EEG?
This type of research method can determine cause and effect because it involves manipulating an independent variable and measuring a dependent variable.
The fight-or-flight response is activated by this system.
What is the sympathetic nervous system?
This disorder impairs the brain's ability to regulate sleep-wake cycles, resulting in extreme, uncontrollable daytime sleepiness and sudden "sleep attacks".
What is narcolepsy?
We perceive objects as unchanging even when stimuli change.
What is perceptual constancy?
The study of biological or environmental influences on gene expression that are not part of inherited genes
What is epigenetics?
The result is unlikely due to chance.
What is statistically significant?
The part of the brain responsible for high-level cognitive processes, voluntary motor control, language production, and personality expression.
What is the frontal lobe?
When a person fails to notice large changes in a visual scene.
What is change blindness?
The law that states two stimuli must differ by a constant proportion to be detected.
What is Weber's Law?
Remaining open to new ideas but is wary of “scientific findings” when evidence and sound reason do not support them
What is amiable skepticism?
This type of research involves observing and recording behavior in a natural environment without manipulating any variables, allowing researchers to see behavior as it occurs in real life.
What is naturalistic observation?
This part of the nervous system activates the fight or flight response.
What is the sympathetic nervous system?
The practice of focusing the mind on a single point—such as the breath, a sound (mantra), or an object—to develop deep, sustained attention and calm.
What is concentrative meditation?
The minimum intensity of a stimulus (light, sound, smell, taste, or touch) that an organism can detect 50% of the time.
What is the absolute threshold?