Old White Guys
This old white guy believed the mind and body were separate things, made of different fundamental materials, earning him the nickname "father of dualism."
Rene Descartes
Don't forget: correlation does not equal causation. If you want to prove causation, you're going to have to use this type of study design.
Experimental
When an action potential reaches the axon terminals, these messengers are released into the synaptic cleft to signal the next neuron, turning the electrical signal into a chemical signal.
Neurotransmitters
Perceptual sets (when stimuli are perceived within the context of the given environment) are considered this type of processing.
Top-down processing
In a classic study, a stranger asking for directions was secretly swapped for a different person mid-conversation. About half the people giving directions didn't notice, exemplifying this phenomenon.
Change blindness
This old white guy discovered an area of the brain that now shares his name. When the area is damaged, people have difficulty producing speech, but speech comprehansion is intact.
Paul Broca
Jim wants to test the efficacy of a happy pill. He gives half of his participants the happy pill and half of them a placebo before placing electrodes on their faces to measure smiling. In this study, which pill the participants are assigned to take would be referred to as this kind of variable.
Independent
These endocrine messengers travel through the bloodstream. Compared with neurotransmitters, their effects take longer to start but last longer.
Hormones
Aerial perspective, relative size, and motion parallax are all examples of this type of depth perception cue.
Monocular
This deepest stage of NREM sleep is dominated by slow delta waves. It is when a sleeper is hardest to wake.
NREM 3 or N3
This old white guy used trained introspection to break conscious experience into its basic elements, a school of thought called structuralism.
Edward B. Titchener
Stop! Before you start your study, you need to get approval from this group, whose job it is to ensure that research is conducted in accordance with ethical standards.
Our brains are plastic--and that's a good thing! In the unfortunate case of brain damage, other parts of the brain can sometimes take over the responsibilities of damaged parts--a process referred to as this.
Functional plasticity
This sensory system shares a unique connection to memory; researchers suggest that its direct neural connection to the limbic system is evidence that it helped our ancestors navigate.
Olfaction (will also accept "sense of smell")
In lab studies, rats kept continuously awake eventually died. Many of the rats developed sepsis, suggesting that sleep loss broke down this body system.
immune system
Ivan Pavlov, known for his experiments with dogs, catalyzed this school of thought, which argues for a focus on directly measurable phenomena.
To study memory across adulthood, a researcher tests separate groups of 20-, 40-, and 60-year-olds in the same week, rather than following one group over many years. This is her research design.
Cross-sectional
Someone experiencing simultaneous sympathetic nervous system deactivation and parasympathetic nervous system activation is likely to feel like this.
probably pretty chill (will accept any rendition of calm or relaxed)
Each eye gets a slightly different view of the world. The brain compares those two images to judge distance, using this binocular depth cue.
Binocular Disparity
You're at a loud party, focused on one conversation and tuning out everything else. Then someone across the room says your name, and you notice it right away, exemplifying this phenomenon.
Cocktail party effect
This old white guy is known for his philosophical work on consciousness, coining the phrase the "hard problem of consciousness."
David Chalmers
Simon runs a study and finds that the number of hours spent reading in one's lifetime is associated with worse memory. He runs some follow-up statistics and he finds that, in his study, age is this kind of variable. Turns out 80-year-olds have spent more time reading than 10-year-olds!
Confounding
During this phase of an action potential, sodium ions rush into the cell, causing the inside of the cell to deviate from its resting negative charge and become positively charged.
Depolarization
In predictive processing, this is the mismatch between what the brain expected and what the senses actually report. It signals the brain to update its model.
Prediction error
Descartes proposed that the non-physical mind and the physical body interact through this small gland near the center of the brain.
Pineal gland