The Basics
The scientific study of thoughts, emotions, behaviors.
What is Psychology?
Thinking about the thought process itself. AKA double checking
What is Metacognition?
A stimulus that changes your attention in some way.
What is Priming?
When X increases Y also increases
What is the a Positive Relationship?
A previously neutral stimulus that comes to trigger the conditioned response
What is the Conditioned Stimulus?
Seeking out information that affirms your biases
What is Confirmation Bias?
A mental shortcut
What is Heuristic?
Is longer than sensory memory, but has a limited capacity of 5-9 pieces of information. Also known as the brain's work space.
What is short term memory?
The specific description of how you will measure a conceptual variable
What is an Operational Definition?
When a person's behaviors and thoughts do not align, resulting in mental discomfort
What is Cognitive Dissonance?
To blindly agree with information upon face value or without questioning
What is Uncritical Acceptance?
The brains ability to be molded and adaptive to new and continuous stimuli
What is Plasticity?
The ability to recall a memory when in a specific emotional or physical state.
What is Context Dependent Memory?
The potential for specific research findings to generalize to a larger population
What is External Validity?
A taste aversion where you have the tendency to blame food for illness, even if the food had nothing to do with the illness
What is the Garcia Effect?
An example of this phenomena is the idea that "opposites attract"
What is the Common Sense Problem?
The ability to focus your attention on a single aspect of an environment, while avoiding attention to other stimuli
What is the Cocktail Party Effect?
The ability to remember information that occurs first better than information occurring later
What is the Primacy Effect?
Any outside variable that can influence the relationship between the independent and dependent variables
What is a Confounding Variable?
The phenomenon in which being rewarded for doing something actually decreases the intrinsic motivation to perform an action
What is the Over Justification Effect?
The tendency to believe that people will provide benefits to those who benefit them
What is the norm of reciprocity?
The scientific studies that explain the cognitive similarities and differences between humans and nonhuman.
What is the Comparative Cognition?
An encoding technique that involves creating an association between new information and information that you already know. An example of this is a mnemonic device.
What is Elaborate Rehearsal?
When you incorrectly reject the null hypothesis. AKA a false positive.
What is a Type I Error?
Behavior that is reinforced after an unpredictable
number of responses
What is a Variable- Ratio schedule of reinforcement?