Ch.1 What is Psychology
The scientific study of behavior and mental processes?
What is Psychology?
A broad idea or set of closely related ideas that attempts to explain observations and to make predictions about future observations.
What is a theory?
The body's electrochemical communication circuitry.
What is the Nervous System?
The process of receiving stimulus energies from the external environment and transforming those energies into neural energy.
What is Sensation?
An individual's awareness of external events and internal sensations under a condition of arousal, including awareness of the self and thoughts about one's experiences.
What is Consciousness?
A systematic, relatively permanent change in behavior that occurs through experience.
What is Learning?
The first step in memory; the process by which information gets into memory storage.
What is Encoding?
These two fields combined to form the field of psychology.
What are philosophy and natural science fields?
A predictive statement that is an educated guess that derives logically from a theory and can be tested.
What is a hypothesis?
The brain's special physical capacity for change.
What is plasticity?
The process of organizing and interpreting sensory information so that it makes sense.
What is Perception?
A network of structures including the brain stem, medulla, and thalamus that are involved in the experience of arousal and engagement with the environment.
What is the Reticular Activating System?
Learning process in which a neutral-stimulus becomes associated with an innately meaningful stimulus and acquires the capacity to elicit a similar response.
What is Classical Conditioning?
Theory stating that memory storage involves three separate systems: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.
What is the Atkinson-Shiffrin Theory?
This philosopher developed the first psychology laboratory and was the first to test the idea that mental processes could be measured.
Who is Wilhelm Wundt?
Gaining knowledge through the observation of events, the collection of data, and logical reasoning.
What is the empirical method?
A type of cell in the nervous system that handles the information processing function.
What is a Neuron?
The operation in sensation and perception where sensory receptors register information from the external environment and send it up to the brain for interpretation.
What is Bottom-Up Processing?
Higher order, complex cognitive processes, including thinking, planning, and problem solving.
What is Executive Function?
A classical conditioning procedure for changing the relationship between a conditioned stimulus and its conditioned response.
What is Counterconditioning?
The conscious recollection of information such as specific facts or events, information that can be verbally communicated.
What is Explicit or Declarative Memory?
This philosopher brought Psychology to America and crated a theory focused on why human thought is adaptive.
Who is William James?
A manipulated experimental factor.
What is an independent variable?
Nerve cells in the brain that are activated both when an action is performed and when one watches someone else perform an action.
What are Mirror Neurons?
The minimum amount of stimulus energy that a person can detect.
What is an Absolute Threshold?
A small brain structure that uses input from the retina to synchronize its own rhythm with the daily cycle of light and dark; the body's way of monitoring the change from day to night.
What is the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus?
A form of associative learning in which the consequences of a behavior change the probability of the behavior's recurrence.
What is Operant Conditioning?
The retention of information about the where, when, and what of life's happenings.
What is Episodic Memory?
Theory that focuses on identifying the structures of the human mind.
What is Structuralism?
The degree to which an experimental design actually reflects the real-world issues it is supposed to address.
What is external validity?
The principle that once an electrical impulse is a certain level of intensity, it fires and moves down the axon without losing any intensity.
What is the All-Or-Nothing Principle?
The activation of information that people already have in storage to help them remember new information better and faster.
What is Priming?
The length of time it takes to cycle through the stages of sleep each night.
What is 90-100 minutes?
The process by which a stimulus or event follows a particular behavior and increases the probability that the behavior will happen again.
What is Reinforcement?
A schema for an event, often containing information about physical features, people, and typical occurrences.
What is a Script?
Theory that focuses on the functions and purposes of the mind and the impact on behavior as one adapts to their environment.
What is Functionalism?
Mathematical procedures that are used to describe and summarize sets of data in a meaningful way.
What are descriptive statistics?
These are the lobes of the brain.
What are the Frontal Lobe, Parietal Lobe, Occipital Lobe, and the Temporal Lobes?
Theory stating that color perception is produced by three types of cone receptors in the retina that are particularly sensitive to different, but overlapping, ranges of wavelengths.
What is the Trichromatic Theory?
Drugs that act on the nervous system to alter consciousness, modify perception, and change mood.
What are Psychoactive Drugs?
The removal of a stimulus following any given behavior in order to decrease the frequency of that behavior.
What is Negative Punishment?
The tendency to recall items at the beginning or end of a list more readily than those in the middle.
What is the Serial Position Effect?
The 7 contemporary approaches in Psychology.
What are the biological, behavioral, psychodynamic, humanistic, cognitive, evolutionary, and sociocultural approaches?
A measure of dispersion that indicates how much the scores in a sample differ from the mean of the sample.
What is the Standard Deviation?
The body system consisting of a set of glands that regulate the activities of certain organs by releasing their chemical products into the blood stream.
What is the Endocrine System?
Theories that state the inner ear registers the frequency of sound stating a) each frequency produces vibrations at a particular spot on the basilar membrane, b) the perception of sound's frequency depends on how often the auditory nerve fires, and c) a cluster of nerve cells can fire neural impulses in rapid succession producing a volley of impulses.
What are the Place Theory, Frequency Theory, and Volley Theory?
The surface content of a dream, containing dream symbols that disguise the dream's true meaning, according to Freud.
What is Manifest Content?
Unreinforced learning that is not immediately reflected in behavior.
What is Latent or Implicit Learning?
Situation in which material that was learned later disrupts the retrieval of information that was learned earlier.
What is Retroactive Interference?