Foundations
What is the main difference between correlational and experimental designs?
Experiments manipulate an independent variable to infer causation; correlations only show relationships.
What part of the neuron sends signals to other neurons?
What is the difference between sensation and perception?
Sensation is physical detection of stimuli; perception is the brain’s interpretation (One is the same no matter the person, one is individualistic)
Who made classical conditioning famous by training dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell?
Ivan Pavlov
What are the three stages of memory according to the Atkinson-Shiffrin model?
Sensory, short-term (working), and long-term memory.
What bias describes believing we “knew it all along” after seeing the results?
Hindsight bias
Which lobe of the cortex is responsible for higher-order planning and decision making?
The frontal lobe
What is the absolute threshold?
The smallest amount of stimulation detectable 50% of the time.
What is the unconditioned stimulus (US) in Pavlov’s original experiment?
Food
What is working memory?
The active manipulation of information currently in use
In 1848, this railroad worker survived a tamping-iron accident that damaged his frontal lobe and dramatically changed his personality, providing early evidence that specific brain regions influence behavior and emotion
Who is Phineas Gage?
What part of the brain is responsible for balance and coordination?
Cerebellum
What theory explains why people’s responses depend on both sensitivity and expectations?
Signal Detection Theory.
What is it called when similar stimuli elicit the same conditioned response?
Generalization
What effect shows better recall for items at the beginning and end of a list?
Serial position effect (primacy and recency effect)
What school of thought, led by Edward Titchener, focused on breaking consciousness into basic elements through introspection?
Structuralism
Which hemisphere of the brain controls movement on the right side of the body?
The left hemisphere
What does top-down processing mean?
prior knowledge or expectations.
What is shaping?
Reinforcing successive approximations toward a desired behavior.
Name these two different kinds of memory. One is declarative (knowing what, episodic/semantic), one is non-declarative (knowing-how, procedural)
Explicit and Implicit memory
Who founded the first psychology laboratory in 1879 and is known as the “father of psychology”?
Wilhelm Wundt
What insulating layer helps electrical signals travel efficiently down the axon?
The myelin sheath
What illusion involves arrowheads making identical lines look different lengths?
The Müller-Lyer illusion
What brain area releases dopamine during reward processing and learning?
Nucleus accumbens
What is it called when new information interferes with old information in memory?
Retroactive interference