Basic Consciousness Concepts
Consciousness
The awareness of yourself and your surroundings
Psychoactive Drugs
Drugs that affect mood, perception, thinking, or behavior
Sensation
The process of detecting physical energy from the environment using sensory receptors
Cocktail party effect
Learning
A relatively lasting change in behavior or knowledge due to experience
Selective Attention
The ability to focus on one stimulus while ignoring others
Depressants
Drugs such as alcohol that slow activity in the central nervous system
Perception
The process of organizing and interpreting sensory information
Stimulants
The type of drug that increases alertness and activity in the central nervous system
Ivan Pavlov
The psychologist who studied dogs learning to associate a sound with food
Inattentional blindness
Failing to notice something visible because your attention is focused elsewhere
Tolerance
Needing more of a drug to achieve the same effect
Transduction
The conversion of physical stimulus energy into neural signals
Top-down processing
The brain uses expectations and previous knowledge to interpret sensory information
Operant conditioning
Learning in which behavior changes because of its consequences (good or bad)
Dual Processing
The two ways the brain processes information, one conscious and one automatic.
Dopamine
The neurotransmitter strongly associated with reward and motivation that cocaine increases in the brain's synapses
Trichromatic theory
The theory that color vision begins with three types of cones sensitive to different ranges of wavelengths
Extinction (classical conditioning)
When the conditioned response weakens because the conditioned stimulus is repeatedly shown without the unconditioned stimulus
Negative reinforcement
Taking away something unpleasant to increase a behavior, such as stopping an annoying alarm by buckling a seat belt
fMRI
The brain-imaging technology that measures changes in blood oxygen to study brain activity
Biopsychosocial Perspective
The three major types of influences (biological, psychological, and social) that affect a person's risk of developing a substance use disorder
Retinal disparity
The depth cue that uses the difference between the images seen by the two eyes
Variable-ratio schedule
This reinforcement schedule rewards a behavior after making an unpredictable number of responses, making the behavior particularly resistant to extinction
Albert Bandura
The psychologist whose Bobo doll studies demonstrated that people can learn behaviors by observing others