Vocabulary
- Absolute threshold
- The smallest amount of stimulation needed for detection by a sense.
- Action Potential
- A transient all-or-nothing electrical current that is conducted down the axon when the membrane potential reaches the threshold of excitation.
- Affective forecasting
- Predicting how one will feel in the future after some event or decision.
- Agnosia
- Loss of the ability to perceive stimuli.
- Anchoring
- The bias to be affected by an initial anchor, even if the anchor is arbitrary, and to insufficiently adjust our judgments away from that anchor.
- Anosmia
- Loss of the ability to smell.
- Anterograde amnesia
- Inability to form new memories for facts and events after the onset of amnesia.
- Attitude
- A psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor.
- Audience design
- Constructing utterances to suit the audience’s knowledge.
- Audition
- Ability to process auditory stimuli. Also called hearing.
- Auditory canal
- Tube running from the outer ear to the middle ear.
- Auditory hair cells
- Receptors in the cochlea that transduce sound into electrical potentials.
- Autobiographical memory
- Memory for the events of one’s life.
- Automatic
- A behavior or process has one or more of the following features: unintentional, uncontrollable, occurring outside of conscious awareness, and cognitively efficient.
- Availability heuristic
- A heuristic in which the frequency or likelihood of an event is evaluated based on how easily instances of it come to mind.
- Axon
- Part of the neuron that extends off the soma, splitting several times to connect with other neurons; main output of the neuron.
- Basic-level category
- The neutral, preferred category for a given object, at an intermediate level of specificity.
- Behaviorism
- The study of behavior.
- Biases
- The systematic and predictable mistakes that influence the judgment of even very talented human beings.
- Binocular advantage
- Benefits from having two eyes as opposed to a single eye.
- Binocular disparity
- Difference is images processed by the left and right eyes.
- Binocular vision
- Our ability to perceive 3D and depth because of the difference between the images on each of our retinas.
- Bottom-up processing
- Building up to perceptual experience from individual pieces.
- Bounded awareness
- The systematic ways in which we fail to notice obvious and important information that is available to us.
- Bounded ethicality
- The systematic ways in which our ethics are limited in ways we are not even aware of ourselves.
- Bounded rationality
- Model of human behavior that suggests that humans try to make rational decisions but are bounded due to cognitive limitations.
- Bounded self-interest
- The systematic and predictable ways in which we care about the outcomes of others.
- Bounded willpower
- The tendency to place greater weight on present concerns rather than future concerns.
- Brain Stem
- The “trunk” of the brain comprised of the medulla, pons, midbrain, and diencephalon.
- Broca’s Area
- An area in the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere. Implicated in language production.
- Category
- A set of entities that are equivalent in some way. Usually the items are similar to one another.
- Central Nervous System
- The portion of the nervous system that includes the brain and spinal cord.
- Cerebellum
- The distinctive structure at the back of the brain, Latin for “small brain.”
- Cerebrum
- Usually refers to the cerebral cortex and associated white matter, but in some texts includes the subcortical structures.
- Chameleon effect
- The tendency for individuals to nonconsciously mimic the postures, mannerisms, facial expressions, and other behaviors of one’s interaction partners.
- Chemical senses
- Our ability to process the environmental stimuli of smell and taste.
- Chutes and Ladders
- A numerical board game that seems to be useful for building numerical knowledge.
- Cochlea
- Spiral bone structure in the inner ear containing auditory hair cells.
- Cognitive psychology
- The study of mental processes.
- Collectivism
- The cultural trend in which the primary unit of measurement is the group. Collectivists are likely to emphasize duty and obligation over personal aspirations.
- Common ground
- Information that is shared by people who engage in a conversation.
- Concept
- The mental representation of a category.
- Concrete operations stage
- Piagetian stage between ages 7 and 12 when children can think logically about concrete situations but not engage in systematic scientific reasoning.
- Cones
- Photoreceptors that operate in lighted environments and can encode fine visual details. There are three different kinds (S or blue, M or green and L or red) that are each sensitive to slightly different types of light. Combined, these three types of cones allow you to have color vision.
- Cones
- Photoreceptors of the retina sensitive to color. Located primarily in the fovea.
- Consciousness
- Awareness of ourselves and our environment.
- Conservation problems
- Problems pioneered by Piaget in which physical transformation of an object or set of objects changes a perceptually salient dimension but not the quantity that is being asked about.
- Consolidation
- Process by which a memory trace is stabilized and transformed into a more durable form.
- Consolidation
- The process occurring after encoding that is believed to stabilize memory traces.
- Continuous development
- Ways in which development occurs in a gradual incremental manner, rather than through sudden jumps.
- Contralateral
- Literally “opposite side”; used to refer to the fact that the two hemispheres of the brain process sensory information and motor commands for the opposite side of the body (e.g., the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body).
- Contrast
- Relative difference in the amount and type of light coming from two nearby locations.
- Contrast gain
- Process where the sensitivity of your visual system can be tuned to be most sensitive to the levels of contrast that are most prevalent in the environment.
- Corpus Callosum
- The thick bundle of nerve cells that connect the two hemispheres of the brain and allow them to communicate.
- Cross-cultural psychology (or cross-cultural studies)
- An approach to researching culture that emphasizes the use of standard scales as a means of making meaningful comparisons across groups.
- Cross-cultural studies (or cross-cultural psychology)
- An approach to researching culture that emphasizes the use of standard scales as a means of making meaningful comparisons across groups.
- Cue overload principle
- The principle stating that the more memories that are associated to a particular retrieval cue, the less effective the cue will be in prompting retrieval of any one memory.
- Cultural differences
- An approach to understanding culture primarily by paying attention to unique and distinctive features that set them apart from other cultures.
- Cultural intelligence
- The ability and willingness to apply cultural awareness to practical uses.
- Cultural psychology
- An approach to researching culture that emphasizes the use of interviews and observation as a means of understanding culture from its own point of view.
- Cultural relativism
- The principled objection to passing overly culture-bound (i.e., “ethnocentric”) judgements on aspects of other cultures.
- Cultural script
- Learned guides for how to behave appropriately in a given social situation. These reflect cultural norms and widely accepted values.
- Cultural similarities
- An approach to understanding culture primarily by paying attention to common features that are the same as or similar to those of other cultures
- Culture
- A pattern of shared meaning and behavior among a group of people that is passed from one generation to the next.
- Dark adaptation
- Adjustment of eye to low levels of light.
- Dark adaptation
- Process that allows you to become sensitive to very small levels of light, so that you can actually see in the near-absence of light.
- Decay
- The fading of memories with the passage of time.
- Declarative memory
- Conscious memories for facts and events.
- Dendrites
- Part of a neuron that extends away from the cell body and is the main input to the neuron.
- Depth perception
- The ability to actively perceive the distance from oneself of objects in the environment.
- Dichotic listening
- A task in which different audio streams are presented to each ear. Typically, people are asked to monitor one stream while ignoring the other.
- Dichotic listening
- An experimental task in which two messages are presented to different ears.
- Differential threshold (or difference threshold)
- The smallest difference needed in order to differentiate two stimuli. (See Just Noticeable Difference (JND))
- Diffuse Optical Imaging (DOI)
- A neuroimaging technique that infers brain activity by measuring changes in light as it is passed through the skull and surface of the brain.
- Directional goals
- The motivation to reach a particular outcome or judgment.
- Discontinuous development
- Discontinuous development
- Dissociative amnesia
- Loss of autobiographical memories from a period in the past in the absence of brain injury or disease.
- Distinctiveness
- The principle that unusual events (in a context of similar events) will be recalled and recognized better than uniform (nondistinctive) events.
- Divided attention
- The ability to flexibly allocate attentional resources between two or more concurrent tasks.
- Dorsal pathway
- Pathway of visual processing. The “where” pathway.
- Durability bias
- A bias in affective forecasting in which one overestimates for how long one will feel an emotion (positive or negative) after some event.
- Electroencephalography (EEG)
- A neuroimaging technique that measures electrical brain activity via multiple electrodes on the scalp.
- Empiricism
- The belief that knowledge comes from experience.
- Encoding
- Process by which information gets into memory.
- Encoding
- The initial experience of perceiving and learning events.
- Encoding specificity principle
- The hypothesis that a retrieval cue will be effective to the extent that information encoded from the cue overlaps or matches information in the engram or memory trace.
- Enculturation
- The uniquely human form of learning that is taught by one generation to another.
- Engrams
- A term indicating the change in the nervous system representing an event; also, memory trace.
- Episodic memory
- Memory for events in a particular time and place.
- Ethnocentric bias (or ethnocentrism)
- Being unduly guided by the beliefs of the culture you’ve grown up in, especially when this results in a misunderstanding or disparagement of unfamiliar cultures.
- Ethnographic studies
- Research that emphasizes field data collection and that examines questions that attempt to understand culture from it's own context and point of view.
- Eugenics
- The practice of selective breeding to promote desired traits.
- Evaluative priming task
- An implicit attitude task that assesses the extent to which an attitude object is associated with a positive or negative valence by measuring the time it takes a person to label an adjective as good or bad after being presented with an attitude object.
- Exemplar
- An example in memory that is labeled as being in a particular category.
- Explicit attitude
- An attitude that is consciously held and can be reported on by the person holding the attitude.
- False memories
- Memory for an event that never actually occurred, implanted by experimental manipulation or other means.
- Flashbulb memory
- Vivid personal memories of receiving the news of some momentous (and usually emotional) event.
- Flashbulb memory
- A highly detailed and vivid memory of an emotionally significant event.
- Flavor
- The combination of smell and taste.
- Foils
- Any member of a lineup (whether live or photograph) other than the suspect.
- Formal operations stage
- Piagetian stage starting at age 12 years and continuing for the rest of life, in which adolescents may gain the reasoning powers of educated adults.
- Framing
- The bias to be systematically affected by the way in which information is presented, while holding the objective information constant.
- Frontal Lobe
- The front most (anterior) part of the cerebrum; anterior to the central sulcus and responsible for motor output and planning, language, judgment, and decision-making.
- Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)
- Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): A neuroimaging technique that infers brain activity by measuring changes in oxygen levels in the blood.
- Functionalism
- A school of American psychology that focused on the utility of consciousness.
- G
- Short for “general factor” and is often used to be synonymous with intelligence itself.
- Gestalt psychology
- An attempt to study the unity of experience.
- Gustation
- Ability to process gustatory stimuli. Also called taste.
- Heuristics
- A mental shortcut or rule of thumb that reduces complex mental problems to more simple rule-based decisions.
- Heuristics
- cognitive (or thinking) strategies that simplify decision making by using mental short-cuts
- Hot cognition
- The mental processes that are influenced by desires and feelings.
- Impact bias
- A bias in affective forecasting in which one overestimates the strength or intensity of emotion one will experience after some event.
- Implicit Association Test
- An implicit attitude task that assesses a person’s automatic associations between concepts by measuring the response times in pairing the concepts.
- Implicit attitude
- An attitude that a person cannot verbally or overtly state.
- Implicit measures of attitudes
- Measures of attitudes in which researchers infer the participant’s attitude rather than having the participant explicitly report it.
- Inattentional blindness
- The failure to notice a fully visible, but unexpected, object or event when attention is devoted to something else.
- Inattentional blindness
- The failure to notice a fully visible object when attention is devoted to something else.
- Inattentional deafness
- The auditory analog of inattentional blindness. People fail to notice an unexpected sound or voice when attention is devoted to other aspects of a scene.
- Independent self
- The tendency to define the self in terms of stable traits that guide behavior.
- Individual differences
- Ways in which people differ in terms of their behavior, emotion, cognition, and development.
- Individualism
- The cultural trend in which the primary unit of measurement is the individual. Individualists are likely to emphasize uniqueness and personal aspirations over social duty.
- Information processing theories
- Theories that focus on describing the cognitive processes that underlie thinking at any one age and cognitive growth over time.
- Ingroup
- Group to which a person belongs.
- Intelligence
- An individual’s cognitive capability. This includes the ability to acquire, process, recall and apply information.
- Interdependent self
- The tendency to define the self in terms of social contexts that guide behavior.
- Interference
- Other memories get in the way of retrieving a desired memory
- Introspection
- A method of focusing on internal processes.
- IQ
- Short for “intelligence quotient.” This is a score, typically obtained from a widely used measure of intelligence that is meant to rank a person’s intellectual ability against that of others.
- Just noticeable difference (JND)
- The smallest difference needed in order to differentiate two stimuli. (see Differential Threshold)
- Lateral inhibition
- A signal produced by a neuron aimed at suppressing the response of nearby neurons.
- Lexicon
- Words and expressions.
- Light adaptation
- Adjustment of eye to high levels of light.
- Limbic System
- Includes the subcortical structures of the amygdala and hippocampal formation as well as some cortical structures; responsible for aversion and gratification.
- Limited capacity
- The notion that humans have limited mental resources that can be used at a given time.
- Linguistic intergroup bias
- A tendency for people to characterize positive things about their ingroup using more abstract expressions, but negative things about their outgroups using more abstract expressions.
- Mechanoreceptors
- Mechanical sensory receptors in the skin that response to tactile stimulation.
- Medial temporal lobes
- Inner region of the temporal lobes that includes the hippocampus.
- Memory traces
- A term indicating the change in the nervous system representing an event.
- Misinformation effect
- A memory error caused by exposure to incorrect information between the original event (e.g., a crime) and later memory test (e.g., an interview, lineup, or day in court).
- Misinformation effect
- When erroneous information occurring after an event is remembered as having been part of the original event.
- Mnemonic devices
- A strategy for remembering large amounts of information, usually involving imaging events occurring on a journey or with some other set of memorized cues.
- Mock witnesses
- A research subject who plays the part of a witness in a study.
- Mood-congruent memory
- The tendency to be better able to recall memories that have a mood similar to our current mood.
- Motivated skepticism
- A form of bias that can result from having a directional goal in which one is skeptical of evidence despite its strength because it goes against what one wants to believe.
- Multimodal perception
- The effects that concurrent stimulation in more than one sensory modality has on the perception of events and objects in the world.
- Myelin Sheath
- Fatty tissue, that insulates the axons of the neurons; myelin is necessary for normal conduction of electrical impulses among neurons.
- Nature
- The genes that children bring with them to life and that influence all aspects of their development.
- Need for closure
- The desire to come to a decision that will resolve ambiguity and conclude an issue.
- Nervous System
- The body’s network for electrochemical communication. This system includes all the nerves cells in the body.
- Neural impulse
- An electro-chemical signal that enables neurons to communicate.
- Neurons
- Individual brain cells
- Neurotransmitters
- Chemical substance released by the presynaptic terminal button that acts on the postsynaptic cell.
- Nociception
- Our ability to sense pain.
- Norm
- Assessments are given to a representative sample of a population to determine the range of scores for that population. These “norms” are then used to place an individual who takes that assessment on a range of scores in which he or she is compared to the population at large.
- Numerical magnitudes
- The sizes of numbers.
- Nurture
- The environments, starting with the womb, that influence all aspects of children’s development.
- Object permanence task
- The Piagetian task in which infants below about 9 months of age fail to search for an object that is removed from their sight and, if not allowed to search immediately for the object, act as if they do not know that it continues to exist.
- Observational learning
- Learning by observing the behavior of others.
- Occipital Lobe
- The back most (posterior) part of the cerebrum; involved in vision.
- Odorants
- Chemicals transduced by olfactory receptors.
- Olfaction
- Ability to process olfactory stimuli. Also called smell.
- Olfactory epithelium
- Organ containing olfactory receptors.
- Open ended questions
- Research questions that ask participants to answer in their own words.
- Opponent Process Theory
- Theory of color vision that assumes there are four different basic colors, organized into two pairs (red/green and blue/yellow) and proposes that colors in the world are encoded in terms of the opponency (or difference) between the colors in each pair. There is an additional black/white pair responsible for coding light contrast.
- Opponent-process theory
- Theory proposing color vision as influenced by cells responsive to pairs of colors.
- Ossicles
- A collection of three small bones in the middle ear that vibrate against the tympanic membrane.
- Outgroup
- Group to which a person does not belong.
- Overconfident
- The bias to have greater confidence in your judgment than is warranted based on a rational assessment.
- Parietal Lobe
- The part of the cerebrum between the frontal and occipital lobes; involved in bodily sensations, visual attention, and integrating the senses.
- Perception
- The psychological process of interpreting sensory information.
- Peripheral Nervous System
- All of the nerve cells that connect the central nervous system to all the other parts of the body.
- Phantom limb
- The perception that a missing limb still exists.
- Phantom limb pain
- Pain in a limb that no longer exists.
- Phonemic awareness
- Awareness of the component sounds within words.
- Photo spreads
- A selection of normally small photographs of faces given to a witness for the purpose of identifying a perpetrator.
- Photoactivation
- A photochemical reaction that occurs when light hits photoreceptors, producing a neural signal.
- Piaget’s theory
- Theory that development occurs through a sequence of discontinuous stages: the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages.
- Pinna
- Outermost portion of the ear.
- Planning fallacy
- A cognitive bias in which one underestimates how long it will take to complete a task.
- Positron Emission Tomography (PET)
- A neuroimaging technique that measures brain activity by detecting the presence of a radioactive substance in the brain that is initially injected into the bloodstream and then pulled in by active brain tissue.
- Practitioner-Scholar Model
- A model of training of professional psychologists that emphasizes clinical practice.
- Preoperational reasoning stage
- Period within Piagetian theory from age 2 to 7 years, in which children can represent objects through drawing and language but cannot solve logical reasoning problems, such as the conservation problems.
- Primary auditory cortex
- Area of the cortex involved in processing auditory stimuli.
- Primary somatosensory cortex
- Area of the cortex involved in processing somatosensory stimuli.
- Primary visual cortex
- Area of the cortex involved in processing visual stimuli.
- Primary visual cortex (V1)
- Brain region located in the occipital cortex (toward the back of the head) responsible for processing basic visual information like the detection, thickness, and orientation of simple lines, color, and small-scale motion.
- Primed
- A process by which a concept or behavior is made more cognitively accessible or likely to occur through the presentation of an associated concept.
- Priming
- A stimulus presented to a person reminds him or her about other ideas associated with the stimulus.
- Principle of inverse effectiveness
- The finding that, in general, for a multimodal stimulus, if the response to each unimodal component (on its own) is weak, then the opportunity for multisensory enhancement is very large. However, if one component—by itself—is sufficient to evoke a strong response, then the effect on the response gained by simultaneously processing the other components of the stimulus will be relatively small.
- Psychological essentialism
- The belief that members of a category have an unseen property that causes them to be in the category and to have the properties associated with it.
- Psychophysics
- Study of the relationships between physical stimuli and the perception of those stimuli.
- Qualitative changes
- Large, fundamental change, as when a caterpillar changes into a butterfly; stage theories such as Piaget’s posit that each stage reflects qualitative change relative to previous stages.
- Quantitative changes
- Gradual, incremental change, as in the growth of a pine tree’s girth.
- Realism
- A point of view that emphasizes the importance of the senses in providing knowledge of the external world.
- Recoding
- The ubiquitous process during learning of taking information in one form and converting it to another form, usually one more easily remembered.
- Representativeness heuristic
- A heuristic in which the likelihood of an object belonging to a category is evaluated based on the extent to which the object appears similar to one’s mental representation of the category.
- Retina
- Cell layer in the back of the eye containing photoreceptors.
- Retrieval
- Process by which information is accessed from memory and utilized.
- Retrieval
- The process of accessing stored information.
- Retroactive interference
- The phenomenon whereby events that occur after some particular event of interest will usually cause forgetting of the original event.
- Retrograde amnesia
- Inability to retrieve memories for facts and events acquired before the onset of amnesia.
- Ritual
- Rites or actions performed in a systematic or prescribed way often for an intended purpose. Example: The exchange of wedding rings during a marriage ceremony in many cultures.
- Rods
- Photoreceptors that are very sensitive to light and are mostly responsible for night vision.
- Rods
- Photoreceptors of the retina sensitive to low levels of light. Located around the fovea.
- Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
- The hypothesis that the language that people use determines their thoughts.
- Schema
- A mental model or representation that organizes the important information about a thing, person, or event (also known as a script).
- Schema (plural: schemata)
- A memory template, created through repeated exposure to a particular class of objects or events.
- Scientist-practitioner model
- A model of training of professional psychologists that emphasizes the development of both research and clinical skills.
- Selective attention
- The ability to select certain stimuli in the environment to process, while ignoring distracting information.
- Selective listening
- A method for studying selective attention in which people focus attention on one auditory stream of information while deliberately ignoring other auditory information.
- Self-construal
- The extent to which the self is defined as independent or as relating to others.
- Semantic memory
- The more or less permanent store of knowledge that people have.
- Sensation
- The physical processing of environmental stimuli by the sense organs.
- Sensorimotor stage
- Period within Piagetian theory from birth to age 2 years, during which children come to represent the enduring reality of objects.
- Sensory adaptation
- Decrease in sensitivity of a receptor to a stimulus after constant stimulation.
- Shadowing
- A task in which the individual is asked to repeat an auditory message as it is presented.
- Shape theory of olfaction
- Theory proposing that odorants of different size and shape correspond to different smells.
- Signal detection
- Method for studying the ability to correctly identify sensory stimuli.
- Situation model
- A mental representation of an event, object, or situation constructed at the time of comprehending a linguistic description.
- Situational identity
- Being guided by different cultural influences in different situations, such as home versus workplace, or formal versus informal roles.
- The hypothesis that the human brain has evolved, so that humans can maintain larger ingroups.
- The study of how people think about the social world.
- Networks of social relationships among individuals through which information can travel.
- Sociocultural theories
- Theory founded in large part by Lev Vygotsky that emphasizes how other people and the attitudes, values, and beliefs of the surrounding culture influence children’s development.
- Soma
- Cell body of a neuron that contains the nucleus and genetic information, and directs protein synthesis.
- Somatosensation
- Ability to sense touch, pain and temperature.
- Somatotopic map
- Organization of the primary somatosensory cortex maintaining a representation of the arrangement of the body.
- Sound waves
- Changes in air pressure. The physical stimulus for audition.
- Spatial Resolution
- A term that refers to how small the elements of an image are; high spatial resolution means the device or technique can resolve very small elements; in neuroscience it describes how small of a structure in the brain can be imaged.
- Split-brain Patient
- A patient who has had most or all of his or her corpus callosum severed.
- Standard scale
- Research method in which all participants use a common scale—typically a Likert scale—to respond to questions.
- Standardize
- Assessments that are given in the exact same manner to all people . With regards to intelligence tests standardized scores are individual scores that are computed to be referenced against normative scores for a population (see “norm”).
- Stereotype threat
- The phenomenon in which people are concerned that they will conform to a stereotype or that their performance does conform to that stereotype, especially in instances in which the stereotype is brought to their conscious awareness.
- Stereotypes
- Our general beliefs about the traits or behaviors shared by group of people.
- Storage
- The stage in the learning/memory process that bridges encoding and retrieval; the persistence of memory over time.
- Structuralism
- A school of American psychology that sought to describe the elements of conscious experience.
- Subliminal perception
- The ability to process information for meaning when the individual is not consciously aware of that information.
- Superadditive effect of multisensory integration
- The finding that responses to multimodal stimuli are typically greater than the sum of the independent responses to each unimodal component if it were presented on its own.
- Synapses
- Junction between the presynaptic terminal button of one neuron and the dendrite, axon, or soma of another postsynaptic neuron.
- Synaptic Gap
- Also known as the synaptic cleft; the small space between the presynaptic terminal button and the postsynaptic dendritic spine, axon, or soma.
- Synesthesia
- The blending of two or more sensory experiences, or the automatic activation of a secondary (indirect) sensory experience due to certain aspects of the primary (direct) sensory stimulation.
- Syntax
- Rules by which words are strung together to form sentences.
- System 1
- Our intuitive decision-making system, which is typically fast, automatic, effortless, implicit, and emotional.
- System 2
- Our more deliberative decision-making system, which is slower, conscious, effortful, explicit, and logical.
- Tastants
- Chemicals transduced by taste receptor cells.
- Taste receptor cells
- Receptors that transduce gustatory information.
- Temporal Lobe
- The part of the cerebrum in front of (anterior to) the occipital lobe and below the lateral fissure; involved in vision, auditory processing, memory, and integrating vision and audition.
- Temporal Resolution
- A term that refers to how small a unit of time can be measured; high temporal resolution means capable of resolving very small units of time; in neuroscience it describes how precisely in time a process can be measured in the brain.
- Temporally graded retrograde amnesia
- Inability to retrieve memories from just prior to the onset of amnesia with intact memory for more remote events.
- Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon
- The inability to pull a word from memory even though there is the sensation that that word is available.
- Top-down processing
- Experience influencing the perception of stimuli.
- Transduction
- The conversion of one form of energy into another.
- Trichromacy theory
- Theory that proposes that all of your color perception is fundamentally based on the combination of three (not two, not four) different color signals.
- Trichromatic theory
- Theory proposing color vision as influenced by three different cones responding preferentially to red, green and blue.
- Tympanic membrane
- Thin, stretched membrane in the middle ear that vibrates in response to sound. Also called the eardrum.
- Typicality
- The difference in “goodness” of category members, ranging from the most typical (the prototype) to borderline members.
- Value judgment
- An assessment—based on one’s own preferences and priorities—about the basic “goodness” or “badness” of a concept or practice.
- Value-free research
- Research that is not influenced by the researchers’ own values, morality, or opinions.
- Ventral pathway
- Pathway of visual processing. The “what” pathway.
- Vestibular system
- Parts of the inner ear involved in balance.
- Vestibulo-ocular reflex
- Coordination of motion information with visual information that allows you to maintain your gaze on an object while you move.
- Weber’s law
- States that just noticeable difference is proportional to the magnitude of the initial stimulus.
- What pathway
- Pathway of neural processing in the brain that is responsible for your ability to recognize what is around you.
- Where-and-How pathway
- Pathway of neural processing in the brain that is responsible for you knowing where things are in the world and how to interact with them.