Vocabulary
- Absolute threshold
- The smallest amount of stimulation needed for detection by a sense.
- Affective forecasting
- Predicting how one will feel in the future after some event or decision.
- Age identity
- How old or young people feel compared to their chronological age; after early adulthood, most people feel younger than their chronological age.
- Agnosia
- Loss of the ability to perceive stimuli.
- Ambulatory assessment
- An overarching term to describe methodologies that assess the behavior, physiology, experience, and environments of humans in naturalistic settings.
- 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.
- Anecdotal evidence
- A piece of biased evidence, usually drawn from personal experience, used to support a conclusion that may or may not be correct.
- Anosmia
- Loss of the ability to smell.
- Attitude
- A psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor.
- 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.
- Autobiographical narratives
- A qualitative research method used to understand characteristics and life themes that an individual considers to uniquely distinguish him- or herself from others.
- Automatic
- A behavior or process has one or more of the following features: unintentional, uncontrollable, occurring outside of conscious awareness, and cognitively efficient.
- Automatic
- Automatic biases are unintended, immediate, and irresistible.
- 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.
- Average life expectancy
- Mean number of years that 50% of people in a specific birth cohort are expected to survive. This is typically calculated from birth but is also sometimes re-calculated for people who have already reached a particular age (e.g., 65).
- Aversive racism
- Aversive racism is unexamined racial bias that the person does not intend and would reject, but that avoids inter-racial contact.
- Biases
- The systematic and predictable mistakes that influence the judgment of even very talented human beings.
- Big-C Creativity
- Creative ideas that have an impact well beyond the everyday life of home or work. At the highest level, this kind of creativity is that of the creative genius.
- 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.
- Blatant biases
- Blatant biases are conscious beliefs, feelings, and behavior that people are perfectly willing to admit, are mostly hostile, and openly favor their own group.
- 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.
- Causality
- In research, the determination that one variable causes—is responsible for—an effect.
- Cause-and-effect
- Related to whether we say one variable is causing changes in the other variable, versus other variables that may be related to these two variables.
- Central route to persuasion
- Persuasion that employs direct, relevant, logical messages.
- 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.
- Cochlea
- Spiral bone structure in the inner ear containing auditory hair cells.
- Cohort
- Group of people typically born in the same year or historical period, who share common experiences over time; sometimes called a generation (e.g., Baby Boom Generation).
- Collective self-esteem
- Feelings of self-worth that are based on evaluation of relationships with others and membership in social groups.
- Common knowledge effect
- The tendency for groups to spend more time discussing information that all members know (shared information) and less time examining information that only a few members know (unshared).
- Cones
- Photoreceptors of the retina sensitive to color. Located primarily in the fovea.
- Confidence interval
- An interval of plausible values for a population parameter; the interval of values within the margin of error of a statistic.
- Consolidation
- The process occurring after encoding that is believed to stabilize memory traces.
- Convergent thinking
- The opposite of divergent thinking, the capacity to narrow in on the single “correct” answer or solution to a given question or problem (e.g., giving the right response on an intelligence tests).
- Theory that proposes that the frequency, types, and reciprocity of social exchanges change with age. These social exchanges impact the health and well-being of the givers and receivers in the convoy.
- Correlation
- In statistics, the measure of relatedness of two or more variables.
- Cross-sectional studies
- Research method that provides information about age group differences; age differences are confounded with cohort differences and effects related to history and time of study.
- Crystallized intelligence
- Type of intellectual ability that relies on the application of knowledge, experience, and learned information.
- 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.
- Daily Diary method
- A methodology where participants complete a questionnaire about their thoughts, feelings, and behavior of the day at the end of the day.
- Dark adaptation
- Adjustment of eye to low levels of light.
- Data (also called observations)
- In research, information systematically collected for analysis and interpretation.
- Day reconstruction method (DRM)
- A methodology where participants describe their experiences and behavior of a given day retrospectively upon a systematic reconstruction on the following day.
- Deductive reasoning
- A form of reasoning in which a given premise determines the interpretation of specific observations (e.g., All birds have feathers; since a duck is a bird, it has feathers).
- 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))
- Directional goals
- The motivation to reach a particular outcome or judgment.
- Discrimination
- Discrimination is behavior that advantages or disadvantages people merely based on their group membership.
- Distinctiveness
- The principle that unusual events (in a context of similar events) will be recalled and recognized better than uniform (nondistinctive) events.
- Distribution
- In statistics, the relative frequency that a particular value occurs for each possible value of a given variable.
- Distribution
- The pattern of variation in data.
- Divergent thinking
- The opposite of convergent thinking, the capacity for exploring multiple potential answers or solutions to a given question or problem (e.g., coming up with many different uses for a common object).
- 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.
- Ecological momentary assessment
- An overarching term to describe methodologies that repeatedly sample participants’ real-world experiences, behavior, and physiology in real time.
- Ecological validity
- The degree to which a study finding has been obtained under conditions that are typical for what happens in everyday life.
- Electronically activated recorder, or EAR
- A methodology where participants wear a small, portable audio recorder that intermittently records snippets of ambient sounds around them.
- Emotion
- An experiential, physiological, and behavioral response to a personally meaningful stimulus.
- Emotion coherence
- The degree to which emotional responses (subjective experience, behavior, physiology, etc.) converge with one another.
- Emotion fluctuation
- The degree to which emotions vary or change in intensity over time.
- Empirical
- Concerned with observation and/or the ability to verify a claim.
- Empirical methods
- Approaches to inquiry that are tied to actual measurement and observation.
- 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.
- 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.
- Ethics
- Professional guidelines that offer researchers a template for making decisions that protect research participants from potential harm and that help steer scientists away from conflicts of interest or other situations that might compromise the integrity of their research.
- 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.
- Experience-sampling method
- A methodology where participants report on their momentary thoughts, feelings, and behaviors at different points in time over the course of a day.
- Explicit attitude
- An attitude that is consciously held and can be reported on by the person holding the attitude.
- External validity
- The degree to which a finding generalizes from the specific sample and context of a study to some larger population and broader settings.
- Fact
- Objective information about the world.
- Falsify
- In science, the ability of a claim to be tested and—possibly—refuted; a defining feature of science.
- Fixed action patterns (FAPs)
- Sequences of behavior that occur in exactly the same fashion, in exactly the same order, every time they are elicited.
- Flashbulb memory
- Vivid personal memories of receiving the news of some momentous (and usually emotional) event.
- Flavor
- The combination of smell and taste.
- Fluid intelligence
- Type of intelligence that relies on the ability to use information processing resources to reason logically and solve novel problems.
- Foot in the door
- Obtaining a small, initial commitment.
- Framing
- The bias to be systematically affected by the way in which information is presented, while holding the objective information constant.
- Full-cycle psychology
- A scientific approach whereby researchers start with an observational field study to identify an effect in the real world, follow up with laboratory experimentation to verify the effect and isolate the causal mechanisms, and return to field research to corroborate their experimental findings.
- Functional distance
- The frequency with which we cross paths with others.
- Generalizability
- Related to whether the results from the sample can be generalized to a larger population.
- Generalize
- In research, the degree to which one can extend conclusions drawn from the findings of a study to other groups or situations not included in the study.
- Generalize
- Generalizing, in science, refers to the ability to arrive at broad conclusions based on a smaller sample of observations. For these conclusions to be true the sample should accurately represent the larger population from which it is drawn.
- Global subjective well-being
- Individuals’ perceptions of and satisfaction with their lives as a whole.
- Gradually escalating commitments
- A pattern of small, progressively escalating demands is less likely to be rejected than a single large demand made all at once.
- Group cohesion
- The solidarity or unity of a group resulting from the development of strong and mutual interpersonal bonds among members and group-level forces that unify the group, such as shared commitment to group goals.
- Group polarization
- The tendency for members of a deliberating group to move to a more extreme position, with the direction of the shift determined by the majority or average of the members’ predeliberation preferences.
- Groupthink
- A set of negative group-level processes, including illusions of invulnerability, self-censorship, and pressures to conform, that occur when highly cohesive groups seek concurrence when making a decision.
- Gustation
- Ability to process gustatory stimuli. Also called taste.
- Hedonic well-being
- Component of well-being that refers to emotional experiences, often including measures of positive (e.g., happiness, contentment) and negative affect (e.g., stress, sadness).
- Heterogeneity
- Inter-individual and subgroup differences in level and rate of change over time.
- 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
- Heuristics
- Mental shortcuts that enable people to make decisions and solve problems quickly and efficiently.
- Hot cognition
- The mental processes that are influenced by desires and feelings.
- Hypotheses
- A logical idea that can be tested.
- Hypothesis
- A tentative explanation that is subject to testing.
- 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
- Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures relatively automatic biases that favor own group relative to other groups.
- 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 object when attention is devoted to something else.
- Induction
- To draw general conclusions from specific observations.
- Inductive reasoning
- A form of reasoning in which a general conclusion is inferred from a set of observations (e.g., noting that “the driver in that car was texting; he just cut me off then ran a red light!” (a specific observation), which leads to the general conclusion that texting while driving is dangerous).
- Inhibitory functioning
- Ability to focus on a subset of information while suppressing attention to less relevant information.
- Internal validity
- The degree to which a cause-effect relationship between two variables has been unambiguously established.
- Intra- and inter-individual differences
- Different patterns of development observed within an individual (intra-) or between individuals (inter-).
- Just noticeable difference (JND)
- The smallest difference needed in order to differentiate two stimuli. (see Differential Threshold)
- Latent inhibition
- The ability to filter out extraneous stimuli, concentrating only on the information that is deemed relevant. Reduced latent inhibition is associated with higher creativity.
- Levels of analysis
- In science, there are complementary understandings and explanations of phenomena.
- Life course theories
- Theory of development that highlights the effects of social expectations of age-related life events and social roles; additionally considers the lifelong cumulative effects of membership in specific cohorts and sociocultural subgroups and exposure to historical events.
- Life span theories
- Theory of development that emphasizes the patterning of lifelong within- and between-person differences in the shape, level, and rate of change trajectories.
- Light adaptation
- Adjustment of eye to high levels of light.
- Limited capacity
- The notion that humans have limited mental resources that can be used at a given time.
- Linguistic inquiry and word count
- A quantitative text analysis methodology that automatically extracts grammatical and psychological information from a text by counting word frequencies.
- Little-c creativity
- Creative ideas that appear at the personal level, whether the home or the workplace. Such creativity needs not have a larger impact to be considered creative.
- Lived day analysis
- A methodology where a research team follows an individual around with a video camera to objectively document a person’s daily life as it is lived.
- Longitudinal studies
- Research method that collects information from individuals at multiple time points over time, allowing researchers to track cohort differences in age-related change to determine cumulative effects of different life experiences.
- Margin of error
- The expected amount of random variation in a statistic; often defined for 95% confidence level.
- Mechanoreceptors
- Mechanical sensory receptors in the skin that response to tactile stimulation.
- Memory traces
- A term indicating the change in the nervous system representing an event.
- Mere-exposure effect
- The notion that people like people/places/things merely because they are familiar with them.
- 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.
- Model minority
- A minority group whose members are perceived as achieving a higher degree of socioeconomic success than the population average.
- 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.
- Multicultural experiences
- Individual exposure to two or more cultures, such as obtained by living abroad, emigrating to another country, or working or going to school in a culturally diverse setting.
- Multimodal perception
- The effects that concurrent stimulation in more than one sensory modality has on the perception of events and objects in the world.
- Need for closure
- The desire to come to a decision that will resolve ambiguity and conclude an issue.
- Nociception
- Our ability to sense pain.
- Null-hypothesis significance testing (NHST)
- In statistics, a test created to determine the chances that an alternative hypothesis would produce a result as extreme as the one observed if the null hypothesis were actually true.
- Objective
- Being free of personal bias.
- Odorants
- Chemicals transduced by olfactory receptors.
- Olfaction
- Ability to process olfactory stimuli. Also called smell.
- Olfactory epithelium
- Organ containing olfactory receptors.
- Openness to experience
- One of the factors of the Big Five Model of personality, the factor assesses the degree that a person is open to different or new values, interests, and activities.
- Opponent-process theory
- Theory proposing color vision as influenced by cells responsive to pairs of colors.
- Originality
- When an idea or solution has a low probability of occurrence.
- Ossicles
- A collection of three small bones in the middle ear that vibrate against the tympanic membrane.
- Ostracism
- Excluding one or more individuals from a group by reducing or eliminating contact with the person, usually by ignoring, shunning, or explicitly banishing them.
- Overconfident
- The bias to have greater confidence in your judgment than is warranted based on a rational assessment.
- Parameter
- A numerical result summarizing a population (e.g., mean, proportion).
- A person’s perception that others are there to help them in times of need.
- Perception
- The psychological process of interpreting sensory information.
- Peripheral route to persuasion
- Persuasion that relies on superficial cues that have little to do with logic.
- Phantom limb
- The perception that a missing limb still exists.
- Phantom limb pain
- Pain in a limb that no longer exists.
- Pinna
- Outermost portion of the ear.
- Planning fallacy
- A cognitive bias in which one underestimates how long it will take to complete a task.
- Population
- A larger collection of individuals that we would like to generalize our results to.
- Population
- In research, all the people belonging to a particular group (e.g., the population of left handed people).
- Prejudice
- Prejudice is an evaluation or emotion toward people merely based on their group membership.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Probability
- A measure of the degree of certainty of the occurrence of an event.
- Probability values
- In statistics, the established threshold for determining whether a given value occurs by chance.
- Processing speed
- The time it takes individuals to perform cognitive operations (e.g., process information, react to a signal, switch attention from one task to another, find a specific target object in a complex picture).
- Proximity
- Physical nearness.
- Pseudoscience
- Beliefs or practices that are presented as being scientific, or which are mistaken for being scientific, but which are not scientific (e.g., astrology, the use of celestial bodies to make predictions about human behaviors, and which presents itself as founded in astronomy, the actual scientific study of celestial objects. Astrology is a pseudoscience unable to be falsified, whereas astronomy is a legitimate scientific discipline).
- Psychological reactance
- A reaction to people, rules, requirements, or offerings that are perceived to limit freedoms.
- Psychometric approach
- Approach to studying intelligence that examines performance on tests of intellectual functioning.
- P-value
- The probability of observing a particular outcome in a sample, or more extreme, under a conjecture about the larger population or process.
- Random assignment
- Using a probability-based method to divide a sample into treatment groups.
- Random sampling
- Using a probability-based method to select a subset of individuals for the sample from the population.
- Recall
- Type of memory task where individuals are asked to remember previously learned information without the help of external cues.
- The actual act of receiving support (e.g., informational, functional).
- Recoding
- The ubiquitous process during learning of taking information in one form and converting it to another form, usually one more easily remembered.
- Recognition
- Type of memory task where individuals are asked to remember previously learned information with the assistance of cues.
- Remote associations
- Associations between words or concepts that are semantically distant and thus relatively unusual or original.
- Representative
- In research, the degree to which a sample is a typical example of the population from which it is drawn.
- 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
- 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.
- Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) focuses on value conflicts but endorses respect for obedience and authority in the service of group conformity.
- Rods
- Photoreceptors of the retina sensitive to low levels of light. Located around the fovea.
- Sample
- In research, a number of people selected from a population to serve as an example of that population.
- Sample
- The collection of individuals on which we collect data.
- Schema
- A mental model or representation that organizes the important information about a thing, person, or event (also known as a script).
- Scientific theory
- An explanation for observed phenomena that is empirically well-supported, consistent, and fruitful (predictive).
- Selective attention
- The ability to select certain stimuli in the environment to process, while ignoring distracting information.
- Self-categorization theory
- Self-categorization theory develops social identity theory’s point that people categorize themselves, along with each other into groups, favoring their own group.
- Self-perceptions of aging
- An individual’s perceptions of their own aging process; positive perceptions of aging have been shown to be associated with greater longevity and health.
- Semantic memory
- The more or less permanent store of knowledge that people have.
- Sensation
- The physical processing of environmental stimuli by the sense organs.
- 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.
- Knowledge, expectations, conceptualizations, and other cognitive representations that members of a group have in common pertaining to the group and its members, tasks, procedures, and resources.
- Signal detection
- Method for studying the ability to correctly identify sensory stimuli.
- The study of how people think about the social world.
- The process of contrasting one’s personal qualities and outcomes, including beliefs, attitudes, values, abilities, accomplishments, and experiences, to those of other people.
- Social dominance orientation (SDO) describes a belief that group hierarchies are inevitable in all societies and even good, to maintain order and stability.
- Improvement in task performance that occurs when people work in the presence of other people.
- A theoretical analysis of group processes and intergroup relations that assumes groups influence their members’ self-concepts and self-esteem, particularly when individuals categorize themselves as group members and identify with the group.
- Social identity theory notes that people categorize each other into groups, favoring their own group.
- The reduction of individual effort exerted when people work in groups compared with when they work alone.
- Network of people with whom an individual is closely connected; social networks provide emotional, informational, and material support and offer opportunities for social engagement.
- The mental shortcut based on the assumption that, if everyone is doing it, it must be right.
- Socioemotional Selectivity Theory
- Theory proposed to explain the reduction of social partners in older adulthood; posits that older adults focus on meeting emotional over information-gathering goals, and adaptively select social partners who meet this need.
- Sociometer model
- A conceptual analysis of self-evaluation processes that theorizes self-esteem functions to psychologically monitor of one’s degree of inclusion and exclusion in social groups.
- 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.
- Statistic
- A numerical result computed from a sample (e.g., mean, proportion).
- Statistical significance
- A result is statistically significant if it is unlikely to arise by chance alone.
- Stereotype Content Model
- Stereotype Content Model shows that social groups are viewed according to their perceived warmth and competence.
- Stereotypes
- Our general beliefs about the traits or behaviors shared by group of people.
- Stereotypes
- Stereotype is a belief that characterizes people based merely on their group membership.
- Storage
- The stage in the learning/memory process that bridges encoding and retrieval; the persistence of memory over time.
- Subjective age
- A multidimensional construct that indicates how old (or young) a person feels and into which age group a person categorizes him- or herself
- Subliminal perception
- The ability to process information for meaning when the individual is not consciously aware of that information.
- Subtle biases
- Subtle biases are automatic, ambiguous, and ambivalent, but real in their consequences.
- Successful aging
- Includes three components: avoiding disease, maintaining high levels of cognitive and physical functioning, and having an actively engaged lifestyle.
- 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.
- Support support network
- The people who care about and support a person.
- 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.
- Systematic observation
- The careful observation of the natural world with the aim of better understanding it. Observations provide the basic data that allow scientists to track, tally, or otherwise organize information about the natural world.
- Tastants
- Chemicals transduced by taste receptor cells.
- Taste receptor cells
- Receptors that transduce gustatory information.
- Teamwork
- The process by which members of the team combine their knowledge, skills, abilities, and other resources through a coordinated series of actions to produce an outcome.
- The norm of reciprocity
- The normative pressure to repay, in equitable value, what another person has given to us.
- The rule of scarcity
- People tend to perceive things as more attractive when their availability is limited, or when they stand to lose the opportunity to acquire them on favorable terms.
- The triad of trust
- We are most vulnerable to persuasion when the source is perceived as an authority, as honest and likable.
- Theories
- Groups of closely related phenomena or observations.
- Top-down processing
- Experience influencing the perception of stimuli.
- Transduction
- The conversion of one form of energy into another.
- Trichromatic theory
- Theory proposing color vision as influenced by three different cones responding preferentially to red, green and blue.
- Trigger features
- Specific, sometimes minute, aspects of a situation that activate fixed action patterns.
- Tympanic membrane
- Thin, stretched membrane in the middle ear that vibrates in response to sound. Also called the eardrum.
- Type I error
- In statistics, the error of rejecting the null hypothesis when it is true.
- Type II error
- In statistics, the error of failing to reject the null hypothesis when it is false.
- Unusual uses
- A test of divergent thinking that asks participants to find many uses for commonplace objects, such as a brick or paperclip.
- Value
- Belief about the way things should be.
- Ventral pathway
- Pathway of visual processing. The “what” pathway.
- Vestibular system
- Parts of the inner ear involved in balance.
- Weber’s law
- States that just noticeable difference is proportional to the magnitude of the initial stimulus.
- Well-being
- The experience of mental and physical health and the absence of disorder.
- White coat hypertension
- A phenomenon in which patients exhibit elevated blood pressure in the hospital or doctor’s office but not in their everyday lives.
- Working memory
- Memory system that allows for information to be simultaneously stored and utilized or manipulated.