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.
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.
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.
Automatic: A behavior or process has one or more of the following features: unintentional, uncontrollable, occurring outside of conscious awareness, and cognitively efficient.
Automatic empathy: A social perceiver unwittingly taking on the internal state of another person, usually because of mimicking the person’s expressive behavior and thereby feeling the expressed emotion.
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.
Balancing between goals: Shifting between a focal goal and other goals or temptations by putting less effort into the focal goal—usually with the intention of coming back to the focal goal at a later point in time.
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.
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 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.
Bouncing balls illusion: The tendency to perceive two circles as bouncing off each other if the moment of their contact is accompanied by an auditory stimulus.
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.
Category: A set of entities that are equivalent in some way. Usually the items are similar to one another.
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.
Chunk: The process of grouping information together using our knowledge.
Classical conditioning: Describes stimulus-stimulus associative learning.
Cochlea: Spiral bone structure in the inner ear containing auditory hair cells.
Cognitive psychology: The study of mental processes.
Collective efficacy: The shared beliefs among members of a group about the group’s ability to effectively perform the tasks needed to attain a valued goal.
Collective self-esteem: Feelings of self-worth that are based on evaluation of relationships with others and membership in social groups.
Commitment: The sense that a goal is both valuable and attainable
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).
Concept: The mental representation of a category.
Cones: Photoreceptors of the retina sensitive to color. Located primarily in the fovea.
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.
Conscious goal activation: When a person is fully aware of contextual influences and resulting goal-directed behavior.
Consciousness: Awareness of ourselves and our environment.
Consolidation: The process occurring after encoding that is believed to stabilize memory traces.
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.
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).
Crossmodal phenomena: Effects that concern the influence of the perception of one sensory modality on the perception of another.
Crossmodal receptive field: A receptive field that can be stimulated by a stimulus from more than one sensory modality.
Crossmodal stimulus: A stimulus with components in multiple sensory modalties that interact with each other.
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.
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.
Deliberative phase: The first of the two basic stages of self-regulation in which individuals decide which of many potential goals to pursue at a given point in time.
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))
Directional goals: The motivation to reach a particular outcome or judgment.
Distinctiveness: The principle that unusual events (in a context of similar events) will be recalled and recognized better than uniform (nondistinctive) events.
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.
Double flash illusion: The false perception of two visual flashes when a single flash is accompanied by two auditory beeps.
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.
Ego-depletion: The exhaustion of physiological and/or psychological resources following the completion of effortful self-control tasks, which subsequently leads to reduction in the capacity to exert more self-control.
Empirical methods: Approaches to inquiry that are tied to actual measurement and observation.
Empiricism: The belief that knowledge comes from experience.
Encoding: The initial experience of perceiving and learning events.
Encoding: The pact of putting information into memory.
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.
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.
Extrinsic motivation: Motivation stemming from the benefits associated with achieving a goal such as obtaining a monetary reward.
False-belief test: An experimental procedure that assesses whether a perceiver recognizes that another person has a false belief—a belief that contradicts reality.
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: A highly detailed and vivid memory of an emotionally significant event.
Flashbulb memory: Vivid personal memories of receiving the news of some momentous (and usually emotional) event.
Flavor: The combination of smell and taste.
Folk explanations of behavior: People’s natural explanations for why somebody did something, felt something, etc. (differing substantially for unintentional and intentional behaviors).
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.
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.
Goal: The cognitive representation of a desired state (outcome).
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.
Habituation: Occurs when the response to a stimulus decreases with exposure.
Hawthorne Effect: An effect in which individuals change or improve some facet of their behavior as a result of their awareness of being observed.
Hawthorne Studies: A series of well-known studies conducted under the leadership of Harvard University researchers, which changed the perspective of scholars and practitioners about the role of human psychology in relation to work behavior.
Heuristics: Mental shortcuts that enable people to make decisions and solve problems quickly and efficiently.
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
Highlighting a goal: Prioritizing a focal goal over other goals or temptations by putting more effort into the focal goal.
Hot cognition: The mental processes that are influenced by desires and feelings.
Hypotheses: A logical idea that can be tested.
Imaginal performances: When imagining yourself doing well increases self-efficacy.
Impact bias: A bias in affective forecasting in which one overestimates the strength or intensity of emotion one will experience after some event.
Implemental phase: The second of the two basic stages of self-regulation in which individuals plan specific actions related to their selected goal.
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 learning: Occurs when we acquire information without intent that we cannot easily express.
Implicit measures of attitudes: Measures of attitudes in which researchers infer the participant’s attitude rather than having the participant explicitly report it.
Implicit memory: A type of long-term memory that does not require conscious thought to encode. It's the type of memory one makes without intent.
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.
Incidental learning: Any type of learning that happens without the intention to learn.
Individual differences: Ways in which people differ in terms of their behavior, emotion, cognition, and development.
Industrial/Organizational psychology: Scientific study of behavior in organizational settings and the application of psychology to understand work behavior.
Integrated: The process by which the perceptual system combines information arising from more than one modality.
Intelligence: An individual’s cognitive capability. This includes the ability to acquire, process, recall and apply information.
Intention: An agent’s mental state of committing to perform an action that the agent believes will bring about a desired outcome.
Intentional learning: Any type of learning that happens when motivated by intention.
Intentionality: The quality of an agent’s performing a behavior intentionally—that is, with skill and awareness and executing an intention (which is in turn based on a desire and relevant beliefs).
Intrinsic motivation: Motivation stemming from the benefits associated with the process of pursuing a goal such as having a fulfilling experience.
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.
Joint attention: Two people attending to the same object and being aware that they both are attending to it.
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.
Lateral inhibition: A signal produced by a neuron aimed at suppressing the response of nearby neurons.
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.
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.
McGurk effect: An effect in which conflicting visual and auditory components of a speech stimulus result in an illusory percept.
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.
Metacognition: Describes the knowledge and skills people have in monitoring and controlling their own learning and memory.
Mimicry: Copying others’ behavior, usually without awareness.
Mirror neurons: Neurons identified in monkey brains that fire both when the monkey performs a certain action and when it perceives another agent performing that action.
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.
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.
Motivation: The psychological driving force that enables action in the course of goal pursuit.
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: Of or pertaining to multiple sensory modalities.
Multimodal perception: The effects that concurrent stimulation in more than one sensory modality has on the perception of events and objects in the world.
Multimodal perception: The effects that concurrent stimulation in more than one sensory modality has on the perception of events and objects in the world.
Multimodal phenomena: Effects that concern the binding of inputs from multiple sensory modalities.
Multisensory convergence zones: Regions in the brain that receive input from multiple unimodal areas processing different sensory modalities.
Multisensory enhancement: See “superadditive effect of multisensory integration.”
Need for closure: The desire to come to a decision that will resolve ambiguity and conclude an issue.
Neural impulse: An electro-chemical signal that enables neurons to communicate.
Nociception: Our ability to sense pain.
Nonassociative learning: Occurs when a single repeated exposure leads to a change in behavior.
Nonconscious goal activation: When activation occurs outside a person’s awareness, such that the person is unaware of the reasons behind her goal-directed thoughts and behaviors.
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.
Odorants: Chemicals transduced by olfactory receptors.
Olfaction: Ability to process olfactory stimuli. Also called smell.
Olfactory epithelium: Organ containing olfactory receptors.
O*Net: A vast database of occupational information containing data on hundreds of jobs.
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.
Operant conditioning: Describes stimulus-response associative learning.
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.
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.
Perception: The psychological process of interpreting sensory information.
Perceptual learning: Occurs when aspects of our perception changes as a function of experience.
Performance experiences: When past successes or failures lead to changes in self-efficacy.
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.
Photoactivation: A photochemical reaction that occurs when light hits photoreceptors, producing a neural signal.
Pinna: Outermost portion of the ear.
Planning fallacy: A cognitive bias in which one underestimates how long it will take to complete a task.
Practitioner-Scholar Model: A model of training of professional psychologists that emphasizes clinical practice.
Prevention focus: One of two self-regulatory orientations emphasizing safety, responsibility, and security needs, and viewing goals as “oughts.” This self-regulatory focus seeks to avoid losses (the presence of negatives) and approach non-losses (the absence of negatives).
Primary auditory cortex: A region of the cortex devoted to the processing of simple auditory information.
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: A region of the cortex devoted to the processing of simple visual information.
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.
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.
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.
Progress: The perception of reducing the discrepancy between one’s current state and one’s desired state in goal pursuit.
Projection: A social perceiver’s assumption that the other person wants, knows, or feels the same as the perceiver wants, know, or feels.
Promotion focus: One of two self-regulatory orientations emphasizing hopes, accomplishments, and advancement needs, and viewing goals as “ideals.” This self-regulatory focus seeks to approach gains (the presence of positives) and avoid non-gains (the absence of positives).
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.
Psychological reactance: A reaction to people, rules, requirements, or offerings that are perceived to limit freedoms.
Psychophysics: Study of the relationships between physical stimuli and the perception of those stimuli.
Realism: A point of view that emphasizes the importance of the senses in providing knowledge of the external world.
Receptive field: The portion of the world to which a neuron will respond if an appropriate stimulus is present there.
Recoding: The ubiquitous process during learning of taking information in one form and converting it to another form, usually one more easily remembered.
Remote associations: Associations between words or concepts that are semantically distant and thus relatively unusual or original.
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.
Rods: Photoreceptors of the retina sensitive to low levels of light. Located around the fovea.
Rods: Photoreceptors that are very sensitive to light and are mostly responsible for night vision.
Rubber hand illusion: The false perception of a fake hand as belonging to a perceiver, due to multimodal sensory information.
Schema: A mental model or representation that organizes the important information about a thing, person, or event (also known as a script).
Scientist-practitioner model: A model of training of professional psychologists that emphasizes the development of both research and clinical skills.
Scientist-practitioner model: The dual focus of I/O psychology, which entails practical questions motivating scientific inquiry to generate knowledge about the work-person interface and the practitioner side applying this scientific knowledge to organizational problems.
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-control: The capacity to control impulses, emotions, desires, and actions in order to resist a temptation and adhere to a valued goal.
Self-efficacy: The belief that you are able to effectively perform the tasks needed to attain a valued goal.
Self-regulation: The processes through which individuals alter their emotions, desires, and actions in the course of pursuing a goal.
Self-regulation: The complex process through which people control their thoughts, emotions, and actions.
Self-report measure: A type of questionnaire in which participants answer questions whose answers correspond to numerical values that can be added to create an overall index of some construct.
Semantic memory: The more or less permanent store of knowledge that people have.
Sensation: The physical processing of environmental stimuli by the sense organs.
Sensitization: Occurs when the response to a stimulus increases with exposure
Sensory adaptation: Decrease in sensitivity of a receptor to a stimulus after constant stimulation.
Sensory modalities: A type of sense; for example, vision or audition.
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.
Shared mental model: 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.
Simulation: The process of representing the other person’s mental state.
Social cognition: The study of how people think about the social world.
Social comparison: The process of contrasting one’s personal qualities and outcomes, including beliefs, attitudes, values, abilities, accomplishments, and experiences, to those of other people.
Social facilitation: Improvement in task performance that occurs when people work in the presence of other people.
Social identity theory: 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 loafing: The reduction of individual effort exerted when people work in groups compared with when they work alone.
Social proof: The mental shortcut based on the assumption that, if everyone is doing it, it must be right.
Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP): A professional organization bringing together academics and practitioners who work in I/O psychology and related areas. It is Division 14 of the American Psychological Association (APA).
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.
Spatial principle of multisensory integration: The finding that the superadditive effects of multisensory integration are observed when the sources of stimulation are spatially related to one another.
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.
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.
Synchrony: Two people displaying the same behaviors or having the same internal states (typically because of mutual mimicry).
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.
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.
Task-specific measures of self-efficacy: Measures that ask about self-efficacy beliefs for a particular task (e.g., athletic self-efficacy, academic self-efficacy).
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.
Theory of mind: The human capacity to understand minds, a capacity that is made up of a collection of concepts (e.g., agent, intentionality) and processes (e.g., goal detection, imitation, empathy, perspective taking).
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.
Transfer-appropriate processing: A principle that states that memory performance is superior when a test taps the same cognitive processes as the original encoding activity.
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.
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.
Typicality: The difference in “goodness” of category members, ranging from the most typical (the prototype) to borderline members.
Unimodal: Of or pertaining to a single sensory modality.
Unimodal components: The parts of a stimulus relevant to one sensory modality at a time.
Unimodal cortex: A region of the brain devoted to the processing of information from a single sensory modality.
Unusual uses: A test of divergent thinking that asks participants to find many uses for commonplace objects, such as a brick or paperclip.
Ventral pathway: Pathway of visual processing. The “what” pathway.
Verbal persuasion: When trusted people (friends, family, experts) influence your self-efficacy for better or worse by either encouraging or discouraging you about your ability to succeed.
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.
Vicarious performances: When seeing other people succeed or fail leads to changes in self-efficacy.
Visual perspective taking: Can refer to visual perspective taking (perceiving something from another person’s spatial vantage point) or more generally to effortful mental state inference (trying to infer the other person’s thoughts, desires, emotions).
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.
Work and organizational psychology: Preferred name for I/O psychology in Europe.
Working memory: The form of memory we use to hold onto information temporarily, usually for the purposes of manipulation.