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.
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.
Anosmia: Loss of the ability to smell.
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.
Awareness: A conscious experience or the capability of having conscious experiences, which is distinct from self-awareness, the conscious understanding of one’s own existence and individuality.
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.
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.
Blood Alcohol Content (BAC): Blood Alcohol Content (BAC): a measure of the percentage of alcohol found in a person’s blood. This measure is typically the standard used to determine the extent to which a person is intoxicated, as in the case of being too impaired to drive a vehicle.
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.
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.
Cartesian catastrophe: The idea that mental processes taking place outside conscious awareness are impossible.
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.
Chemical senses: Our ability to process the environmental stimuli of smell and taste.
Chunk: The process of grouping information together using our knowledge.
Circadian Rhythm: Circadian Rhythm: The physiological sleep-wake cycle. It is influenced by exposure to sunlight as well as daily schedule and activity. Biologically, it includes changes in body temperature, blood pressure and blood sugar.
Classical conditioning: Describes stimulus-stimulus associative learning.
Cochlea: Spiral bone structure in the inner ear containing auditory hair cells.
Cochlea: Snail-shell-shaped organ that transduces mechanical vibrations into neural signals.
Cognitive psychology: The study of mental processes.
Common ground: Information that is shared by people who engage in a conversation.
Concept: The mental representation of a category.
Conceptual Replication: A scientific attempt to copy the scientific hypothesis used in an earlier study in an effort to determine whether the results will generalize to different samples, times, or situations. The same—or similar—results are an indication that the findings are generalizable.
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.
Confederate: An actor working with the researcher. Most often, this individual is used to deceive unsuspecting research participants. Also known as a “stooge.”
Confounds: Factors that undermine the ability to draw causal inferences from an experiment.
Conscious: Having knowledge of something external or internal to oneself; being aware of and responding to one’s surroundings.
Conscious experience: The first-person perspective of a mental event, such as feeling some sensory input, a memory, an idea, an emotion, a mood, or a continuous temporal sequence of happenings.
Consciousness: Consciousness: the awareness or deliberate perception of a stimulus
Consciousness: Awareness of ourselves and our environment.
Consolidation: The process occurring after encoding that is believed to stabilize memory traces.
Contemplative science: A research area concerned with understanding how contemplative practices such as meditation can affect individuals, including changes in their behavior, their emotional reactivity, their cognitive abilities, and their brains. Contemplative science also seeks insights into conscious experience that can be gained from first-person observations by individuals who have gained extraordinary expertise in introspection.
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.
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).
Corpus Callosum: The thick bundle of nerve cells that connect the two hemispheres of the brain and allow them to communicate.
Correlation: Measures the association between two variables, or how they go together.
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.
Cues: Cues: a stimulus that has a particular significance to the perceiver (e.g., a sight or a sound that has special relevance to the person who saw or heard it)
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.
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.
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.
Dendrites: Part of a neuron that extends away from the cell body and is the main input to the neuron.
Dependent variable: The variable the researcher measures but does not manipulate in an experiment.
Depressants: Depressants: a class of drugs that slow down the body’s physiological and mental processes.
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.
Dissociation: Dissociation: the heightened focus on one stimulus or thought such that many other things around you are ignored; a disconnect between one’s awareness of their environment and the one object the person is focusing on
Distinctiveness: The principle that unusual events (in a context of similar events) will be recalled and recognized better than uniform (nondistinctive) events.
Distractor task: A task that is designed to make a person think about something unrelated to an impending decision.
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.
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.
EEG: (Electroencephalography) The recording of the brain’s electrical activity over a period of time by placing electrodes on the scalp.
Electroencephalography (EEG): A neuroimaging technique that measures electrical brain activity via multiple electrodes on the scalp.
Electronically activated recorder, or EAR: A methodology where participants wear a small, portable audio recorder that intermittently records snippets of ambient sounds around them.
Empiricism: The belief that knowledge comes from experience.
Encoding: The pact of putting information 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.
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.
Eugenics: The practice of selective breeding to promote desired traits.
Euphoria: Euphoria: an intense feeling of pleasure, excitement or happiness.
Eureka experience: When a creative product enters consciousness.
Exact Replication (also called Direct Replication): A scientific attempt to exactly copy the scientific methods used in an earlier study in an effort to determine whether the results are consistent. The same—or similar—results are an indication that the findings are accurate.
Exemplar: An example in memory that is labeled as being in a particular category.
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.
Experimenter expectations: When the experimenter’s expectations influence the outcome of a study.
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.
False memories: Memory for an event that never actually occurred, implanted by experimental manipulation or other means.
Falsified data (faked data): Data that are fabricated, or made up, by researchers intentionally trying to pass off research results that are inaccurate. This is a serious ethical breach and can even be a criminal offense.
First-person perspective: Observations made by individuals about their own conscious experiences, also known as introspection or a subjective point of view. Phenomenology refers to the description and investigation of such observations.
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.
Flexible Correction Model: Flexible Correction Model: the ability for people to correct or change their beliefs and evaluations if they believe these judgments have been biased (e.g., if someone realizes they only thought their day was great because it was sunny, they may revise their evaluation of the day to account for this “biasing” influence of the weather)
Foils: Any member of a lineup (whether live or photograph) other than the suspect.
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.
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 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.
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.
Gestalt psychology: An attempt to study the unity of experience.
Gustation: Ability to process gustatory stimuli. Also called taste.
Habituation: Occurs when the response to a stimulus decreases with exposure.
Hallucinogens: Hallucinogens: substances that, when ingested, alter a person’s perceptions, often by creating hallucinations that are not real or distorting their perceptions of time.
Heuristics: cognitive (or thinking) strategies that simplify decision making by using mental short-cuts
Hypnosis: Hypnosis: the state of consciousness whereby a person is highly responsive to the suggestions of another; this state usually involves a dissociation with one’s environment and an intense focus on a single stimulus, which is usually accompanied by a sense of relaxation
Hypnotherapy: Hypnotherapy: The use of hypnotic techniques such as relaxation and suggestion to help engineer desirable change such as lower pain or quitting smoking.
Implicit Associations Test: Implicit Associations Test (IAT): A computer reaction time test that measures a person’s automatic associations with concepts. For instance, the IAT could be used to measure how quickly a person makes positive or negative evaluations of members of various ethnic groups.
Implicit learning: Occurs when we acquire information without intent that we cannot easily express.
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.
Independent variable: The variable the researcher manipulates and controls in an experiment.
Individual differences: Ways in which people differ in terms of their behavior, emotion, cognition, and development.
Ingroup: Group to which a person belongs.
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.
Intentional learning: Any type of learning that happens when motivated by intention.
Interaural differences: Differences (usually in time or intensity) between the two ears.
Internal validity: The degree to which a cause-effect relationship between two variables has been unambiguously established.
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.
Jet Lag: Jet Lag: The state of being fatigued and/or having difficulty adjusting to a new time zone after traveling a long distance (across multiple time zones).
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.
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 inquiry and word count: A quantitative text analysis methodology that automatically extracts grammatical and psychological information from a text by counting word frequencies.
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.
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 study: A study that follows the same group of individuals over time.
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.
Melatonin: Melatonin: A hormone associated with increased drowsiness and sleep.
Memory traces: A term indicating the change in the nervous system representing an event.
Mere-exposure effects: The result of developing a more positive attitude towards a stimulus after repeated instances of mere exposure to it.
Metacognition: Describes the knowledge and skills people have in monitoring and controlling their own learning and memory.
Mindfulness: Mindfulness: a state of heightened focus on the thoughts passing through one’s head, as well as a more controlled evaluation of those thoughts (e.g., do you reject or support the thoughts you’re having?)
Misinformation effect: When erroneous information occurring after an event is remembered as having been part of the original 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).
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.
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.”
Myelin Sheath: Fatty tissue, that insulates the axons of the neurons; myelin is necessary for normal conduction of electrical impulses among neurons.
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.
Nonassociative learning: Occurs when a single repeated exposure leads to a change in behavior.
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.
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.
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.
Operational definitions: How researchers specifically measure a concept.
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.
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.
Participant demand: When participants behave in a way that they think the experimenter wants them to behave.
Perception: The psychological process of interpreting sensory information.
Perceptual learning: Occurs when aspects of our perception changes as a function of experience.
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.
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.
Pinna: Outermost portion of the ear.
Pinna: Visible part of the outer ear.
Placebo effect: When receiving special treatment or something new affects human behavior.
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.
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.
Priming: Priming: the activation of certain thoughts or feelings that make them easier to think of and act upon
Priming: A stimulus presented to a person reminds him or her about other ideas associated with the stimulus.
Priming: The process by which exposing people to one stimulus makes certain thoughts, feelings or behaviors more salient.
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.
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.
Quasi-experimental design: An experiment that does not require random assignment to conditions.
Random assignment: Assigning participants to receive different conditions of an experiment by chance.
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.
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 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.
Rubber hand illusion: The false perception of a fake hand as belonging to a perceiver, due to multimodal sensory information.
Sample Size: The number of participants in a study. Sample size is important because it can influence the confidence scientists have in the accuracy and generalizability of their results.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: The hypothesis that the language that people use determines their thoughts.
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.
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.
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.
Social brain hypothesis: The hypothesis that the human brain has evolved, so that humans can maintain larger ingroups.
Social networks: Networks of social relationships among individuals through which information can travel.
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 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.
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.
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.
Stimulants: Stimulants: a class of drugs that speed up the body’s physiological and mental processes.
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.
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.
Third-person perspective: Observations made by individuals in a way that can be independently confirmed by other individuals so as to lead to general, objective understanding. With respect to consciousness, third-person perspectives make use of behavioral and neural measures related to conscious experiences.
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.
Trance States: Trance: a state of consciousness characterized by the experience of “out-of-body possession,” or an acute dissociation between one’s self and the current, physical environment surrounding them.
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.
Tympanic membrane: Ear drum, which separates the outer ear from the middle ear.
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.
Unconscious: Not conscious; the part of the mind that affects behavior though it is inaccessible to the conscious mind.
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.
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.
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: The form of memory we use to hold onto information temporarily, usually for the purposes of manipulation.