AP Psych Top 50 Missed Vocabulary

Barbiturates

A category of depressant drugs that reduce anxiety and produce sleepiness.

Agonist

A chemical that mimics the action of a neurotransmitter.

Axon

A threadlike extension of a neuron that carries nerve impulses away from the cell body.

Classical Conditioning

A type of learning in which one learns to link two or more stimuli and anticipate events.

Cerebral Cortex

The intricate fiber of interconnected neural cells that cover the cerebral hemispheres. The body's ultimate control and information processing center.

Threshold

The level of stimulation required to trigger a neural impulse.

Sensation

Detection and basic sensory experience of environmental stimuli.

Intelligence Scale

The most widely used intelligence test which contains verbal and performance (nonverbal) subtests.

Inner Ear

The innermost part of the ear, containing the cochlea, semicircular canals, and vestibular sacs.

Retinal Disparity

A binocular cue for perceiving depth; by comparing images from the two eyeballs, the brain computes distance - the greater the disparity (difference) between the two images, the close the object.

Cochlea

A coiled, bony, fluid-filled tube in the inner ear through which sound waves trigger nerve impulses.

Peripheral Nervous System

A division of the nervous system consisting of all nerves that are not part of the brain or spinal cord.

Schizophrenia

A group of severe disorders characterized by disorganized and delusional thinking, disturbed perceptions, and inappropriate emotions and actions.

Visual Cliff

A laboratory device for testing depth perception in infants and young animals.

Priming

A technique for cuing implicit memories by providing cues that stimulate a memory without awareness of the connection between the cue and the retrieved memory.

Cognitive Map

A mental representation of the layout of one's environment. For example, after exploring a maze, rats act as if they have learned a cognitive map of it.

Hippocampus

A neural center located in the limbic system that helps process explicit memories for storage.

Dopamine

A neurotransmitter associated with movement, attention and learning and the brain's pleasure and reward system.

Serotonin

A neurotransmitter that affects hunger,sleep,arousal,and mood. Appears in lower than normal levels in depressed persons.

Reinforcement Schedule

A pattern that defines how often a desired response will be reinforced.

Perception

A person's cognitive (mental) interpretation of events.

Cohort

A population group unified by a specific common characteristic, such as age, and subsequently treated as a statistical unit.

Iris

A ring of muscle tissue that forms the colored portion of the eye around the pupil and controls the size of the pupil opening.

Fovea

A small area in the center of the retina, composed entirely of cones, where visual information is most sharply focused.

Thalamus

A structure in the forebrain through which all sensory information (except smell) must pass to get to the cerebral cortex.

Assimilation

According to Piaget, the process by which new ideas and experiences are absorbed and incorporated into existing mental structures and behaviors.

Accomodation

Adapting one's current understandings (schemas) to incorporate new information.

Priming

An enhanced ability to think of a stimulus, such as a word or object, as a result of a recent exposure to the stimulus.

Agoraphobia

An extreme fear of venturing into public places.

Long-term potentiation

An increase in a synapse's firing potential after brief, rapid stimulation. Believed to be a neural basis for learning and memory.

Habituation

An organism's decreasing response to a stimulus with repeated exposure to it.

Dendrites

Branchlike parts of a neuron that are specialized to receive information.

Sleep Spindles

Brief burst of high frequency/low amplitude brain waves that last for 1 second. It is an indicator of being truly asleep (NREM stage 2 only).

Retina

Contains sensory receptors that process visual information and sends it to the brain. Light sensitive layer of the eye; contains rods and cones

Availability Heuristic

Estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory; if instances come readily to mind, we presume such events are common.

Lens

Focuses light onto retina.

Embodied Cognition

In psychological science, the influence of bodily sensations, gestures, and other states on cognitive preferences and judgments.

Anterograde Amnesia

Inability to remember things that occurred after a CNS insult (no new memories).

Representative Heuristic

Judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes.

Latent Learning

Learning in which a new behavior is acquired but is not demonstrated until some incentive is provided for displaying it.

Hypothamalus

Located below the thalamus that controls temperature, hunger, thirst, and various aspects of emotion.

Retrograde Amnesia

Loss of memory for events or information learned before the amnesia-inducing brain injury.

Serial Position Effect

Our tendency to recall best the last and first items in a list.

Weber's Law

Principle that, to be percieved as different; two stimuli must differ by a constant minimum. Percentage(rather than a constant amount).

Two-factor theory

Schachter's theory that to experience emotion one must (1) be physically aroused and (2) cognitively label the arousal.

Retroactive Interference

The disruptive effect of new learning on the recall of old information.

Proactive Interference

The disruptive effect of prior learning on the recall of new information.

Refractory phase

The recovery phase for a neuron.

Cannon-Bard Theory

The theory that an emotion-arousing stimulus simultaneously triggers (1) physiological responses and (2) the subjective experience of emotion

James-Lange Theory

The theory that our experience of emotion is our awareness of our physiological responses to emotion-arousing stimuli.