AP Psych Unit 3

• Top-Down processing: you use what you already know to make sense of the new information you encounter
• bottom-up processing: senses get a stimulus and sends it to the brain
• parallel processing: the brain can process multiple stimuli at once and put them together
• Schemas:  a person to interpret a new situation based on their experience in similar, prior experiences.
• perpetual sets: how our expectations of something can alter our perception of it
• framing: the way that a problem is presented to someone,
• priming: exposure to certain stimulus influence a response to a subsequent stimulus
• Context effects: how the surrounding environment effects how we interpret information
• Signal detection theory: if you are motivated to sense things then you are more likely to sense them when it is present but also when it is not present and vice versa
• figure-ground: when the visual system simplifies the a scene into a main object and everything else is the background
• proximity: things that are closer together are more likely to be a group
• closure: our brain can make sense of things even if a part of it is missing
• similarity: we group things based on similarity
• selective attention the act of focusing on a particular object for a while, simultaneously ignoring distractions and irrelevant information
• the cocktail party effect: our ability to focus on one things while tuning out many other distractions
• inattentional blindness: failing to notice something right in front of us because we're focused on another task or stimulus
• change blindness: noticing changes only when they are important enough to cause cognitive dissonance
• retinal disparity: images appear differently in our left and right eye the closer we are to the object the larger the differencece
• convergence: the two eyes move inward when looking at an object close to you
• relative clarity: things look blurrier the farther away they are
• interposition: when one object partially blocks another it is in front
• relative size: when two objects are the same size the closer one looks bigger
• texture gradient: texture gets less detailed the farther away something is
• linear perspective parallel lines converge as they get farther away
• subliminal messages: messages that are not consciously perceived
• weber's law: the greater or stronger the stimulus, the greater change is required to notice and change
• more stimulation needed = higher threshold