Glossary

68 key terms from all six modules.

Amygdala: A medial temporal structure central to fear learning and emotional salience, with input (basolateral) and output (central) nuclei.; Example: Bilateral amygdala damage in patient S.M. reduced fear experience.; Module 6
Analytic introspection: Titchener's method of training observers to report the elementary sensations, images and feelings in their experience.; Example: Observers described an apple as patches of redness, brightness and roundness rather than 'an apple'.; Module 1
Anterograde amnesia: Inability to form new explicit memories after brain injury.; Example: H.M. could not remember people he met after his 1953 surgery.; Module 3
Aphasia: An acquired language impairment caused by brain damage.; Example: Broca's aphasia after a left frontal stroke.; Module 5
Basal ganglia: Subcortical nuclei that select and gate actions through direct (D1, go) and indirect (D2, no-go) pathways.; Example: Dopamine loss in Parkinson's disease reduces movement initiation.; Module 2
Behaviorism: An approach restricting psychology to observable stimuli and responses, treating the mind as a black box.; Example: Skinner explained behaviour through reinforcement schedules without reference to mental states.; Module 1
BOLD signal: Blood-oxygen-level-dependent signal measured by fMRI, reflecting changes in blood oxygenation that follow neural activity.; Example: The BOLD response to a brief visual flash peaks around 5 seconds later.; Module 1
Cerebellum: A hindbrain structure that compares intended and actual movement to correct errors and refine timing.; Example: Cerebellar damage causes ataxia — overshooting and unsteady gait.; Module 2
Chunking: Grouping items into larger meaningful units to increase effective memory capacity.; Example: Remembering FBI-CIA-IBM as three acronyms rather than nine letters.; Module 3
Computational model: A theory specified precisely enough to be run as a computer simulation that generates testable predictions.; Example: A model of the forgetting curve predicts retention at untested delays.; Module 1
Confirmation bias: The tendency to seek or favour evidence that supports a belief rather than evidence that could refute it.; Example: Turning the 4 card instead of the 7 in the Wason task.; Module 4
Confound: A variable that changes systematically with the independent variable and offers an alternative explanation.; Example: Testing one condition only in the morning confounds condition with time of day.; Module 1
DRM paradigm: A procedure in which studying associated words leads to false recall of an unpresented critical lure.; Example: Falsely remembering 'sleep' after studying bed, rest, dream, tired.; Module 3
Dual visual streams: The ventral 'what' pathway to temporal cortex for recognition and the dorsal 'where/how' pathway to parietal cortex for spatial processing and action.; Example: Patient D.F. could post a card through a slot she could not describe.; Module 2
Encoding specificity: The principle that retrieval is best when cues at test match those present at encoding.; Example: Divers recalled words better in the environment where they learned them.; Module 3
Event-related potential: An averaged EEG waveform time-locked to an event, revealing processing with millisecond precision.; Example: The P300 is larger for rare target tones in an oddball task.; Module 1
Executive functions: Control processes — inhibition, shifting and updating — that coordinate thought and action toward goals.; Example: Resisting checking your phone while studying.; Module 4
Exemplar theory: The view that categories are represented by stored individual instances, with new items compared to all of them.; Example: Recognising an unusual dog breed by similarity to dogs you have seen.; Module 4
Explicit memory: Long-term memory that can be consciously recalled, comprising episodic and semantic memory.; Example: Describing what you ate yesterday.; Module 3
Feature detector: A neuron that responds selectively to a specific stimulus feature, such as an edge at a particular orientation.; Example: Hubel and Wiesel's orientation-tuned cells in cat V1.; Module 2
Forgetting curve: The decline of memory retention over time, steep at first and then gradual.; Example: Ebbinghaus found large savings losses within hours of learning nonsense syllables, then slower loss over days.; Module 1
Framing effect: Changes in choice caused by describing identical options as gains or as losses.; Example: '90% survive' versus '10% die' produces different treatment choices.; Module 4
Functional fixedness: Difficulty using an object in a way other than its usual function.; Example: Not seeing a tack box as a candle shelf.; Module 4
Garden-path sentence: A sentence whose initial interpretation turns out to be wrong, forcing reanalysis.; Example: 'The horse raced past the barn fell.'; Module 5
Gestalt principles: Rules by which perception groups elements into organised wholes, such as proximity, similarity and closure.; Example: Dots arranged in pairs are seen as pairs because of proximity.; Module 2
Grid cell: An entorhinal neuron that fires at multiple locations forming a regular triangular grid.; Example: Grid fields tile the floor of an enclosure like a honeycomb.; Module 3
Hebbian plasticity: The strengthening of a synapse when presynaptic activity repeatedly contributes to firing the postsynaptic neuron.; Example: 'Cells that fire together wire together.'; Module 3
Heuristic: A mental shortcut that usually yields reasonable judgements quickly but can produce systematic bias.; Example: Judging risk by how easily examples come to mind (availability).; Module 4
HPA axis: The hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal hormonal cascade (CRH → ACTH → cortisol) that mediates the slower stress response.; Example: Cortisol rises 15–30 minutes after a public-speaking task.; Module 6
Implicit memory: Memory expressed through performance without conscious recollection, such as skills and priming.; Example: Typing faster after practice without recalling the practice sessions.; Module 3
Independent variable: The factor an experimenter manipulates to test its effect on a dependent variable.; Example: Study instructions (imagery vs. rote repetition) in a memory experiment.; Module 1
Information-processing approach: A framework that models cognition as stages that encode, transform, store and retrieve representations.; Example: Sternberg's memory-scanning task estimated the time to compare a probe with each item in memory.; Module 1
Just-noticeable difference: The smallest change in a stimulus detected on 50% of trials; the difference threshold.; Example: About 2 g for a 100 g weight.; Module 2
Language Acquisition Device: Chomsky's theoretical proposal of an innate mental capacity for acquiring grammar.; Example: Invoked to explain rapid acquisition from limited input.; Module 5
Levels of processing: Craik and Lockhart's proposal that deeper, meaning-based processing yields more durable memories.; Example: Judging a word's meaning leads to better recall than judging its font.; Module 3
Long-term potentiation: A long-lasting increase in synaptic strength following high-frequency stimulation, depending on NMDA receptors and Ca²⁺ influx.; Example: Hippocampal synapses respond more strongly after a brief high-frequency train.; Module 3
Loss aversion: The tendency for losses to have greater psychological impact than equivalent gains.; Example: Refusing a 50–50 bet to win 110 or lose 100.; Module 4
Memory consolidation: The post-encoding stabilisation of memories at synaptic and systems levels.; Example: Recent memories are more vulnerable to hippocampal damage than remote ones.; Module 3
Mental set: Persisting with a previously successful strategy even when a better one is available.; Example: Luchins's water-jug participants kept using a long formula.; Module 4
Mirror neuron: A neuron that fires both when an action is performed and when the same action is observed; a debated candidate mechanism for action understanding.; Example: Macaque F5 neurons firing during grasping and while watching a grasp.; Module 6
Misinformation effect: Distortion of memory by misleading information encountered after an event.; Example: Reporting broken glass after being asked about cars that 'smashed'.; Module 3
Morpheme: The smallest unit of meaning in a language.; Example: 'Cats' has two morphemes: cat + -s.; Module 5
Motor homunculus: The somatotopic map of the body in primary motor cortex, scaled by precision of control.; Example: Large representations for the fingers and lips.; Module 2
Neural decoding: Reconstructing a stimulus, decision or intended action from recorded neural activity.; Example: Decoding motor-cortex activity to move a robotic arm.; Module 1
Phoneme: The smallest unit of sound that can change meaning in a language.; Example: /b/ and /p/ distinguish 'bat' from 'pat'.; Module 5
Place cell: A hippocampal neuron that fires when an animal occupies a particular location.; Example: A rat's place cell fires each time it enters the north-east corner.; Module 3
Prospect theory: A descriptive model of choice under risk with reference dependence, diminishing sensitivity, loss aversion and probability weighting.; Example: Preferring a sure gain but gambling to avoid a sure loss.; Module 4
Prototype: An average or idealised representation of a category's members used for categorization.; Example: A robin is closer to the bird prototype than a penguin.; Module 4
Psychophysics: The study of quantitative relations between physical stimuli and perceptual experience.; Example: Measuring how much louder a tone must be to sound different.; Module 2
Reaction time: The time between stimulus onset and a response, usually measured in milliseconds.; Example: Choice RT is typically longer than simple RT because a response must be selected.; Module 1
Reward prediction error: The difference between a received and an expected reward, signalled by midbrain dopamine neurons.; Example: Dopamine neurons burst to an unexpected reward and dip when an expected reward is omitted.; Module 6
Schema: An organised knowledge structure about a type of situation that guides encoding and recall.; Example: A restaurant schema leads people to 'remember' a menu that was not mentioned.; Module 3
Selective attention: Focusing processing on some inputs while ignoring others.; Example: Following one conversation at a noisy party.; Module 2
Sensitive period: A developmental window when learning is especially efficient; for language, attainment declines gradually rather than abruptly.; Example: Accent and grammar are more native-like with earlier second-language exposure.; Module 5
Signal detection theory: A framework separating perceptual sensitivity (d′) from decision bias (criterion) in detection under uncertainty.; Example: Comparing radiologists' accuracy independent of their willingness to call a scan abnormal.; Module 2
Speed–accuracy trade-off: The inverse relation between responding quickly and responding accurately.; Example: Instructions to hurry shorten RTs but raise error rates.; Module 1
Spreading activation: The spread of activation from one concept to related concepts in a semantic network.; Example: Seeing 'doctor' speeds recognition of 'nurse'.; Module 4
Stroop effect: Slower, error-prone colour naming when a colour word conflicts with its ink colour.; Example: Naming the green ink of the word RED.; Module 2
Structuralism: Titchener's school that sought to catalogue the basic elements of consciousness using analytic introspection.; Example: Disagreements between laboratories over basic sensations contributed to its decline.; Module 1
Subtraction method: Donders' technique of estimating a mental stage's duration by subtracting the RT of a task without the stage from a task with it.; Example: Choice RT 350 ms − simple RT 220 ms = 130 ms decision stage.; Module 1
Targeted memory reactivation: Presenting learning-associated cues during sleep to selectively strengthen specific memories.; Example: Replaying object-paired sounds during slow-wave sleep improves recall of those objects' locations.; Module 3
Theory of Mind: The capacity to attribute beliefs, desires and intentions to others and to recognise they may differ from one's own and from reality.; Example: Predicting that Sally will look in the basket where she left her marble.; Module 6
Transcranial magnetic stimulation: A non-invasive technique that uses a magnetic pulse to temporarily alter excitability in superficial cortex.; Example: TMS over visual area V5/MT briefly impairs motion perception.; Module 1
Universal Grammar: The proposed set of abstract grammatical principles shared by all human languages; strong versions are challenged by cross-linguistic diversity.; Example: Debated in light of Evans and Levinson's (2009) survey.; Module 5
Validity: The extent to which a study's conclusions are justified — internally (causation), externally (generalisation) and in construct (measuring the intended concept).; Example: A lab attention effect that vanishes in real driving has limited external validity.; Module 1
Weber's Law: The JND is a constant proportion of the original stimulus intensity: ΔI/I = k.; Example: A 1000 g weight needs roughly 10 times the change of a 100 g weight to be noticed.; Module 2
Wisconsin Card Sorting Test: A task requiring people to infer and switch sorting rules from feedback; used to assess cognitive flexibility.; Example: Perseverating on colour after the rule changes to shape.; Module 4
Working memory: A limited-capacity system for temporarily holding and manipulating information during tasks.; Example: Keeping a phone number in mind while dialling it.; Module 3