Psychology 11
Concept Topics for Exam 3
Fall 02
Listed below are approximately 50 Concept Topics which represent the
core ideas for this third segment of the course. You should be able to generate
a definition of each concept, an explanation of its central idea, an
understanding of why it is important, and be comfortable creating or
recognizing an example of the concept. The tests are unlikely to contain
the specific examples of the concept as used in the text or lecture. You will
need to be able to make use of the concept and understand when you are faced
with an illustration of it.
LEARNING (incorporating the effects of our experiences ...)
- know about sensitization and
habituation processes and spontaneous recovery (118 and lecture)
- understand Pavlovian
(Classical) conditioning and know terms: CS, US, CR, UR (119-121)
- appreciate features of
Classical conditioning such as: acquisition, discrimination,
generalization, extinction, spontaneous recovery and second order
conditioning (121-124)
- CR: UR relationship (and Karl
Zener & Peter Holland) (125 and lecture)
- Pavlovian conditioning
mechanism for drug tolerance/addiction (126-127)
- understand compensatory
response hypothesis (126)
- know about time and conditioning:
forward, backward, trace, & delay (140-142)
- and contingency vs contiguity
(140-142)
- appreciate surprise and
blocking (143-144)
- know the relationship of the
law of effect to Operant conditioning (129-132)
- understand how shaping works
(132-133)
- what is conditioned
reinforcement (134)
- what do FR, VR, FI, VI
schedules and the partial reinforcement effect tell us (136-137)
- know about reward,
punishment, and avoidance learning (138-139)
- understand learned
helplessness (146)
- what is latent learning (144)
- what is the idea of
biological constraints on learning all about (and belongingness &
preparedness) (148-151)
NEUROBIOLOGY & NEUROSCIENCE (how our brains work)
- know about a neuron: axons,
dendrites, soma (cell body) (45-46)
- know about its resting and action
(AP) potentials (48-52)
- and about conduction of APs
within neurons ( gates & pumps, all-or-none rule, myelin, saltatory
conduction) (48-52; and lecture)
- how did Sherrington figure
out there was a synapse (i.e. summation & inhibition) (53-55; and lecture)
- synaptic transmission,
synaptic terminals & vesicles, neurotransmitters, receptor sites,
deactivation, reuptake (55-60)
- you should have some
familiarity with the transmitters acetylcholine, serotonin, GABA, norepinephrine,
and dopamine (58; and throughout text)
- know what agonists and
antagonists are (59)
- understand the general notion
of heirarchical control in the nervous system (43-44; lecture and
elsewhere)
- know something about each of
the three major subdivisions of the brain and what's in them (24-26)
- be familiar with
subcomponents of the forebrain: cerebral hemispheres, thalamus,
hypothalamus, limbic system (26-27)
- be familiar with the cortex:
sensory, motor and 'association' areas (28-35)
- recognize some of the effects
of cortical damage: disorders of actions, agnosias, sensory neglect,
receptive and productive aphasias (34-38)
- understand the relation of
corpus callosum to hemispheric dominance & lateralization (i.e. split
brain experiments)(38-42)
SENSATION & PERCEPTION (constructing our realities
...)
- distal stimuli, proximal
stimuli and psychophysics (170-174)
- difference threshold, j.n.d.
(174)
- Weber's & Fechner's laws
(174-175)
- signal detection theory,
signal vs. noise, criterion, sensitivity (d'), response bias, payoff
matrix (176-179)
- appreciate the variety of
transduction processes (chapter)
- understand ideas related to
sensory coding, law of specific nerve energies, specificity theory,
across-fiber pattern theory (180)
- understand what 'taste-best'
fibers are illustrating (183)
- parts of retina: fovea, blind
spot (optic disk), cones, rods, ganglion and bipolar cells (195-197)
- understand duplex theory of
vision, foveal vs peripheral sensitivity curves (195-196)
- what's adaptation (197)
- what's significance/relation
of Mach bands to lateral inhibition (198-200)
- color vision and additive and
subtractive mixtures (201-204)
- color vision: Young-Helmholtz
theory and opponent process theory (205-208)
- what's a feature detector
(209-211)
- appreciate cues for depth; monocular,
binocular, movement (218-222)
- understand apparent motion
(223)
- form perception: visual
segregation, figure-ground relationships, perceptual groupings (225-226)
- pattern recognition:
bottom-up/top-down processing, geons (234-238)
- what do impossible figures
demonstrate (241)
- attention: orientation,
parallel & serial processing, minds eye, cocktail-party effects
(244-247)
- why are size, shape, and
light constancies interesting (247-252)
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