Stimuli

Distal Stimulus: Objects and events out in the world about you
o Object which reflects light waves is a distal stimulus with respect
to eye
o Energy given off by lightbulb
Proximal Stimulus: Patterns of stimuli from these objects and events
that actually reach your senses (actually act on your nervous system)
o Effect of light waves on the retina of the eye
o Energy of lightbulb falling on a receptor surface in your eye

Motivation
Motivational salience
o Regulate intensity of behaviors that facilitate:
The attainment of a particular goal
Amount of time and energy that you are willing to expend
to attain the goal
Amount of risk willing to accept to attain it
Incentive salience
o desire or want attribute -> includes rewarding stimulus (a
reward)

Tests
Word Association Test
o answer as quickly as possible with the first word that comes to
you
Psychophysical discrimination testing (influence/relationship
between physical stimuli and sensation/perception)
o Vary physical stimulus slightly and observe effect on subjects
experience or behavior in order to better understand perceptual
processing
o E.g. change size slightly between two objects until subject
notices different
o Relates perception of stimulus to true physical properties
o Method of Limits
1. Measure subjects perception of stimuli by determining at
what level is a change perceived (continual change)
o Method of constant
1. Stimulus presented randomly instead
o Method of adjustment
1. Subject control stimulus level and is asked to alter it until it
is barely there (or vice versa)
Operational Span Testing
o Test to see capacity of working memory
o E.g.
 1. read/verify simple math problem
2. read a word
3. do series of problem
4. recall the word
Memory
o Flashbulb memory
o Highly detailed, exceptionally vivid snapshot of moment and
circumstances in which a piece of surprising/consequential (or
emotionally arousing) news was heard
o Autobiographical memory
o System consisting of episodes recollected from an individuals
life (episodic + semantic memories)

Learning
o Motivation for operant conditioning? deprive subject of stimulus
for long period of time beforehand (e.g. dont feed for some time
before)

Hearing
o Place theory
o Perception of sound depends on where each component
frequency produces vibrations along the basilar membrane

Vision: Depth cues

o Monocular
o Interposition (occultation): Partial blocking of a more distant
object by a nearer object
o Motion parallax: as observer moves, relative motion gives more
insight
o Far items -> move less quickly
o Proximal items -> move fast
o Relative size
o Familiar size
o Texture gradient
o Closer -> more detailed
o Lighting/Shading
o Accommodation
o Ciliary muscle change
o Only effective for distances < 2 meters
Binocular
o Stereopsis (binocular parallax, retinal/binocular disparity)
Obtain information from both eyes -> put together to
triangulate distance
o Convergence (< 10 meters)
 During stereopsis -> two eyeballs focus on same object ->
converge -> stretch extraocular muscles

Intelligence
G factor (general intelligence (factor))
o Summarizes positive correlations among different cognitive tasks
o Reflects the fact that an individuals performance on one type of
task tends to be comparable to that of another task
Crystallized (Gc) intelligence
o Ability to use skills, knowledge, and experience
o Does not equate to memory -> but does rely on accessing
information from long-term memory
o E.g. vocabulary, general knowledge
o Increase gradually, peak later in adulthood, decline after
65
Fluid (Gf) intelligence
o Capacity to reason and solve novel problems (independent of
any knowledge from the past)
o Identify patterns/relationships
o Includes inductive/deductive reasoning
o Peaks in young adulthood, steadily declines
WAIS (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale)
o Adults and older adolescents (16-90 years of age)
WISC (Weschler Intelligence Scale for Children)
o 6-16 years of age
WPPSI (Weschler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence)
o 2.5-7 years,7 months of age
All scales -> mean = 100, std = 15
Aging
o Decline
Recall
New episodic (old episodic are stable)
Processing speed
Divided attention
o Stable
Implicit
Recognition
Old episodic stable
o Improve
Semantic (until ~ 60)
Crystallized IQ
Emotional reasoning
Miscellaneous
Shadowing (speech shadowing)
o Immediately repeat (e.g. watch a video, listen to a line,
immediately repeat the line, and continue this process)
Context effects
o Influence of environmental factors on ones perception of a
stimulus
o Part of top-down design
Feature detectors
o Individual neurons (or groups of neurons) in the brain which code
for perceptually significant stimuli
o Helps with ability to detect certain types of stimuli (movements,
shape, angles)
o E.g. without them -> harder to detect round object coming at you
fast
Practice Effects
o Gains in scores on cognitive tests that occur when a person is
retested on same instrument (or very similar ones)
Economic capital
o command of economic resources (money, assets, property)
Social capital
o actual and potential resources linked to the possession of a
durable network of institutionalized relationships of mutual
acquaintance and recognition
Cultural capital
o person's education (knowledge and intellectual skills) that
provides advantage in achieving a higher social-status in society
o help make social distinctions
o Associated with differences in social status
Parallel processing
o Brain simultaneously process incoming stimuli of differing quality
E.g. vision: color, depth, shape, motion
E.g. Stroop effect
Negative priming (experience stimulus, then ignore it)
o Implicit memory effect
o Prior exposure to a stimulus unfavorably influences the response
to the same stimulus
o Slow/error-prone reaction to a stimulus previously
ignored
Consistently/consciously choose a red pen from a holder
Then, try switching to a blue pen
There is a momentary delay of picking the pen out
 Distractor stimulus -> target stimulus
Positive priming
o Speeds up processing
o Caused by simply experiencing the stimulus
o Thought to be caused by spreading activation
Priming
o Implicit memory effect
o Exposure to one stimulus influences the response to another
stimulus
o E.g. NURSE recognized more quickly following DOCTOR than
BREAD
Neuroleptics = antipsychotics
Verbal fluency
o Say as many words as possible from a category in a given time
(semantic or phonemic)
SG (Stress generation) hypothesis
o Depressed people might act in ways that keep making them
more stressed

Mead (how others affect how we view ourselves) (self = balance of I

and ME)
Generalized other (used in symbolic interactionism)
o Notion that a person has of the expectations that others have
about behavior/thoughts in society -> clarify relation to the other
as a representative member of a shared social system
Only certain people can influence perception of ourselves -> and only
during certain periods of life
The way others influence us changes over lifespan
Preparatory stage, play stage, game stage
Preparatory
o Interact via imitation
o E.g. play with pots while someone cooks
Play
o More aware of social relationships
o Pretend play (mommy, daddy, firefighters, etc.)
o Mentally assume perspective of another person - > role-taking
o Act based on perceived point of view
o Children able to respond -> not just mimic, but can create them
Game
o Can understand attitudes, beliefs, behaviors of the generalized
other
 o Realize people dont always perform in ways based on what they
personally believe -> but also based on what society expects of
them
o People can take on multiple roles
o children realize people have opinions of them
Really only concerned with significant others (people you
are close to)
o Creation of the I and the ME
ME (societys view)
o Social self
o How we believe the generalized other sees us
o Learned from interactions with other
I (personal responses to what society thinks)
o Response to social self (response to the ME)
o Thinks about what the things from the ME actually mean
E.g. ME sees people go straight to college from high-school, the I
will think whether that is best or not

Cooley (see looking glass self)

Everyone that a person interacts with (in entirety of life) affects your
self-identity
Looking-glass self -> development of ones self through ones
interpersonal interactions within the context of society

Cross-sectional Data
Type of data collected by observing many subjects at the same pint of
time, or without regard to differences in time
o E.g. measure current obesity levels

Cross-sectional Study
Analyzes data collected from a population, or representative subset, at
a specific point in time

Case-control study
Two existing groups differing in outcome are identified and compared
on the basis of some supposed causal attribute
Cases: those with the outcome
Controls: those without the outcome
You know the two outcomes first - > look back to see exposure
Cohort study
Longitudinal study/quasi-experiment
Sample a cohort (group of people sharing defining characteristic)
Perform cross-section at intervals through time
Prospective
o Two groups (differ by exposure)-> follow to see the outcome
of each one
Retrospective
o Two groups (differ by exposure) -> Look back and see the
outcome
(panel study -> individuals do not always share a common
characteristic)

Primary reinforcers -> biological (food, drinks, sex)

Secondary reinforcers - > acquire power via history of association with
primary reinforcers or other secondary reinforcers (e.g. money)

McDonaldization
Efficiency
Calculability/uniformity
Technological control

Thomas Theorem
If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences
Interpretation of a situation causes the action (not objective)