Semester Exam Revision Guide

What are the functions of the Reticular formation?
What is accommodation?
What are the functions of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems?
What is the purpose of the double-blind control?
What part of the brain is considered specialized for speech?
What is the function of the frontal lobe?
Which brain imaging technique gives the most details?
What is meant by the term significant difference?
Give an example of an algorithm and a heuristic?
What do the bones of the middle ear do?
What information is processed by the thalamus?
What is the difference between drug tolerance and withdrawal?
Know the processes of classical and operant conditioning.
What is functional fixedness?
Know all the parts of the eye.
Know the different advantages of the various schedules of reinforcement.
When is punishment most effective?
Know all the stages of memory.
What have we learnt about facial expressions?
What types of distributions are produced when the median and mean are the same, the median is higher or the median lower than the mean?
What happens when rehearsal is prevented?
What are the brain’s natural pain killing substances?
How do we maintain balance?
What is the serial position effect?
Why is climbing an irregular set of stairs a challenge if one eye is covered?
Know the differences between semantic, flashbulb, procedural, and episodic memories.
What effect does alcohol have on the CNS?
Describe the processes of closure and feature analysis.
What did we learn from the dichotic listening experiment?
What are the characteristics of the normal distribution?
What are the various definitions of ‘discrimination’ in the subfields of perceptions, classical conditioning and social psychology?
What are the following: memory decay, retrograde amnesia, reconstruction errors, retroactive interference and proactive interference?
How does the appearance of sleep spindles change during the various stages of sleep?
How could twin studies help us understand the role of heredity in IQ?
Why can cats see better at night than humans?
If you were studying the effects of lesions on the brain, what type of a psychological would you be?
What are the building blocks of the nervous system?
Who pioneered the following: Psychoanalytic perspective, structuralism and behavioralism?
What is the confirmation bias?
What is a schema?
What did we lean from Garcia?
How would high achievement motivation influence behavior?
How would high intrinsic motivation influence behavior?
What does it mean to say that animals are biological predisposed to learn certain behaviors?
What is the set point?
Where may the brain be injured if a person had difficulty seeing and hearing?
Ensure you know the various theories of emotion.
What does the standard deviation measure?
Why did early psychologists avoid studying the ‘mind’?
What are the gestalt principles of perception?
What is the correct sequence of anatomical structures in the ear?
Why would the corpus callosum be cut?
What are the big ideas of the evolutionary perspective?
Remember the stars you received for being punctual to class, if you could have converted them into candies, what would I have been imposing on the class?
Why have psychologists rejected that idea that we acquire language through associative leaning?
What is generalization?
What are the differences between longitudinal and cross-sectional studies?
What is adaptation in terms of perception?
What chemicals are involved in the action potential?
What part of the limbic system is involved in memory?
What is the vestibular sense located?
How has cognitive psychology added to our understanding of classical conditioning?
Review all aspects of experimental design.
What is selective attention?
Explain the tip of the tongue phenomenon?
What is the relationship between levels of achievement and the preferred difficulty of a task?
What is homeostasis?
How does the body react to danger?
What is the relationship between arousal and performance?
What is Maslow’s theory?
What is the opponent –process theory?
Define emotions?
What is a mental grouping of similar things events or people?
What is the best example of a concept?
What regulates thirst and hunger?
What is the absolute threshold?
What do social-learning believe underpins much of what we learn?
What research methods is the best to establish cause and effect relationship?
Outline the differences between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
What brain area would suppress eating?
Explain the faulty thinking that may come from using a representative heuristic.
What is the difference between negative and positive reinforcement?
What is learned helplessness?
What is the guiding principle of neuron firing?

Unit 7 Language

Language
Definition: Abstract system of symbols and meanings.
Common Features
1. Meaningfulness
2. Arbitrary Nature
3. Openness (infinite number of meanings)
4. Sound-meaning link
The Structure of Language
- Rules of phonology (sounds recognized as speech)
- Consists of phonemes and morphemes
- Rules of Syntax (order of worlds)
- Rules of Semantic (meaning of words)

Linguistic Acquisition
Genetic programming (nature)
Social Leaning (nurture)
The Skinner- Chomsky Debate
The Language-thinking Debate
Whorf introduced the linguistic relativity hypothesis i.e. language shapes basic ideas
Key Questions are:
Can we still understand with having a word or phase?
Does experience also shape language?

Conclusion
Language, culture and thought are intertwined. People create words and words shape how people think and what they think about. But people can think about things for which they have no words, so thinking is not limited to the world in a language.