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Unit 2
15–25% of examThis unit is about how your mind takes in and works with information. You'll study how you interpret what your senses pick up, how you think, solve problems and make decisions, how memories are formed, stored, recalled and lost, and how psychologists define and measure intelligence. It's also the most useful unit for studying, since it explains why some study habits work better than others.
Longer videos that cover the whole unit. Good for a first pass or a final review.
Perception is how your brain organizes and interprets sensations, using both the incoming data (bottom-up processing) and your expectations and experience (top-down processing). It covers Gestalt grouping principles, the cues that let you see depth, perceptual constancy, and the limits of attention, such as change blindness.
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You think with concepts and schemas (mental frameworks). You solve problems with algorithms, step-by-step methods that always reach the answer but can be slow, or with heuristics, quick mental shortcuts that can mislead you. Your decisions are also nudged by mental set, priming, framing and fallacies like the sunk-cost fallacy, and creative thinking can be blocked by functional fixedness.
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Explicit memories are ones you can put into words, like events (episodic) and facts (semantic). Implicit memories, such as the procedural skill of riding a bike, show up in what you do instead. The multi-store model, the working memory model and levels of processing each explain how information reaches long-term memory, and long-term potentiation, the strengthening of connections between neurons that fire together often, is a biological basis for memory.
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Encoding is getting information into memory, and how you encode something shapes how well you'll remember it. Chunking, mnemonic devices like the method of loci, and spreading study out over time (the spacing effect) all help, and the serial position effect means you tend to remember the start and end of a list better than the middle.
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Sensory memory holds information for only a moment, short-term memory keeps a few items for less than a minute unless you rehearse them, and long-term memory can hold a huge amount for years. Connecting new information to its meaning (elaborative rehearsal) keeps it better than simple repetition, and storage can be disrupted by brain injury, amnesia or Alzheimer's disease.
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Retrieval is getting information back out of memory, either by recall with no hints or by recognition with cues, like picking an answer on a multiple-choice test. You remember better when you're in the same place, mood or physical state as when you learned something, and practicing retrieval by testing yourself (the testing effect) makes memories stronger.
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You forget fastest right after learning and then more slowly, as Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve shows. Forgetting can come from never encoding something, from interference by other memories, or from not having the right retrieval cue. Memories can also be wrong: misleading information after an event (the misinformation effect), forgetting where you learned something (source amnesia) and imagining an event can all change what you're sure you remember.
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Psychologists still debate whether intelligence is one general ability (g) or several, and any test of it must be standardized, reliable (giving consistent results) and valid (measuring what it claims to measure). IQ scores have risen over generations (the Flynn effect), can be pulled down by poverty, discrimination, unequal schooling and stereotype threat (worry about confirming a stereotype about your group), and have been misused to limit people's opportunities. Your beliefs about whether ability can grow (a growth or fixed mindset) also affect how you achieve.
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