Psychology key terms

Coding information in terms of its appearance or as a mental image.

A misleading or distorted perception of a real visual stimulus.

A learner who prefers to process information through pictures and visual features such as shape, colour and layout.

A form of sampling bias arising because people who volunteer for research may differ from those who do not.

A bee movement involving straight runs with the abdomen moving from side to side, separated by alternating left and right circular turns, associated with more distant food.

Spontaneous waking mental activity involving an imagined story or perceptual experience, without a clear link to external stimuli or deliberate intention.

A standardised battery of tasks used to assess different memory functions and compare performance with age-based norms.

A language area, usually in the left temporal lobe, involved in understanding language.

A cognitive psychologist’s evidence-based recommendations for learning, including the use of retrieval practice, appropriate praise, self-regulation and findings from neuroscience.

A card-sorting task that assesses reasoning and the ability to change strategy when a sorting rule changes; performance is linked to frontal-lobe functioning.

In Freud’s theory of dreaming, the satisfaction of an unconscious desire through a dream.

Physical or psychological symptoms occurring when substance use is stopped or reduced after repeated use.

The limited-capacity mental system used to hold and work with information during a task.

No apparent association between the two measured variables.