Free WACE Psychology Flashcard Review
Review 20 public cards with spaced repetition. Flip a card, then grade your recall. Cards you miss return today. Your schedule stays in this browser.
Loading your review schedule…
Browse the free cards
How do reception, transduction and transmission differ?
Reception detects adequate stimulus energy at a receptor; transduction converts it into electrochemical activity; transmission carries neural information along sensory pathways.
Why is interpreting a smoke alarm as danger perception rather than sensation?
Sensation registers and transduces the sound. Selecting, organising and assigning the meaning “danger” is perception.
What are the three operations involved in perception?
Selection prioritises input, organisation groups features into objects or patterns, and interpretation assigns meaning using context and knowledge.
What does an ambiguous figure demonstrate about perception?
Unchanged sensory input can support more than one organised interpretation. The possible percepts remain constrained by the stimulus contours.
Why can phone checking reduce learning even when every line was seen?
Repeated goal switching withdraws attention from semantic processing and integration. Visual reception can occur without strong encoding.
What is selective attention?
It is prioritising some available input while reducing processing of competitors because processing capacity is limited.
How does divided attention usually affect two controlled tasks?
Performance tends to fall when both tasks require deliberate decisions or overlap in modality. A well-practised automated task may impose less cost.
Why does change blindness not prove that no visual processing occurred?
It shows the changed feature was not represented or compared well enough for conscious report. Some unattended processing may still have occurred.
How could detection sensitivity be separated from guessing?
Use repeated randomised signal-present and signal-absent trials and record hits and false alarms. Correct presses alone can be inflated by a liberal response rule.
What conclusion follows if distraction lowers delayed comprehension in a randomised study?
The distraction condition caused lower performance under the controlled task if adherence and confounds were handled. It does not prove distraction always prevents all encoding.
Which stores and control processes appear in the multi-store model?
Sensory register, short-term memory and long-term memory are linked by attention, rehearsal and retrieval. The stores are theoretical systems, not literal containers.
How do iconic and echoic sensory memory differ?
Iconic memory briefly retains visual traces, usually for a fraction of a second; echoic memory retains auditory traces for several seconds.
What does superior immediate partial report suggest about sensory memory?
More information was briefly available than could be reported before it faded. Delayed cues reduce the advantage, supporting rapid decay.
Why can chunking increase apparent short-term capacity?
Meaningful grouping lets several elements function as one unit by using long-term knowledge. The physical amount of information has not disappeared.
How can a filled delay test the source of the recency effect?
An intervening task prevents rehearsal and displaces recent items. Reduced recall of final list items supports a short-lived active component.
How do episodic, semantic and procedural long-term memory differ?
Episodic memory concerns experienced events, semantic memory facts and concepts, and procedural memory skills expressed through performance.
Why does failed free recall not prove a long-term trace is absent?
The trace may be stored but inaccessible with the available cue. Recognition or a more effective retrieval prompt may reveal retention.
How do maintenance and elaborative rehearsal differ?
Maintenance repeats information to keep it active; elaborative rehearsal links it with meaning, categories, imagery or prior knowledge.
What does Molaison’s mirror-drawing improvement challenge in the model?
It challenges one undifferentiated long-term store because procedural learning improved while new explicit episodic memory was profoundly impaired.
What is a precise limitation of the multi-store model?
Its single short-term and long-term boxes underdescribe specialised working-memory components and distinct explicit and implicit long-term systems.