Unit 4 Calendar

AP PSYCHOLOGY 2014-15

Unit 4:  Sensation & Perception

Tuesday 10/21	DISCUSS SOCIAL SCIENCE FAIR
Wednesday 10/22	RTN:  pages 147 - 152
Thursday 10/23	RTN:  pages 170 – 177
Friday 10/24	RTN:  pages 164 – 169
Due Monday, 10/27	RTN:  pages 153 - 158
Tuesday 10/28 – Wednesday 10/29	IN COMPUTER LAB (FB 256) SOCIAL SCIENCE FAIR:  GROUP & TOPIC SELECTION DUE
Thursday 10/30	RTN:  pages 158 - 163
Friday 10/31	SENSATION QUIZ (Sensation index cards due)
Monday 11/3	SOCIAL SCIENCE FAIR:  ARTICLE INTERPRETATION SHEETS DUE RTN:  pages 180 - 186
Tuesday 11/4	RTN:  pages 186 – 190
Wednesday 11/5	RTN:  pages 190 – 194
Thursday 11/6	RTN:  pages 183 – 184
Wednesday 11/12	UNIT TEST – Multiple Choice (Perception index cards due)
Friday 11/14	UNIT TEST – FRQ
Tuesday 11/18 – Wednesday 11/19	IN COMPUTER LAB (TBA)

SUGGESTED NOTE-TAKING TOPICS

Throughout all readings, think about the relationship between SENSATION and PERCEPTION.  Everything that we know about the world is first encountered when stimuli in our environment activate sensory organs, initiating awareness of the external world.  Perception involves the interpretation of that sensory inputs as a cognitive process. 

147 –  152

Basic principles of sensory transduction, including:

·  absolute threshold 

·  difference threshold (incl. Weber’s Law)

·  signal detection

·  sensory adaptation

170 – 177

Sensory processes for the following senses:

·  touch

·  pain

·  taste

·  smell

For each, include information about:

·  energy transduction

·  anatomical structures

·  related brain pathways

164 – 169

Sensory process for hearing, including information about:

·  energy transduction

·  anatomical structures

·  related brain pathways

·  impairments

153 – 158

Sensory process for vision, including information about:

·  energy transduction

·  anatomical structures

·  related brain pathways

·  impairments

158 – 163

Processing of visual information, including:

·  feature detection

·  parallel proessing

Processing of color, including:

·  Young-Melmholtz trichromatic theory

·  opponent-process theory

180 – 186

·  How perception is affected by selective attention

·  How illusions affect perception

·  Principles of organizing sensation:

o Gestalt principles

o form perception (figure/ground & grouping)

186 – 190

More principles of organizing sensation:

·  Depth perception cues (monocular & binocular)

190 – 194

More principles of organizing sensation:

·  Motion perception

·  Perceptual constancy

o shape/size

o size-distance

o lightness

194 – 198

How experience and culture influence perception, including:

·  perceptual adaptation

·  perceptual set

·  context effects

INDEX CARD TERMS:

Sensation

1. Sensation
2. Perception
3. Bottom-up processing
4. Top-down processing
5. Psychophysics
6. Absolute threshold
7. Signal detection theory
8. Subliminal
9. Difference threshold
10. Weber’s Law
11. Sensory adaptation
12. Transduction
13. Wavelength
14. Hue
15. Intensity
16. Pupil
17. Iris
18. Lens
19. Accommodation
20. Retina
21. Acuity
22. Nearsightedness
23. Farsightedness
24. Rods
25. Cones
26. Optic nerve
27. Blind spot
28. Fovea
29. Feature detectors
30. Parallel processing
31. Color constancy
32. Audition
33. Frequency
34. Pitch
35. Middle ear
36. Inner ear
37. Cochlea
38. Gate-control theory

Perception

39. Selective attention
40. Gestalt
41. Figure-ground
42. Grouping
43. Depth perception
44. Perceptual constancy
45. Perceptual adaptation
46. Perceptual se

Social Science Fair Calendar

AP Psychology 2014-15

Social Science Fair Calendar

Tuesday, 10/28 – Wednesday 10/29	COMPUTER LAB – FB256
Tuesday, 10/28	Group & topic selection due
Monday, 11/3	Article Interpretation Sheets due
Tuesday, 11/18 – Wednesday, 11/19	COMPUTER LAB
Friday, 11/21	Literature review & hypothesis due
Thursday, 12/04 – Friday, 12/05	COMPUTER LAB
Friday, 12/5	Study design & IRB application due
Wednesday, 12/10	Approval [IRB & study design] returned to students
Monday, 1/05 Tuesday 1/06	COMPUTER LAB
Wednesday, 1/07	Data & data analysis due
Wednesday, 1/14	Data analysis feedback returned to students
Tuesday, 1/20	Abstract due
Monday, 1/26	Board text and graph drafts due
Thursday, 2/05	Social Science Fair (Completed board due)

Some Practice Quizzes for Unit 2

• [Highly recommended] practice quizzes from our textbook publisher.  You will need to create an account (a very quick process).
• A quiz specifically on Research Methods.
• On this site, look under "Research Methods" to find three different quizzes for the unit.

Article Clarifying "Correlation vs. Causation"

Correlation and causation:  what does it all mean?

Psychology Today, 2010

Adi Jaffe, Ph D.

Being clear about inferences in research

Correlation

When researchers say they have found a “correlation," what they are saying is that they found a relationship between two or more variables. For instance, researchers have found a correlation between using marijuana as a teen and having more troublesome relationships in mid- to late-twenties.

Correlations can be positive, meaning that as one variable (marijuana smoking) goes up, so does the other (relationship trouble); or they can be negative, which would mean that as one variable goes up (methamphetamine smoking) another goes down (grade point average).  The trouble is that unless they are properly controlled for, there could be other variables affecting this relationship that the researchers don't know about.  For instance:  education, gender, and mental health issues could be behind the marijuana-relationship association.  (These variables were all controlled for by the researchers in that study.)

Researchers have at their disposal a number of sophisticated statistical tools to control for these, ranging from the relatively simple (like multiple regression) to the highly complex and involved (multi-level modeling and structural equation modeling).  These methods allow researchers to separate the effect of one variable from others, thereby leaving them more confident in making assertions about the true nature of the relationships they found.  Still, even under the best analysis circumstances, correlation is not the same as causation.

Causation

When an article says that causation was found, this means that the researchers found that changes in one variable they measured directly caused changes in the other.  An example would be research showing that jumping off a cliff directly causes great physical damage.  In order to do this, researchers would need to assign people to jump off a cliff and measure the amount of physical damage caused.  When they find that jumping off the cliff causes more damage, they can assert causality.  Good luck recruiting for that study!

Most of the research you read about indicates a correlation—NOT causation—between variables.  You can find the key words by carefully reading.  If the article says something like "men were found to have," or "women were more likely to," they're talking about correlation, not causation.

Why the difference?

The reason is that in order to actually be able to claim causation, the researchers have to split the participants into different groups and assign them the behavior they want to study (like taking a new drug), while the rest don't.  This is in fact what happens in clinical trials of medication because the FDA requires proof that the medication actually makes people better (more so than a placebo).  It's this random assignment to conditions that makes experiments suitable for the discovery of causality.  Unlike in correlational studies, random assignment assures (if everything is designed correctly) that it’s the behavior being studied, and not some other random effect, that is causing the outcome.

Obviously, it is much more difficult to prove causation than it is to prove an association.

So, should we just ignore correlation?

No!  Not at all!  Correlations are crucial for research and still need to be looked at and studied, especially in some areas of research like addiction.

The reason is simple:  we can't randomly give people drugs like methamphetamine as children and study their brain development to see how the stuff affects them, because that would be unethical.  So what we're left with is the study of what meth use (and use of other drugs) correlates with.  It's for this reason that researchers use special statistical methods to assess correlations, making certain that they are also considering other things that may be interfering with their results.

In the case of the marijuana article, the researchers ruled out a number of other interfering variables known to affect relationships, like aggression, gender, education, closeness with other family members, etc.  By doing so, they did their best to assure that the association found between marijuana and relationship status was real.  Obviously other possibilities exist, but as more researchers assess this relationship in different ways, we'll learn more about its true nature.

This is how research works.

It's also how we found out that smoking causes cancer:  through endlessly repeated findings showing an association. That turned out pretty well, I think ...