UGS 303 – “Knowing” – 1st midterm study guide
3/2/2011
Here was what I consider the be the main points from each class so far:
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Day 1 – Intro. Know the different ways of knowing.
Day 2 – Sensation and Perception. What are the nerve cells that turn physical
energy into sensations, in the eye and in the ear? Know that perceptions are not
just a sum of all sensations. What are different depth cues that enable us to
perceive three dimensions? Why are ambiguous images interesting, from a
perceptual standpoint?
Day 3 – Memory and cognition. Know the three types of memory. Know why
the primacy and the recency effect reflect long-term and short-term memory.
What are some factors influencing STM capacity? What is the “levels of
processing” model of LTM?
Day 4 – Psycholinguistics. How do we read? (I won’t ask you any numbers –
like how long is a saccade.) What is phonological recoding? Why do we think it
exists?
Day 5 – Individual differences. Hmm. Not much. Why is the MBTI cool?
(Hint: ‘Cause it’s not judgmental.)
Day 6 – Ms. Ostrow. How to tell scholarly sources from popular ones.
Day 7 – Information retrieval – Hmm. This one’s hard. Why is information
retrieval hard? How can social networking and tagging help?Organizing
information
Day 8 – Feinberg. I really like all seven of Dr. Feinberg’s points. Nice, crisp
presentation.
Day 9 – Digital libraries – Karadkar. How is a digital library different from a
physical library?
Day 10 – Persuasion – What are the steps in the persuasion process? What are
some different types of persuasive appeals? How has persuasion changed over
the last four decades?
Day 11 -- Usability – what is it about the typical software development process
that makes for usability problems? Why hasn’t usability enjoyed a routine seat at
the software design table? What is empirical design? What are the ABCs of usercentered design?
Day 12 – Accessibility. What is Section 508? What is a screen reader, and why
is it hard to understand a web site when it is read to you? How can one make a
web page more accessible?