STUDY GUIDE: UNIT 7 – COGNITION
AP Psychology
In addition to the information in this study guide, you are also responsible for
all of the content in textbook (Chapters 8 & 9), all information from class
notes/discussions, videos, handouts and graphic organizers.
It’s AP – it’s all fair game 
Terms & Concepts
All terms & concepts on page 367 and page 403.
(Terms & concepts are also listed on the back of the APP December calendar)
Big Ideas: Chapter 8
1: How do psychologists describe the human memory system?
 Encoding, storage, retrieval
2: What information do we encode automatically? What information do we encode effortfully,
and how does the distribution of practice influence retention?
 Rehearsal, spacing effect, serial position effect
3: What effortful processing methods aid in forming memories?
 Semantic, visual, and acoustic encoding
 Mnemonics, chunking, hierarchies
4: What is sensory memory?
 Iconic, echoic, hepatic
5: What are the duration and capacity of short-term and long-term memory?
 Miller’s Magical Number Seven
6: How does the brain store our memories?
 Long-term potentiation, flashbulb memories
 Explicit and implicit memories
 Anterograde amnesia (HM)
7: How do we get information out of memory?
 Recognition, recall, relearning
 Retrieval cues, priming
8: How do external contexts and internal emotions influence memory retrieval?
 Context effects, déjà vu, moods and memories
9: Why do we forget?
 Encoding failure, storage decay, retrieval failure
 Motivated forgetting, repression (Freud)
10: How do misinformation, imagination, and source amnesia influence our memory
construction? How real-seeming are false memories?
 Memory construction, source amnesia, eyewitness testimony
11: What is the controversy related to claims of repressed and recovered memories?
 Memories of abuse
 Leading psychological associations’ consensus on childhood abuse
12: How can an understanding of memory contribute to more effective study techniques?
Big Ideas: Chapter 9
1: What are the functions of concepts?
2: What strategies assist our problem solving, and what obstacles hinder it?
 Trial and Error, Algorithms, Heuristics, Insight
 Fixation
3: How do heuristics, overconfidence, and belief perseverance influence our decisions and
judgments?
 Representative heuristics, availability heuristics
 Overconfidence, exaggerated fear
4: How do smart thinkers use intuition?
5: What is framing?
 Effects of framing
 The Belief Perseverance Phenomenon
6: What are the structural components of a language?
 The building blocks of language
7: What are the milestones in language development?
 Babbling stage, one-word stage, two-word stage
8: How do we learn language?
 Operant learning, inborn universal grammar
 Critical period
9: What brain areas are involved in language processing?
10: What is the relationship between language and thinking?
 Linguistic determinism, word power
 Thinking in images
11: What do we know about animal thinking? Do other animals share our capacity for
language?
 Common cognitive skills in humans and apes
 Insight, problem solving, animal culture
 The case of apes