Mere-exposure: The phenomenon that repeated exposure to novel stimuli increases liking of them. This is in simple words that familiarity breeds fondness. It comes from psychological chemistry, but also from adaptive behavior.

Déjá vu: The eerie sense that “I’ve experienced this before.” Cues from the current situations may subconsciously trigger retrieval of an earlier experience. This can happen because if we have previously been in a similar situation, the current situation may be loaded with cues that unconsciously retrieve the earlier experience.

Mood congruent memory: It is striking because moods bias memories. In mood-congruent memory, people have a tendency to recall experiences that are consistent with one’s current good or bad mood. What this means is that when something happens during a certain mood, you remember it better when you are in that mood again. Moods also influence how we interpret other people’s behaviors.

Proactive vs. retroactive interference: Learning some items may interfere with retrieving others. Proactive interference is the disruptive effect of prior learning on recall of new information. This means that if it is close to something you learned earlier, you brain can clutter and you are unable to recall this new information. On the other hand, retroactive interference is the disruptive effect of prior learning on recall of old information. Thus, it is the opposite of proactive. You forget the old and not the new.

Repression: Repression is the psychoanalytic theory, in which repression is the basic defense mechanism that banishes from consciousness anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings and memories. To protect our self-concept and to minimize anxiety, we supposedly repress painful memories. Eventually, though, the memory will submerge.

Misinformation effect: The misinformation effect is incorporating misleading information into one’s memory of an event. In other words, people misremember situations. As we recount an experience, we fill in memory gaps with plausible guesses and assumptions. After more retellings, we often recall the guessed details, which have now been absorbed into our memories, as if we had actually observed them.

Source Amnesia: When we encode memories, we distribute different aspects of them to different parts of the brain. Among the frailest parts of a memory is its source. Source amnesia is attributing to the wrong source an event that we have experienced heard about, read about, or imagined. Source amnesia and the misinformation effect are very similar.

Binocular cues: Depth cues, such as retinal disparity and convergence, which depend on the use of two eyes. This type of cue helps create our perception of the world around us. Two eyes + brain = depth.

Monocular cues: Distance cues, such as linear perspectives and overlaps, available to either eye alone. This type of cue helps create our perception of the world around us. Two eyes + brain = depth.


Megan Johnson, Pd. 7