9 of the Psychology glossary’s terms, each with the part of the syllabus where you first meet it.
A control procedure in treatment research in which the control group receives the treatment after the study ends, so that no one is denied it while its effect is measured.
Samples drawn from Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic societies, which make up most participants in published psychology research but only a small minority of the world’s population.
A person’s self-reported sense that their life is pleasant, satisfying and meaningful; subjective, but measurable reliably by self-report.
A region of the left posterior temporal lobe, named after Carl Wernicke, involved in understanding language; damage to it is linked to fluent but meaningless speech and poor comprehension.
Brain tissue made up mainly of myelinated axons, which carries signals between regions of grey matter; its volume increases through childhood and adolescence.
The finding that people recall fewer long words than short words from a list, because the phonological loop holds only as much as can be said in about two seconds.
The finding that novices learn a procedure more effectively by studying step-by-step worked examples than by solving equivalent problems, because examples avoid the heavy load of searching for a solution.
The limited-capacity memory system that temporarily holds and manipulates the information a person is currently thinking about, holding only a few new elements for a few seconds without rehearsal.
A model of short-term memory proposed by Baddeley and Hitch (1974) that divides it into a central executive controlling a phonological loop, a visuospatial sketchpad and, from 2000, an episodic buffer.