AP Psychology & Human Behavior Flashcards
7 cards from real AP practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 AP Psychology & Human Behavior flashcards as text
Which neurotransmitter is most directly associated with the brain's reward pathway and is implicated in motivation, pleasure, and certain movement disorders?
Answer: Dopamine
Dopamine is central to the mesolimbic reward pathway; deficits are linked to Parkinson's disease, while surpluses are associated with schizophrenia.
The brain structure most responsible for regulating hunger, thirst, body temperature, and the sleep-wake cycle is the:
Answer: Hypothalamus
The hypothalamus is the brain's homeostatic regulator, controlling vital drives such as hunger, thirst, and temperature to maintain internal balance.
Absolute threshold is defined as the minimum stimulation needed to detect a particular stimulus:
Answer: 50% of the time it is presented
By convention, the absolute threshold is the stimulus intensity detected exactly 50% of the time across repeated trials.
According to the Young-Helmholtz trichromatic theory of color vision, the eye contains three types of cone receptors sensitive to:
Answer: Red, green, and blue wavelengths
Trichromatic theory proposes three cone types — sensitive to red, green, and blue light — whose combined signals produce the full range of color perception.
Which part of the neuron receives incoming chemical signals from neighboring neurons?
Answer: Dendrites
Dendrites are the branching extensions of a neuron that receive neurotransmitter signals at synapses from other neurons.
The tendency to perceive a moving stimulus as stationary and a stationary background as moving is an example of:
Answer: Figure-ground organization
Figure-ground organization is the Gestalt principle describing how we separate a perceived object (figure) from its surroundings (ground).
Roger Sperry's split-brain research demonstrated which finding about hemispheric specialization?
Answer: Language processing is predominantly located in the left hemisphere for most people
Sperry's Nobel Prize-winning research showed that cutting the corpus callosum reveals the left hemisphere's dominance for language in the majority of people.