How the mind takes in, organizes, stores and uses information: perception, thinking and decisions, memory from encoding to forgetting, and how intelligence is defined and measured. Expect scenario questions that hinge on telling two similar terms apart.
Perception mixes bottom-up processing (building from sensory input) with top-down processing (expectations, schemas, perceptual set, context and culture). Gestalt principles organize what we see; attention is selective, and inattention causes change blindness. Binocular and monocular cues give depth, constancies keep objects stable, and apparent movement can be seen where there is none.
Concepts and prototypes organize thought; schemas grow by assimilation and change by accommodation. Algorithms are slow but sure; heuristics are fast shortcuts that cause errors (representativeness, availability). Mental set, priming and framing sway decisions; the gambler's and sunk-cost fallacies derail them. Executive functions plan and carry out goals; creativity needs divergent thinking and is blocked by functional fixedness.
Explicit memories can be put into words (episodic: personal events; semantic: facts); implicit memories show in performance (procedural: skills). Prospective memory is remembering to do things. Long-term potentiation strengthens synapses with use. The multi-store model has sensory, short-term and long-term stores; the working memory model adds a central executive, phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad; levels of processing run from structural (shallow) to semantic (deep).
Encoding gets information into memory, and how you encode decides how well it's stored and retrieved. Mnemonics (like the method of loci) and chunking help. The spacing effect: distributed practice beats massed practice. The serial position effect: the first items (primacy) and last items (recency) of a list are remembered best.
Sensory, short-term, working and long-term memory differ in duration, capacity and content. Maintenance rehearsal keeps information active; elaborative rehearsal (linking it to meaning) stores it better. Storage can be disrupted by anterograde amnesia (no new memories), retrograde amnesia (old memories lost), Alzheimer's disease, and infantile amnesia.
Recall retrieves without cues; recognition uses cues, so it's easier. Retrieval improves when you're in the same place (context-dependent), mood (mood-congruent) or physical state (state-dependent) as during encoding. Practicing retrieval itself, through the testing effect and metacognition, makes memories easier to get back.
The forgetting curve drops fast, then levels off. Forgetting comes from encoding failure, interference (proactive: old disrupts new; retroactive: new disrupts old) and retrieval failure such as the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. Psychodynamic theorists propose repression. Memories can be distorted by the misinformation effect, source amnesia and constructive memory, including imagination inflation.
Psychologists still debate whether intelligence is one general ability (g) or many. Early IQ = mental age ÷ chronological age × 100. Good tests are standardized, valid (construct, predictive) and reliable (test-retest, split-half). The Flynn effect is rising scores over time; scores vary more within groups than between them, and tests have been misused. Achievement tests measure what you know, aptitude tests predict, and a growth mindset helps achievement.