Memly's AP® Psychology Key Terms: 300 Free Study Cards

300 terms, with the confusable pair named on 52 of them.

300 cardsLast updated 2026-08-22

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Psychology terms fail in pairs. Negative reinforcement against punishment, random assignment against random sampling, sensory adaptation against habituation, proactive against retroactive interference, positive symptoms against desirable ones. Each pair is easy to define separately and easy to swap under time pressure, and swapping them is the difference between an answer and a near miss. So these 300 cards are built on the distinction as much as the definition. All 300 open with a definition, 195 add why it matters, 54 carry a short original scenario in place of an abstract restatement, and 52 name the term this one is most often confused with and say what separates them. The weighting is 38 cards each on biological bases and cognition, 35 on research methods and statistics, 33 on social psychology, 30 on disorders and treatment, 28 each on sensation and perception, learning, and development, 22 on motivation and emotion, and 20 on personality. The disorders section describes what the categories are, how classification works, and the models used to explain them. It does not turn symptoms into a diagnosis, because that is a judgement for a qualified professional and no flashcard can make it. Cards are tagged by area and sub-topic, so you can drill just the conditioning schedules, just the attribution biases, or just the memory effects, and the pairs that keep swapping keep coming back until they stop.

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Showing 100 representative cards from the full 300-card deck.

Front	Back
Operational definition — what is it?	A statement of exactly how a variable is measured or manipulated in a particular study. Two studies claiming to measure the same thing may not, so the operational definition is what makes a finding checkable.
Independent and dependent variables — what is it?	The independent variable is manipulated by the researcher, and the dependent variable is measured to see whether it responded.
Random assignment — what is it?	Allocating participants to conditions by chance, so groups differ only randomly at the start. Random sampling, which is about who enters the study. Assignment supports causal claims, sampling supports generalization.
Control group in psychological research — what is it?	A comparison group that does not receive the treatment, against which the experimental group is judged. Without it, a change over time cannot be separated from the effect of the manipulation.
Experimenter expectancy effect — what is it?	Unintended influence of a researcher's expectations on participants' behaviour or on how it is recorded.
Correlational study — what is it?	A design measuring two variables to see whether they vary together, without manipulating either. It can establish that a relationship exists and cannot establish which direction it runs, or whether a third variable produces both.
Case study — what is it?	An intensive examination of one individual or a small group. It is valuable for rare conditions and cannot support a general claim, since one case cannot show how typical it is.
Longitudinal and cross-sectional designs — what is it?	A longitudinal design follows the same people over time. A cross-sectional design compares different age groups at one time. Cross-sectional differences may reflect the era people grew up in rather than age itself, which is the cohort problem longitudinal work avoids.
Measures of central tendency — what is it?	The mean, median and mode, each summarizing where a distribution centres. The mean is pulled by extreme scores while the median is not, so a skewed distribution is better summarized by the median.
Standard deviation as a measure of spread — what is it?	A summary of how far scores typically lie from the mean. Two distributions can share a mean and differ entirely in spread, so a mean quoted without it is incomplete.
Correlation coefficient — what is it?	A number between minus one and one describing the strength and direction of a linear relationship. The sign gives direction and the distance from zero gives strength, so a strong negative relationship is not a weak one.
Illusory correlation — what is it?	Perceiving a relationship between two variables where none exists, or a stronger one than the data support.
Reliability of a measure — what is it?	The consistency of a measure, across occasions, across items, or across raters. A measure can be perfectly consistent and consistently measure the wrong thing, so reliability does not imply validity.
Informed consent — what is it?	Agreement to take part given with adequate knowledge of what participation involves. It requires that a participant could reasonably decide, which is why consent obtained through incomplete information is treated as a separate problem.
Confidentiality in research — what is it?	Protecting participants' identities and data from disclosure. Anonymity, where the researcher cannot identify participants at all. Confidentiality means the researcher can and undertakes not to.
Medulla — what is it?	A hindbrain structure controlling automatic functions including heartbeat and breathing. Damage here is life-threatening in a way that damage to much larger cortical areas may not be, so importance does not track size.
Reticular formation — what is it?	A network running through the brainstem that governs arousal and alertness. It filters incoming signals rather than carrying them, which is why it affects whether a stimulus is noticed at all.
Hypothalamus in behaviour — what is it?	A small structure regulating hunger, thirst, temperature and sexual behaviour, and linking the nervous and endocrine systems. It converts a bodily state into a motivated behaviour, which is why it appears in both biological and motivational topics.
Amygdala — what is it?	A structure involved in processing emotionally significant events, particularly fear and threat.
Frontal lobe functions — what is it?	The cortical region associated with planning, judgement, working memory and voluntary movement. Its association areas mature late relative to other regions, which is a common explanation for age differences in impulse control.
Occipital lobe functions — what is it?	The cortical region where visual information is processed. It sits at the back of the head, far from the eyes, so a blow there can affect vision without any injury to the eye.
Motor cortex and somatosensory cortex — what is it?	Adjacent strips of cortex, one sending movement commands and the other receiving body sensation, each mapped to body regions. Area is allocated by sensitivity and precision rather than by body size, which is why the hands and lips occupy so much of both.
Wernicke's area — what is it?	A temporal region associated with understanding language. Damage here can leave speech fluent but meaning disturbed, which is the pattern that separates the two language areas.
Corpus callosum and hemispheric communication — what is it?	The bundle of fibres connecting the two cerebral hemispheres. Severing it leaves each hemisphere working with information the other cannot access, which is what made split-brain research informative.
Split-brain findings — what is it?	Results from people whose hemispheres were surgically separated, showing each hemisphere can process information independently. The separated hemispheres could respond to different stimuli without the other knowing, which is direct evidence for lateralized function.
Electroencephalography — what is it?	Recording electrical activity from the scalp. It has excellent timing and poor spatial resolution, so it shows when something happened far better than where.
Behaviour genetics — what is it?	The study of how far differences between people in a trait relate to genetic differences. Claims about individuals. Estimates describe variation within a population and say nothing about any one person.
Neurotransmitter roles in behaviour — what is it?	Different transmitters are associated with different behavioural functions, such as movement and reward, mood, arousal, and inhibition. One transmitter is never responsible for one feeling, since each acts at many sites through many receptor types.
Serotonin in behaviour — what is it?	A transmitter associated with mood, appetite and sleep. The relationship with mood is far less direct than popular accounts suggest, and the simple deficiency explanation is not well supported.
Endorphins — what is it?	Naturally produced substances that reduce pain and can produce a sense of wellbeing.
Rapid eye movement sleep — what is it?	A stage with rapid eye movements, brain activity resembling waking, and greatly reduced muscle tone. The loss of muscle tone is why vivid dreaming is not acted out, so the paralysis is a feature rather than an oddity.
Sensation and perception distinguished — what is it?	Sensation is the detection of physical energy by receptors. Perception is the organization and interpretation of that input.
Difference threshold — what is it?	The smallest change in a stimulus that can be detected. It grows in proportion to the original intensity, so a change detectable in a quiet room is missed in a loud one.
Signal detection theory — what is it?	An account in which detection depends on both sensitivity and a decision criterion influenced by expectation and consequences. It explains why the same person detects differently when a miss is costly, which a fixed threshold cannot.
Structure of the eye in vision — what is it?	Light passes the cornea and lens, which focus an inverted image on the retina where receptors sit. The image is inverted and reversed at the retina, so the upright world is a product of processing rather than of optics.
Blind spot — what is it?	The retinal region where the optic nerve exits, containing no receptors. It is not experienced as a gap because the visual system fills it in, which is direct evidence that perception constructs rather than records.
Conduction and sensorineural hearing loss — what is it?	Conduction loss involves the mechanical transmission of sound. Sensorineural loss involves the receptors or the auditory nerve. The distinction is about where the pathway is interrupted, which is why amplification helps one more than the other.
Bottom-up and top-down processing — what is it?	Bottom-up processing builds a percept from sensory features. Top-down processing uses expectation and prior knowledge to interpret it.
Inattentional blindness — what is it?	Failing to notice a visible object because attention is directed elsewhere. The object is fully in view and the failure is attentional rather than visual, which is why looking is not the same as seeing.
Gestalt principle of figure and ground — what is it?	Organizing a scene into an object of focus and a background. The assignment can reverse in ambiguous images, showing that the division is imposed rather than present in the input.
Binocular depth cues — what is it?	Depth information available only from two eyes, chiefly the slight difference between the two retinal images and the inward turn of the eyes for near objects. They work best at close range, which is why depth further away relies on the monocular cues.
Size constancy and visual illusions — what is it?	Illusions in which distance cues lead the system to scale an object's apparent size. The illusion follows from a mechanism that is usually correct, so it is a by-product of accurate perception rather than a flaw.
Perceptual adaptation — what is it?	Adjusting to an altered perceptual input, such as a displaced visual field, until coordinated action is restored. It shows the mapping between sensation and action is learned and revisable rather than fixed.
Classical conditioning — what is it?	Learning in which a neutral stimulus comes to elicit a response after being paired with a stimulus that already produces it.
Conditioned stimulus and response — what is it?	A previously neutral stimulus that has come to produce a learned reaction, and that reaction. The conditioned response often resembles the unconditioned one but is not identical, and it is defined by having been learned.
Extinction and spontaneous recovery — what is it?	The conditioned response weakens when the pairing stops, and can reappear after a rest period. Recovery shows the original association was suppressed rather than erased, which is why extinction is not unlearning.
Taste aversion learning — what is it?	A strong association formed between a food and illness, often after a single pairing and with a long delay between them. It violates the usual requirements for close timing and repetition, which is evidence that organisms are biologically prepared to learn some associations more readily.
Reinforcement — what is it?	Any consequence that makes the preceding behaviour more likely. It is defined by its effect, not by whether it seems pleasant, so a consequence is reinforcing only if the behaviour increases.
Punishment — what is it?	A consequence that makes the preceding behaviour less likely, by adding something unpleasant or removing something desired. Negative reinforcement. Punishment decreases behaviour and reinforcement increases it, regardless of whether something is added or removed.
Shaping — what is it?	Reinforcing successive approximations to a target behaviour. It allows behaviour that has never occurred to be trained, which simple reinforcement cannot do because there is nothing to reinforce.
Fixed and variable interval schedules — what is it?	A fixed interval reinforces the first response after a set time. A variable interval reinforces after unpredictable periods.
Observational learning — what is it?	Learning by watching others and the consequences their behaviour produces. It requires no direct reinforcement of the learner, which is why behaviour can be acquired before it is ever performed.
Latent learning — what is it?	Learning that occurs without reinforcement and is not shown until there is reason to use it. It separates learning from performance, which strict behavioural accounts had treated as the same thing.
Learned helplessness — what is it?	A reduced tendency to attempt escape or control after repeated experience that outcomes are independent of one's actions. The learning is about controllability rather than about the unpleasant events themselves, which is why it transfers to new situations.
Biological preparedness — what is it?	A predisposition to learn some associations more readily than others. Associations that would have mattered for survival are learned faster, which is why fears of some stimuli are acquired more easily than others.
Encoding, storage and retrieval — what is it?	The three stages of memory, getting information in, holding it, and getting it back out. A failure can occur at any stage, so forgetting a name may mean it was never encoded rather than that it has been lost.
Short-term and working memory — what is it?	Short-term memory holds a small amount briefly. Working memory adds active manipulation of that content. One another. Working memory is the newer account and describes doing something with the information, not just holding it.
Rehearsal — what is it?	Repeating information to maintain it, or relating it to what is already known. Simple repetition maintains but transfers poorly, while relating information to meaning produces far better later recall.
Long-term memory — what is it?	A store of very large capacity holding information over long periods. Its limits are on retrieval rather than on capacity, which is why a forgotten item can resurface with the right cue.
Procedural memory — what is it?	Memory for how to perform a skill, expressed through action rather than description. It is often difficult to verbalize, which is why explaining a well-practised skill can interfere with performing it.
Spacing effect — what is it?	Better long-term retention from study distributed over time than from the same total time in one session. Massed study feels more effective because it produces fluency during the session, which is why the better method feels worse while doing it.
Concept and prototype — what is it?	A concept is a mental grouping of similar items. A prototype is the best example of that category. Items resembling the prototype are categorized faster, which is why an unusual member of a category is recognized more slowly.
Confirmation bias — what is it?	Seeking or weighting information that supports an existing belief.
Overconfidence — what is it?	Greater certainty in one's judgements than accuracy warrants. It is largely unrelated to actual accuracy, which is why feeling sure is weak evidence of being right.
Phonemes and morphemes — what is it?	Phonemes are the smallest sound units that distinguish meaning. Morphemes are the smallest units carrying meaning.
Drive-reduction theory — what is it?	The account that a physiological need creates a drive that motivates behaviour to restore balance. It explains hunger and thirst well and explains curiosity poorly, since exploration raises rather than reduces arousal.
Self-determination in motivation — what is it?	An account emphasizing autonomy, competence and relatedness as sources of sustained motivation. It predicts that controlling rewards undermine motivation, which links it to the overjustification finding.
Components of emotion — what is it?	Emotion is generally described as having physiological, expressive and cognitive components. Theories of emotion differ mainly in the order they place these in, so the components are the common ground.
Two-factor account of emotion — what is it?	The proposal that emotion requires both physiological arousal and a cognitive label for that arousal. It predicts that the same arousal can be experienced as different emotions depending on the explanation available.
General adaptation syndrome — what is it?	A three-stage description of the response to prolonged stress, moving through alarm, resistance and exhaustion. It describes a common pattern regardless of the stressor, which is what made it influential.
Nature and nurture in development — what is it?	The question of how inherited and environmental influences combine to produce a characteristic. The modern framing is interaction rather than proportion, so asking which matters more is treated as the wrong question.
Maturation — what is it?	Biologically driven development following a largely fixed sequence relatively independent of experience.
Piaget's sensorimotor stage — what is it?	The first period, in which understanding is built through action and sensation.
Piaget's concrete operational stage — what is it?	A period in which logical operations become available for concrete situations. Reasoning works well with real objects and poorly with hypotheticals, which is the boundary that defines the stage.
Vygotsky's zone of proximal development — what is it?	The range between what a learner can do alone and what they can do with guidance. It places development in the social interaction rather than inside the individual, which is the main contrast with Piaget's account.
Attachment — what is it?	An enduring emotional bond between an infant and a caregiver. Evidence indicates it forms around comfort and responsiveness rather than around feeding alone.
Erikson's psychosocial stages — what is it?	A sequence of periods each framed around a central social conflict, spanning the whole lifespan. It extends development beyond childhood, which distinguishes it from accounts that end at adolescence.
Psychodynamic approach to personality — what is it?	An approach emphasizing unconscious processes and early experience as determinants of personality. Its central claims are difficult to test directly, which is the principal scientific criticism made of it.
Humanistic approach to personality — what is it?	An approach emphasizing subjective experience, personal growth and the drive toward fulfilling one's potential. It was framed as an alternative to accounts that reduced people to drives or to conditioning histories.
The five-factor model — what is it?	A widely used trait framework with five broad dimensions covering openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability. The dimensions emerged from statistical analysis of descriptive terms rather than from a theory of causes.
Self-efficacy — what is it?	A person's belief in their capacity to succeed at a specific task. Self-esteem, which is a general evaluation of worth. Self-efficacy is task-specific and can be high in one domain and low in another.
Self-report personality inventories — what is it?	Questionnaires in which people describe their own characteristics, scored against comparison groups. They are open to social desirability, which is why some include measures designed to detect it.
Attribution — what is it?	The process of explaining the causes of behaviour, either in terms of the person or of the situation. The explanation chosen shapes the response, so the same act draws sympathy or blame depending on the attribution made.
Cognitive dissonance — what is it?	Discomfort arising from holding inconsistent beliefs, or from acting against a belief, which motivates a change in one of them. The change usually falls on the attitude rather than the action, because the action has already happened.
Conformity — what is it?	Adjusting behaviour or judgement to match a group. It occurs even when the group is plainly incorrect, which is why the classic demonstrations used unambiguous tasks.
Ethical questions raised by classic social research — what is it?	Several influential studies would not receive approval today, on grounds of deception, distress and the difficulty of withdrawing. The findings are taught alongside the objections, since the ethics are part of what the field learned from them.
Deindividuation — what is it?	Reduced self-awareness and restraint in situations offering anonymity and group arousal.
Bystander effect — what is it?	Reduced likelihood that any individual helps as the number of witnesses increases. The chance that someone helps may not fall, while the chance that any particular person does clearly falls.
Altruism — what is it?	Acting to benefit another at a cost to oneself. Whether genuinely selfless motives exist is debated, since helping also relieves the helper's own discomfort.
Out-group homogeneity effect — what is it?	Perceiving members of another group as more alike than members of one's own. It is largely explained by unequal exposure, so it can appear without any hostility.
Scapegoat explanation of prejudice — what is it?	The proposal that frustration is redirected toward a group that is not its source. It predicts prejudice should rise under economic strain, which is a testable consequence rather than a description.
Defining a psychological disorder — what is it?	Definitions generally combine deviation from a norm, personal distress, and impaired functioning, none of which is sufficient alone. Each criterion fails in some case, which is why the boundary is described as a judgement rather than a measurement.
Diathesis-stress model — what is it?	The proposal that a predisposition combines with environmental stress to produce a condition. It explains why the same predisposition leads to different outcomes in different circumstances, which a purely biological account cannot.
Anxiety-related conditions as a category — what is it?	A grouping unified by persistent anxiety or fear that is disproportionate and interferes with functioning. The grouping is by the central feature rather than by cause, which is why several different accounts of origin coexist within it.
Obsessive-compulsive conditions as a category — what is it?	A grouping characterized by intrusive unwanted thoughts and repetitive acts performed to reduce the distress they cause. The acts are understood as maintaining the cycle by preventing the distress from subsiding on its own.
Bipolar conditions as a category — what is it?	A grouping defined by periods of markedly elevated or irritable mood and activity alongside periods of low mood. Ordinary mood variation. The category concerns sustained episodes representing a clear change from usual functioning.
Schizophrenia spectrum as a category — what is it?	A grouping involving disturbances of thought, perception and behaviour representing a marked departure from previous functioning. It is a spectrum rather than a single condition, so presentations within it vary widely.
Psychodynamic therapy as an approach — what is it?	An approach seeking insight into unconscious conflicts and their origins in earlier experience. Its aim is understanding rather than symptom removal, which is why its outcomes are assessed differently from briefer approaches.
Systematic desensitization — what is it?	A behavioural technique pairing gradual exposure to a feared stimulus with a response incompatible with anxiety. The graded order and the incompatible response are both essential, which is what distinguishes it from simply confronting the fear.
Evaluating therapy outcomes — what is it?	Assessment of whether an approach produces improvement beyond what time, expectation and regression toward the average would give. Many people improve without any intervention, which is why an untreated comparison group is essential to any claim about effectiveness.

Frequently asked

What is on each card?

A term on the front. On the back, a definition on all 300, then on 195 the reason it matters. 54 carry a short original scenario rather than an abstract restatement, and 52 name the term this one is most often mixed up with and say what separates them. Each line is labeled, so the back reads as a short structured answer.

How does it handle the disorders and treatment material?

At the level of what the categories are and how they are explained: how classification systems work, the biopsychosocial and diathesis-stress models, what unifies each grouping, and the main theoretical accounts. Treatment appears as schools of approach, such as behavioural, cognitive and humanistic. It does not map symptoms onto a diagnosis and does not compare treatments, because those are judgements for a qualified professional.

Which areas get the most cards?

Biological bases 38 and cognition 38, then research methods and statistics 35, social psychology 33, disorders and treatment 30, sensation and perception 28, learning 28, development 28, motivation and emotion 22, and personality 20. The weighting follows where terminology is densest and most confusable rather than where the reading is longest.

Why so many cards on research methods?

Because method questions are answerable from principle rather than recall, so they repay study more per card than any single content area. The 35 cards cover design, the statistics needed to read a result, measurement quality, and research ethics, including why several classic studies would not be approved today.

How is it organized for studying one area at a time?

Every card carries an area tag and a finer sub-topic tag, across research methods, biological bases, sensation and perception, learning, cognition, motivation and emotion, development, personality, social psychology, and disorders and treatment. Filter by a tag to drill one area, or by the finer tag for a single block such as conditioning, memory, or attribution.

Can I import the whole deck on the free plan?

Yes. Importing a saved deck runs no new AI generation and does not use your AI allowance, so the free plan imports every card. You can study, edit and delete them afterwards.

Will importing it twice create duplicates?

No. Cards you already have are skipped and only cards added in a revision come through. Including re-imports after deleting it, one official deck can be imported three times per account.

Can I edit the cards after importing?

Yes. Once imported they are your cards: edit either side, delete the ones you already know cold, retag them, or move them into another deck.