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

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

300 cards

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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.
Experimenter expectancy effect — what is it?	Unintended influence of a researcher's expectations on participants' behaviour or on how it is recorded.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Piaget's sensorimotor stage — what is it?	The first period, in which understanding is built through action and sensation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

About this deck

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.

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.

AP® and Advanced Placement® are trademarks registered by the College Board, which is not affiliated with, and does not endorse, this deck. No official questions or course framework text are reproduced, and every card is written by Memly. Compiled 2026-08-22.