AP Psychology — Unit 2: Cognition

What AP Psychology Unit 2 covers

The College Board Course and Exam Description breaks Unit 2 into 6 topics:

1. 2.1 States of Consciousness
2. 2.2 Attention
3. 2.3 Memory
4. 2.4 Language
5. 2.5 Thinking and Problem-Solving
6. 2.6 Intelligence

AP Psychology Unit 2 practice questions

• You hear three notes and the song name pops into your head instantly — no thinking. Your friend hears the same clip, frowns, and reasons from memory: that drum pattern... has to be their second album. One builds up from raw sound; the other reasons down from what they know. Which is which?

  You used bottom-up processing; your friend used top-down. Raw sound triggered your recognition; your friend reasoned from prior knowledge.

• A radiologist who has read thousands of X-rays spots a small tumor that a first-year medical student misses entirely — even though both are looking at the same image. What explains this difference?

  Perceptual set — experience creates a readiness to notice certain patterns. Prior knowledge shapes what the brain attends to and perceives.

• You look at a group of dots and instantly perceive them as a face — two dots for eyes, one for a nose, a curved line for a mouth. Which Gestalt principle drives this organization?

  Closure — the brain fills in gaps to perceive complete, whole shapes. It builds meaningful wholes from incomplete input.

• At a loud party, you're deep in conversation across the room — but when someone nearby says your name, you immediately hear it and turn. What phenomenon just occurred?

  The cocktail party effect — you notice your own name even in a noisy room. Selective attention still monitors unattended channels.

• In a famous study, subjects counting basketball passes failed to notice a person in a gorilla costume walking through the scene. What does this demonstrate about attention?

  Inattentional blindness — focused on a task, people miss unexpected stimuli. The gorilla goes unnoticed because attention is elsewhere.

• People who grow up in environments with right angles and rectangular rooms are more susceptible to the Müller-Lyer illusion than people raised in round-hut cultures. What does this prove about perception?

  Cultural experience filters perception; the brain learns to read angles as depth cues. So perception is partly learned, not purely innate.

• After a plane crash dominates the news for a week, surveys show that people dramatically overestimate the annual death toll from aviation. What cognitive bias drives this error?

  Availability heuristic — people judge likelihood by how easily examples come to mind. Vivid recent crashes feel more common than they are.

• A hiring manager reviews two resumes: one from a tattooed candidate and one from a clean-cut candidate with identical qualifications. The manager assumes the tattooed candidate is less professional without reading their experience. What heuristic is this?

  Representativeness heuristic — judging by fit to a prototype, not actual evidence. Here the tattooed candidate is judged against a 'professional' stereotype.

+ 22 more AP Psychology cards in the app.

Key terms in Unit 2

These 12 terms show up in the Unit 2 cards. Each one links to its definition in the AP Psychology key-term reference.

• Anterograde amnesia
• Availability heuristic
• Bottom-up processing
• Cocktail party effect
• Functional fixedness
• Gambler's fallacy
• Gestalt principles
• Misinformation effect
• Multi-store model
• Overgeneralization
• Representativeness heuristic
• State-dependent memory