AP Psychology — perception and memory systems

Unit 2 of AP Psychology is about how the mind builds its picture of the world and keeps it. The category's cognition material already covers encoding, working memory, interference, the misinformation effect and the heuristics of judgment. This one fills in the rest of the unit: how perception organizes what the senses deliver, and how memories are stored, lost and quietly rebuilt.

On perception, it covers the four Gestalt principles the course framework names (closure, figure and ground, proximity and similarity); the binocular depth cues of retinal disparity and convergence; the five monocular cues the exam is limited to (relative clarity, relative size, texture gradient, linear perspective and interposition); perceptual constancy; apparent movement; and attention, from the cocktail party effect to change blindness.

On memory, it covers the distinction between explicit memory, episodic and semantic, and implicit procedural memory, plus prospective memory; long-term potentiation as a biological process for memory; maintenance and elaborative rehearsal; storage problems such as retrograde and anterograde amnesia, Alzheimer's disease and infantile amnesia; the forgetting curve; retrieval failures like the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon; repression as a psychodynamic idea; and the ways memories are constructed rather than replayed, through source amnesia and imagination inflation.

Every item describes its case in words, so no picture is needed to answer; where a real illusion would normally be shown, the question says what the viewer sees.

Four formats are offered. The quiz has twelve questions on invented cases, each with an explanation of why the neighboring term, such as inattentional blindness against change blindness or retrograde against anterograde amnesia, does not fit. The flashcards drill the vocabulary. The oral exam starts from an invented patient who can still play the guitar but cannot remember anything new, and moves one question at a time between perception and memory, ending with brief feedback. The written work is a printable sheet of eight open questions, from explaining two depth cues an artist uses to explaining why a confident memory can still be wrong.

The material is based on the published AP Psychology course framework, Unit 2, topics 2.1, 2.3, 2.5 and 2.7. Intelligence, the last topic of the unit, has its own material in this category.

• Apply the Gestalt principles of closure, figure and ground, proximity and similarity
• Distinguish binocular from monocular depth cues and explain perceptual constancy and apparent movement
• Explain selective attention, the cocktail party effect and change blindness
• Distinguish episodic, semantic, procedural and prospective memory and explain long-term potentiation
• Explain anterograde and retrograde amnesia, the forgetting curve, source amnesia and imagination inflation

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the College Board AP Psychology Course and Exam Description (effective fall 2024, with the October 2025 clarifications), Unit 2, topics 2.1 Perception, 2.3 Introduction to Memory, 2.5 Storing Memories and 2.7 Forgetting and Other Memory Challenges. The Gestalt principles and monocular depth cues listed follow that framework. All cases are invented.