allowing you to limit what invoked tasks or nested activies “see” and what they propagate to the caller context.

a method that doesn’t have access to variables outside its scope

The term encapsulation is often used interchangeably with information hiding. Not all agree on the distinctions between the two though; one may think of information hiding as being the principle and encapsulation being the technique. A software module hides information by encapsulating the information into a module or other construct which presents an interface.

Authors rarely distinguish between the two and often directly claim they are the same.