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| 1. The process by which the ciliary muscles change the thickness of the lens of the eye to permit variable focusing on near and distant objects. 2. According to Piaget, the process of restructuring or modifying cognitive structures so that new information can fit into them more easily; this process works in tandem with assimilation |
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| The stage in a classical conditioning experiment during which the conditioned response is first elicited by the conditioned stimulus |
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| Cells that integrate information across the retina; rather than sending signals to the brain, amacrine cells link bipolar cells to other bipolar cells and ganglion cells to other ganglion cells |
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| Property of perceptual object that may have more than one interpretation |
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| The part of the limbic system that controls emotion, aggression, and the formation of emotional memory. |
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| An insufficient adjustment up or down from an original starting value when judging the probable value of some event or outcome |
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| The part of the cerebral cortex in which many high-level brain processes occur |
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| A judgment based on the information readily available in memory |
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| The level of categorization that can be retrieved from memory most quickly and used most efficiently |
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| A membrane in the cochlea that when set into motion, stimulates hair cells that produce the neural effects of auditory perception |
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| The area of psychology that focuses on the environmental determinants of learning and behavior |
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| Observational reports about the behavior of organisms and the conditions under which the behavior occurs or changes. |
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| A multidisciplinary field that attempts to understand the brain processes that underlie behavior. |
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| The psychological perspective primarily concerned with observable behavior that can be objectively recorded and the relationships of observable behavior to environmental stimuli. |
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| A situation that occurs when a person’s prior knowledge, attitudes, or values distort the reasoning process by influencing the person to accept invalid arguments |
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| A research design in which different groups of participants are randomly assigned to experimental conditions or control conditions |
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| biological constraints on learning |
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| Any limitations on an organism’s capacity to learn that are caused by the inherited sensory, response, or cognitive capabilities of members of a given species |
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| The approach to identifying causes of behavior that focuses on the functioning of the genes, the brains, the nervous system, and the endocrine system. |
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| Nerve cells in the visual system that combine impulses from many receptors and transmit the results to ganglion cells |
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| Perceptual analyses based on the sensory data available in the environment; results of analysis are passed upward toward more abstract representations |
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| The brain structure that regulates the body’s basic life processes |
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| The region of the brain that translates thoughts into speech or signs |
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| The region of the brain attached to the brain stem that controls motor coordination, posture and balance as well as the ability to learn control of body movements |
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| The region of the brain that regulates higher cognitive and emotional functions. |
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| The primary organ of hearing; a fluid-filled coiled tube located in the inner ear |
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| Processes of knowing including attending, remembering, and reasoning; also the content of the processes, such as concepts and memories |
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| Mental representations of kinds or categories of items and ideas |
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| A stimulus other than the variable an experimenter explicitly introduces into a research setting that affects a participant’s behavior |
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| The degree to which test scores indicate a result on a specific measure that is consistent with some other criterion of the characteristic being assessed; also known as predictive validity |
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| crystallized intelligence |
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| The facet of intelligence involving the knowledge a person has already acquired and the ability to access that knowledge; measures by vocabulary, arithmetic, and general information tests |
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| The skin senses that register sensations, pressure or temperature |
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| Memory for information such as facts and events |
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| The doctrine that all events-physical, behavioral, and mental-are determined by specific causal factors that are potentially knowable. |
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| An experimental technique in which a different auditory stimulus is simultaneously presented to each ear. |
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| The smallest physical difference between two stimuli that can still be recognized as a difference; operationally defined as the point at which the stimuli are recognized as different half of the time |
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| Stimuli that act as predictors of reinforcement, signaling when particular behaviors will result in positive reinforcement |
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| In the process of perception, the physical object in the world, as contrasted with the proximal stimulus, the optical image on the retina |
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| An aspect of creativity characterized by an ability to produce unusual but appropriate responses to problems |
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| Sensory memory that allows auditory information to be stored for brief durations |
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| EEG- (Electroencephalogram) |
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| A recording of electrical activity in the brain |
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| A technique for improving memory by enriching the encoding of information |
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| Type of intelligence defined as the abilities to perceive, appraise, and express emotions accurately and appropriately; to use emotions to facilitate thinking, to understand and analyze emotions, to use emotional knowledge effectively, and to regulate one’s emotions to promote both emotional and intellectual growth |
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| The principle that subsequent retrieval of information is enhanced if cues received at the time of recall are consistent with those present at the time of encoding |
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| The network of glands that manufacture and secrete hormones into the bloodstream |
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| The physical memory trace for information in the brain |
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| Long-term memories for autobiographical events and the contents in which they occurred |
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| Information entering a neuron that signals it to fire |
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| The aspect of intelligence that involves the ability to see complex relationships and solve problems |
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| A brain imaging technique that combines benefits of both MRI and PET scans by detecting magnetic changes in the flow of blood to cells in the brain |
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| The systematic procedures and measurement instruments used by trained professionals to assess an individual’s functioning, aptitudes, abilities, or mental states |
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| Area of the retina that contains densely packed cones and forms the point of sharpest vision |
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| The theory that a tone produces a rate of vibration in the basilar membrane equal to its frequency, with the result that pitch can be coded by the frequency of neural response |
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| region of the brain located above the lateral fissure and in front of the central sulcus; involved in motor control and cognitive activities. |
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| An inability to perceive a new use for an object previously associated with some other purpose; adversely affects problem solving and creativity |
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| A theory about pain modulation that proposes that certain cells in the spinal cord act as gates to interrupt and block some pain signals while sending others to the brain |
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| A school of psychology that maintains that psychological phenomena can be understood only when viewed as organized, structured wholes, not when broken down into primitive perceptual elements |
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| Cognitive strategies or “rules of thumb” often used as shortcuts in solving a complex inferential task |
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| The part of the limbic system that is involved in the acquisition of explicit memory |
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| The cells that integrate information across the retina; rather than sending signals to the brain, horizontal cells connect receptors to each other |
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| The brain structure that regulates motivated behavior (such as eating and drinking) and homeostasis |
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| Sensory memory in the visual domain; allows large amounts of information to be stored for very brief durations |
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| Availability of information through memory processes without conscious effort to encode or recover information |
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| Information entering a neuron that signals it not to fire |
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| The tendency for learned behavior to drift toward instinctual behavior over time |
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| brain neurons that relay messages from sensory neurons to other interneurons or motor neurons |
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| A basic law of learning that states that the power of a stimulus to evoke a response is strengthened when the response is followed by a reward and weakened when it is not followed by a reward |
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| learning-performance distinction |
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| The difference between what has been learned and what is expressed in over behavior |
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| levels-of-processing theory |
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| A theory that suggests that the deeper the level at which information was processed, the more likely it is to be retained in memory |
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| The tendency to perceive the whiteness, grayness, or blackness of objects as constant across changing levels of illumination |
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| The region of the brain that regulates emotional behavior, basic motivational urges, and memory, as well as major physiological functions. |
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| The region of the brain stem that regulates breathing, waking, and heartbeat |
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| The mental capacity to encode, store, and retrieve information |
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| The tendency to respond to a new problem in the manner used to respond to a previous problem |
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| Implicit or explicit knowledge about memory abilities and effective memory strategies; cognition about memory |
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| The creation of new neurons |
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| Any substance that modifies or modulates the activities of the postsynaptic neuron |
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| Rearmost region of the brain; contains the primary visual cortex |
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| The center where odor-sensitive receptors sent their signals, located just below the frontal lobes of the cortex |
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| The subdivision of the autonomic nervous system that monitors the routine operation of the body’s internal functions and conserves and restores body energy |
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| Region of the brain behind the frontal lobe and above the lateral fissure; contains the somatosensory cortex |
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| Region of the brain behind the frontal lobe and above the lateral fissure; contains the somatosensory cortex |
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| The behavioral principle that states that responses arte acquired under intermittent reinforcement are more difficult to extinguish than those acquired with continuous reinforcement |
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| The ability to retain an unchanging percept of an object despite variations in the retinal image |
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| The processes that put sensory information together to give the perception of a coherent scene over the whole visual field |
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| peripheral nervous system |
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| The part of the nervous system composed of the spinal cord and cranial nerves that connect the body’s sensory receptors to the CNS and the CNS to the muscles and glands |
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| The simplest form of apparent motion, the movement illusion in which one or more stationary lights going on and off in succession are perceived as a single moving light |
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| Changes in the performance of the brain; may involve the creation of new synapses or changes in the function of existing synapses. |
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| The region of the brain stem that connects the spinal cord with the brain and links parts of the brain to another |
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| The degree to which test scores indicate a result on a specific measure that is consistent with some other criterion of the characteristic being assessed; also known as criterion validity |
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| Improved memory for items at the start of a list |
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| Biologically determined reinforcers such as food and water |
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| In the assessment of implicit memory, the advantage conferred by prior exposure to a word or situation |
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| The optical image on the retina; contrasted with the distal stimulus, the physical image in the world |
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| A source of information about depth in which the relative distances of objects from a viewer determine the amount and direction of their relative motion in the retinal image |
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| representativeness heuristics |
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| A cognitive strategy that assigns an object to a category on the basis of a few characteristics regarded as representative of that category |
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| The region of the brain stem that alerts the cerebral cortex to incoming sensory signals and is responsible for maintaining consciousness and awakening from sleep |
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| rTMS (repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation) |
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| A technique for producing temporary inactivation of brain areas using repeated pulses of magnetic stimulation |
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| General conceptual frameworks, or clusters of knowledge, regarding objects, people, and situations; knowledge packages that encode generalizations about the structure of the environment |
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| The self-behaviors that are identified through a participants own observations and reports |
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| Generic, categorical memories, such as the meanings of words and concepts |
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| shaping by successive approximations |
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| A behavioral method that reinforces responses that successively approximate and ultimately match the desired response |
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| A systematic approach to the problem of response bias that allows an experimenter to identify and separate the roles of sensory stimuli and the individual’s criterion level in producing the final response |
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| The cell body of a neuron containing the nucleus and cytoplasm |
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| The subdivision of the peripheral nervous system that connects the central nervous system to the skeletal muscles and skin |
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| A disorder that causes sleepers to leave their beds and wander while still remaining asleep; also known as sleepwalking |
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| A measure of the correlation between test taker’s performance on different halves (e.g., odd and even numbered items) of a test |
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| A determinant of why people select some parts of sensory input for further processing; occurs when features of stimuli- objects ion the environment- automatically capture attention; independent of the local goals of a perceiver |
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| The relaying of information from one neuron to another across the synaptic cleft |
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| A biological constraint on learning in which an organism learns in one trial to avoid food whose ingestion is followed by illness |
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| Region of brain found below the lateral fissure; contains auditory cortex |
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| The brain structure that relays sensory impulses to the cerebral cortex |
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| The means by which organisms learn that, in the presence of some stimuli but not others, their behavior is likely to have a particular effect on the environment |
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| Perceptual processes in which information from an individual’s past experience, knowledge, expectations, motivations, and background influence the way a perceived object is interpreted and classified |
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| Transformation of one form of energy into another; for example, light is transformed into neural impulses |
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| transfer-appropriate processing |
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| The perspective that suggests that memory is best when the type of processing carried out at encoding matches the processes carried out at retrieval |
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| The theory that there are three types of color receptors that produce the primary color sensations of red, green, and blue |
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| In classical conditioning, the response elicited by an unconditioned stimulus without prior training or learning |
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| The sense that tells how one’s own body is oriented in the worlds with respect to gravity |
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| An extension of frequency theory, which proposes that when peaks in a sound wave come too frequently for a single neuron to fire at each peak, several neurons fire as a group at the frequency of the stimulus tone. |
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| An assertion that the size of a difference threshold is proportional to the intensity of the standard stimulus |
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