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Psych 2
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Maturation | Biological growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by experiance |
| Critical Period | An optimal period early in the life of an organism when exposure to certain stimuli or experiences produces normal devolopment |
| Cognition | All the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating |
| Schema | A concept or framework that organizes and interprets information |
| Assimilation | Interpreting our new experiences in terms of our existing schemas |
| Accommodation | Adapting our current understandings to incorporate new information |
| Sensorimotor Stage | In Piaget's theory, the stage (from birth to about 2 years old) during which infants know the world mostly in terms of their sensory impressions and motor activites |
| Object Permanence | The awareness that things continue to exist even when not perceived |
| Preoperational Stage | In Piaget's theory, the stage (from 2 years old until 6 or 7 years old) during which a child learns to use language but does not yet comprehend the mental operations of concrete logic |
| Conservation | The principle that properties such as mass, volume and number remain the same despite changes in the forms of objects |
| Egocentrism | In Piaget's theory, the preoperational child's difficulty taking another's point of view |
| Theory of Mind | People's ideas about their own and other's mental states-about their feelings, perceptions, and thoughts, and the behaviors these might predict |
| Concrete Operational Stage | In Piaget's theory, the stage of cognitive development (from 6 years old to 11 years old) during which children gain the mental operations that enable them to think logically about concrete events |
| Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) | A disorder that appears in childhood and is marked by significant deficiencies in communication and social interaction, and by rigidly fixated interests and repetitive behaviors |
| Formal Operational Stage | In Piaget's theory, the stage of cognitive development (normally around 12) during which people begin to think logically about abstract concepts |
| Stranger Anxiety | The fear of strangers that infants commonly display, beginning by about 8 months |
| Attachment | An emotional tie with another person; shown in young children by their seeking closeness to the caregiver and showing distress on seperation |
| Imprinting | The process by which certain animals form attachments during a critical period very early in life |
| Temperament | A person's characteristic emotional reactivity and intensity |
| Basic Trust | A sense that the world is predictable and trustworthy; said to be formed during infancy by appropriate experiences with responsive caregivers |
| Menopause | The time of natural cessaton of menstruation; also refers to the biological changes a woman experiences as her ability to reproduce declines |
| Cross-sectional Study | A study in which people of different ages are compared with one another |
| Longitudinal Study | Research in which the same people are restudied and retested over a long period |
| Social Clock | The culturally preferred timing of social events such as marriage, parenthood, and retirement |
| Testostorone | The most important of the male sex hormones. Both males and females have it, but the additional testosterone in males stimulates the growth of the male sex organs in the fetus and the development of the male sex characteristics during puberty |
| Estrogens | Sex hormones secreted in greater amounts by females than by males and contributing to female sex characteristics. |
| Sexual Response Cycle | The four stages of sexual responding described by Masters and Johnson-excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution |
| Refractory Period | A resting period after orgasm, during which a man cannot achieve another orgasm |
| Sexual Dysfunciton | A problem that consistently impairs sexual arousal or functioning |
| Paraphilias | Experiencing sexual arousal from fantasies, behaviors or urges involving non-human objects, that suffering of self or others, and/or non consenting persons |
| Sexual Orientation | An enduring sexual attraction toward members of either one's own sex (homo), the other sex (hetero) or both sexes (bi) |
| Sensation | The process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system receive and represent stimulus energies from our enviroment |
| Perception | The process of organizing and interpreting sensory information, enabling us to recognize meaningful objects and events |
| Bottom-Up Processing | Analysis that begins with the sensory receptors and works up to the brain's integration of sensory information |
| Top-Down Processing | Information processing guided by higher-level mental processes, as when we construct perceptions drawing on our experiences and expectations |
| Transduction | Conversion of one form of energy into another |
| Absolute Threshold | The minimum stimulation needed to detect a particular stimulus 50% of the time |
| Signal Detection Theory | A theory predicting how and when we detect the presence of a faint stimulus (signal) amid background noise |
| Subliminal | Below one's absolute threshold for conscious awareness |
| Priming | The activation, often unconsciously, of certain associations, thus predisposing one's perception, memory, or response |
| Difference Threshold | The minimum difference between two stimuli required for detection |
| Weber's Law | The principle that, to be perceived as different, two stimuli must differ by a constant minimum percentage |
| Sensory Adaptation | Diminished sensitivity as a consequence of constant stimulation |
| Perceptual Set | A mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another |
| Wavelength | The distance from the peak of one light or sound wave to the peak of the next. |
| Hue | The dimension of color that is determined by the wavelength; |
| Intensity | The amount of energy in a light or sound wave |
| Retina | The light-sensitive inner surface of the eye, containing the receptor rods and cones plus layers of neurons that begin the processing of visual infromation |
| Accommodation | The process by which the eye's lens changes shape to focus near or far objects on the retina |
| Rods | Retinal receptors that detect black, white and gray; necessary for peripheral and twilight vision |
| Cones | Retinal receptor cells that are concentrated near the center of the retina and that function in daylight or well-lit conditions |
| Optic Nerve | The nerve that carries neural impulses from the eye to the brain |
| Blind Spot | The point at which the optic nerve leaves the eye, creating a "blind" spot because no receptor cells are located there |
| Fovea | The central focal point in the retina |
| Feature Detectors | Nerve cells in the brain that respond to specific features of the stimulus |
| Parallel Processing | The processing of many aspects of a problem simultaneously; the brain's natural mode of information processing for many functions |
| Young-Helmholtz Trichromatic Theory | The theory that the retina contains three different color receptors, when stimulated in combination, can produce the perception of any color |
| Opponent-process Theory | The theory that opposing retinal processes enable color vision |
| Gestalt | An organized whole. Gestalt psychologists emphasized our tendency to integrate pieces of information into meaningful wholes |
| Figure-ground | The organization of the visual field into objects that stand out from their surroundings |
| Grouping | The perceptual tendency to organize stimuli into coherent groups |
| Depth Perception | The ability to see object in three dimensions although the images that strike the retina are two-dimensional; allows us to judge distance |
| Visual Cliff | A laboratory device for testing the depth perception in infants and young animals |
| Binocular Clues | Depth cues that depend on the use of two eyes |
| Retinal Disparity | A binocular cue for perceiving depth |
| Monocular Cues | Depth cues available to either eye alone |
| Perceptual Constancy | Perceiving objects as unchanging even as illumination and retinal images change |
| Color Constancy | Perceiving familiar objects as having consistent color, even if changing illumination alters the wavelengths reflected by the object |
| Perceptual Adaptation | In vision, the ability to adjust to an artificially displaced or even inverted visual field |
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