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bkx PSY101 T3, KT
PSY-101 Test #3 Key Terms
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Developmental psychology | a branch of psychology that studies physical, cognitive, and social change throughout the life span |
| Zygote | the fertilized egg; it enters a 2-week period of rapid cell division and develops into an embryo |
| Embryo | the developing human organism from about 2 weeks after conception through the second month |
| Fetus | the developing human organism from 9 weeks after conception to birth |
| Teratogens | agents, such as chemicals and viruses, that can reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal development and cause harm |
| Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) | physical and cognitive abnormalities in children caused by a pregnant woman’s heavy drinking; in severe cases, symptoms include noticeable facial misproportions |
| Habituation | decreasing responsiveness with repeated stimulation (as infants gain familiarity with repeated exposure to a visual stimulus, their interest wanes and they look away sooner) |
| Maturation | biological growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by experience |
| Cognition | all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering and communicating |
| Schema | a concept of framework that organizes and interprets information |
| Assimilation | interpreting our new experience in terms of our existing schemas |
| Accommodation | adapting our current understandings (schemas) to incorporate new information |
| Sensorimotor stage | in Piaget’s theory, the stage (from birth to 2 years of age) during which infants know the world mostly in terms of their sensory impressions and motor activities |
| Object permanence | the awareness that things continue to exist even when not perceived |
| Preoperational stage | in Piaget’s theory, the stage (2-7 years of age) during which a child learns to use language but does not comprehend the mental operations of concrete logic |
| Conservation | |
| 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 about 6-11 years of age) during which children gain the mental operations that enable them to think logically about concrete events |
| Formal operational stage | in Piaget’s theory, the stage of cognitive development (normally beginning around 21 years) during which people begin to think logically about abstract concepts |
| Autism | a disorder that appears in childhood and is marked by deficient communication, social interaction, and understanding of others’ states of mind |
| Attachment | an emotional tie with another person; shown in young children by their seeking closeness to the caregiver and showing distress on separation |
| Puberty | the period of sexual maturation, during which a person becomes capable of reproducing |
| Primary sex characteristics | the body structures (ovaries, testes, and external genitalia) that make sexual reproduction possible |
| Secondary sex characteristics | nonreproductive sexual characteristics, such as female breasts and hips, male voice quality, and body hair |
| Menarche | first menstrual period |
| Spermarche | first ejaculation |
| Menopause | the time of natural cessation 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 an retested over a long period of time |
| Crystallized intelligence | our accumulated knowledge and verbal skills; tends to increase with age |
| Fluid intelligence | our ability to reason speedily and abstractly; tends to decrease during late adulthood |
| Memory | the persistence of learning over time through the storage and retrieval of information |
| Encoding | the processing of information into the memory system – for example, by extracting meaning |
| Storage | the retention of encoded information over time |
| Retrieval | the process of getting information out of memory storage |
| Sensory memory | the immediate, very brief recording of sensory information in the memory system |
| Short-term memory | activated memory that holds a few items briefly, such as the seven digits of a phone number while dialing, before the information is stored or forgotten |
| Long-term memory | the relatively permanent and limitless storehouse of the memory system; includes knowledge, skills, and experiences |
| Working memory | a newer understanding of short-term memory that focuses on conscious, active processing of incoming auditory and visual-spatial information, and of information retrieved from long-term memory |
| Automatic processing | unconscious encoding of incidental information, such as space, time, and frequency, and of well-learned information, such as word meanings |
| Effortful processing | encoding that requires attention and conscious effort |
| Rehearsal | the conscious repetition of information, either to maintain it in consciousness or to encode it for storage |
| Spacing effect | the tendency for distributed study or practice to yield better long-term retention than is achieved through massed study or practice |
| Serial position effect | our tendency to recall best the last and first items in a list |
| Recency effect | items presented at the end of a list are remembered well, likely because they are still in the working memory |
| Primacy | items presented at the beginning of a list are remembered well, likely due to rehearsal |
| Visual encoding | the encoding of visual information, including the visual appearance of words |
| Acoustic encoding | the encoding of sound, especially the sound of words |
| Semantic encoding | the encoding of meaning, including the meaning of words |
| Self-reference effect | the tendency for self-relevant knowledge to be more easily remembered |
| Imagery | mental pictures; a powerful aid to effortful processing, especially when combined with semantic encoding |
| Rosy retrospection | the tendency to recall extreme details more than mundane details, causing bad experiences to be remembered as worse than they were and good experiences to be remembered as better than they were |
| Mnemonics | memory aids, especially those techniques that use vivid imagery and organizational devices |
| Chunking | organizing items into familiar, manageable units, often occurs automatically |
| Iconic memory | a momentary sensory memory of visual stimuli; a photographic or picture-image memory lasting no more than a few tenths of a second |
| Echoic memory | a momentary sensory memory of auditory stimuli; if attention is elsewhere, sounds and words can still be recalled within 3 or 4 seconds |
| Long-term potentiation (LTP) | an increase in a synapse’s firing potential after brief, rapid stimulation; believed to be a neural basis for learning and memory |
| Flashbulb memory | a clear memory of an emotionally significant moment or event |
| Amnesia | the loss of memory |
| Implicit memory | retention independent of conscious recollection |
| Explicit memory | memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and “declare” |
| Hippocampus | a neural center that is located in the limbic system and helps process explicit memories for storage |
| Recall | a measure of memory in which the person must retrieve information learned earlier, as on a fill-in-the-blank test |
| Recognition | a measure of memory in which the person need only identify items previously learned, as on a multiple-choice test |
| Relearning | a memory measure that assesses the amount of time saved when learning material for a second time |
| Priming | the activation, often unconsciously, of particular associations in memory |
| Déjà vu | that eerie sense that “I’ve experienced this before,” possibly caused by cues from the current situation triggering retrieval of an earlier experience |
| Mood-congruent memory | the tendency to recall experiences that are consistent with one’s current good or bad mood |
| Three sins of forgetting | absent-mindedness, transience, blocking |
| Absent-mindedness | inattention to details that leads to encoding failure (our mind is elsewhere as we lay down the car keys) |
| Transience | storage decay over time (after we part ways with former classmates, unused information fades) |
| Blocking | inaccessibility of stored information (seeing an actor in an old movie, we feel the name on the tip of our tongue but experience retrieval failure – we cannot get it out) |
| Three sins of distortion | misattribution, suggestibility, bias |
| Misattribution | confusing the source of information (putting words in someone else’s mouth or remembering a dream as an actual happening) |
| Suggestibility | the lingering effects of misinformation (a leading question later becomes a person’s false memory) |
| Bias | belief-colored recollections (current feelings toward a friend may color our recalled initial feelings) |
| One sin of intrusion | persistence |
| Persistence | unwanted memories (being haunted by images of a sexual assault) |
| Proactive interference | the disruptive effect of prior learning on the recall of new information |
| Retroactive interference | the disruptive effect of new learning on the recall of old information |
| Repression | in psychoanalytic theory, the basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness |
| Misinformation effect | incorporating misleading information into one’s memory of an event |
| Source amnesia | (source misattribution) attributing to the wrong source an event we have experienced, heard about, read about, or imagined |
| Language | our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning |
| Phoneme | in language, the smallest distinctive sound unit |
| Morpheme | in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word of a part of a word (such as a prefix) |
| Grammar | in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others |
| Semantics | the set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences in a given language; also, the study of meaning |
| Syntax | the rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language |
| Babbling stage | beginning at about 4 months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language |
| One-word stage | the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words |
| Two-word stage | beginning at about age 2, the stage in speech development during which an infant speaks mostly two-word statements |
| Telegraphic speech | early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram (Ex. “Want juice”) using mostly nouns and verbs |
| Aphasia | impairment of language, usually caused by left hemisphere damage to either Broca’s area (impaired speaking) or to Wernicke’s area (impaired understanding) |
| Broca’s area | controls language expression – an area of the frontal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech |
| Wernicke’s area | controls language reception – a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression; usually in the left temporal lobe |
| Linguistic determinisim | Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think |
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bamkapowxo
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