Genetics & Environment
The long-standing debate over whether behavior is primarily influenced by genes or learned factors.
What is Nature vs. Nurture?
This system contains the brain and the spinal cord.
What is the Central Nervous System (CNS)?
The brief electrical charge that travels down an axon; a neural impulse.
What is the Action Potential?
The ability to focus conscious awareness on a particular stimulus, demonstrated by the cocktail party effect.
What is Selective Attention?
The brain's capacity for modification, as evidenced by brain reorganization following damage.
What is Plasticity?
The principle that traits contributing to reproduction and survival are most likely to be passed down to succeeding generations.
What is Natural Selection?
This part of the peripheral nervous system controls voluntary movements of skeletal muscles
What is the Somatic Nervous System?
The process where the brain processes color, motion, form, and depth simultaneously.
What is Parallel Processing?
This Gestalt principle describes the tendency to see objects that are near each other as belonging together.
What is Proximity?
This lobe processes auditory information and includes the auditory cortex.
What is the Temporal Lobe?
The study of the relative power and limits of genetic and environmental influences on behavior.
What is Behavior Genetics?
These specialized neurons carry outgoing information from the brain and spinal cord to the muscles and glands.
What are Motor Neurons?
The junction between the axon tip of the sending neuron and the dendrite or cell body of the receiving neuron.
What is the Synapse?
Depth cues, such as interposition and linear perspective, that are available to either eye alone.
What are Monocular Cues?
Located at the base of the brainstem, this structure controls heartbeat and breathing.
What is the Medulla?
The term for the complete set of genetic instructions in an organism's chromosome.
What is a genome?
The branch of the autonomic nervous system that arouses the body and mobilizes its energy in stressful situations.
What is the Sympathetic Nervous System?
The "all-or-none" phenomenon states that a neuron either fires completely or it doesn't fire at all, provided it reaches this minimum level of stimulation.
What is the Threshold?
Our ability to perceive objects as having consistent color, size, and shape, even as illumination and viewing angle changes.
What is Perceptual Constancy?
This neural structure, part of the limbic system, processes explicit memories for storage.
What is the Hippocampus?
Research shows that adopted children tend to have traits more similar to these parents, while their values/beliefs are more similar to their adoptive parents.
What are Biological Parents?
The most numerous type of neuron; they communicate internally and intervene between sensory inputs and motor outputs.
What are Interneurons?
The chemical messenger that influences mood, hunger, sleep, and arousal, and is often linked to depression when levels are low.
What is Serotonin?
A mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another, heavily influenced by context, motivation, and emotions.
What is Perceptual Set?
The large band of neural fibers that connects the two brain hemispheres and carries messages between them.
What is the Corpus Callosum?