Pavlov’s Laboratory (Classical Conditioning)
This is the initial stage in classical conditioning where an association between a neutral stimulus and an unconditioned stimulus is first learned.
Acquisition
According to Thorndike’s Law of Effect, behaviors followed by these types of consequences are more likely to be repeated.
Favorable/Pleasant
Infants in the sensorimotor stage eventually develop this—the awareness that things continue to exist even when they are hidden.
Object Permanence
According to Erikson, this is the primary psychosocial crisis faced by infants whose needs are or are not being met by caregivers
Trust vs. Mistrust
These are harmful agents, such as chemicals or viruses, that can reach a fetus during prenatal development and cause birth defects.
Teratogens
This term describes the reappearance of an extinguished conditioned response after a period of rest.
Spontaneous Recovery
This specific type of reinforcement involves removing an aversive stimulus (like an annoying alarm) to increase a behavior.
Negative Reinforcement
A preoperational child who believes their teddy bear has feelings is demonstrating this concept.
Animism
This style of parenting is characterized by high demands but low responsiveness, often emphasizing strict obedience.
Authoritarian
This type of research study follows and retests the same group of people over a very long period.
Longitudinal Research
If a dog salivates to a specific bell tone but not to a buzzer, it is demonstrating this principle.
Stimulus Discrimination
This schedule of reinforcement, common in slot machines, reinforces a response after an unpredictable number of behaviors
Variable Ratio
This is the stage (ages 7-11) where children first gain the mental ability to think logically about physical, concrete events.
Concrete Operational Stage
In adolescent identity development, this status refers to someone who has committed to an identity based on others' values without doing their own exploration.
Foreclosure
Vygotsky’s term for the gap between what a learner can do alone and what they can do with a teacher’s help.
Zone of Proximal Development
This biological phenomenon explains why humans and animals are genetically predisposed to learn certain associations, like taste and nausea, very quickly.
Biological Preparedness
This occurs when an animal’s conditioned behavior begins to revert back to its natural, biological patterns
Instinctive Drift
While assimilation involves fitting new info into old schemas, this term describes altering a schema to fit new information.
Accommodation
This term describes the "culturally preferred timing" of major life events like marriage or retirement.
Social Clock
This classic experiment used a "visual cliff" to determine at what age infants develop this specific ability.
Depth Perception
According to Thorndike’s Law of Effect, behaviors followed by these types of consequences are more likely to be repeated.
Higher-Order Conditioning
A reinforcement schedule that provides a reward only after a specific, set amount of time has passed.
Fixed Interval
Adolescents often feel they are the focus of everyone else’s attention, a phenomenon known by this term
Imaginary Audience
This level of Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory involves the larger cultural context, such as socioeconomic status and ethnicity.
Macrosystem
This learning phenomenon occurs when a person or animal is repeatedly exposed to an unavoidable aversive event and eventually gives up trying to escape.
Learned Helplessness