Vocabulary

Ablation: Surgical removal of brain tissue.
Adoption study: A behavior genetic research method that involves comparison of adopted children to their adoptive and biological parents.
Afferent nerves: Nerves that carry messages to the brain or spinal cord.
Agnosias: Due to damage of Wernicke’s area. An inability to recognize objects, words, or faces.
Anterograde amnesia: Inability to form new memories for facts and events after the onset of amnesia.
Aphasia: Due to damage of the Broca’s area. An inability to produce or understand words.
Arcuate fasciculus: A fiber tract that connects Wernicke’s and Broca’s speech areas.
Attachment behavioral system: A motivational system selected over the course of evolution to maintain proximity between a young child and his or her primary attachment figure.
Attachment behaviors: Behaviors and signals that attract the attention of a primary attachment figure and function to prevent separation from that individual or to reestablish proximity to that individual (e.g., crying, clinging).
Attachment figure: Someone who functions as the primary safe haven and secure base for an individual. In childhood, an individual’s attachment figure is often a parent. In adulthood, an individual’s attachment figure is often a romantic partner.
Attachment patterns: (also called “attachment styles” or “attachment orientations”) Individual differences in how securely (vs. insecurely) people think, feel, and behave in attachment relationships.
Audience design: Constructing utterances to suit the audience’s knowledge.
Authoritative: A parenting style characterized by high (but reasonable) expectations for children’s behavior, good communication, warmth and nurturance, and the use of reasoning (rather than coercion) as preferred responses to children’s misbehavior.
Autobiographical memory: Memory for the events of one’s life.
Automatic: Automatic biases are unintended, immediate, and irresistible.
Automatic empathy: A social perceiver unwittingly taking on the internal state of another person, usually because of mimicking the person’s expressive behavior and thereby feeling the expressed emotion.
Autonomic nervous system: A part of the peripheral nervous system that connects to glands and smooth muscles. Consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions.
Aversive racism: Aversive racism is unexamined racial bias that the person does not intend and would reject, but that avoids inter-racial contact.
Axial plane: See “horizontal plane.”
Basal ganglia: Subcortical structures of the cerebral hemispheres involved in voluntary movement.
Behavioral genetics: The empirical science of how genes and environments combine to generate behavior.
Blatant biases: Blatant biases are conscious beliefs, feelings, and behavior that people are perfectly willing to admit, are mostly hostile, and openly favor their own group.
Bouncing balls illusion: The tendency to perceive two circles as bouncing off each other if the moment of their contact is accompanied by an auditory stimulus.
Brain stem: The “trunk” of the brain comprised of the medulla, pons, midbrain, and diencephalon.
Broca’s area: An area in the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere. Implicated in language production.
Callosotomy: Surgical procedure in which the corpus callosum is severed (used to control severe epilepsy).
Case study: A thorough study of a patient (or a few patients) with naturally occurring lesions.
Central sulcus: The major fissure that divides the frontal and the parietal lobes.
Cerebellum: A nervous system structure behind and below the cerebrum. Controls motor movement coordination, balance, equilibrium, and muscle tone.
Cerebellum: The distinctive structure at the back of the brain, Latin for “small brain.”
Cerebral cortex: The outermost gray matter of the cerebrum; the distinctive convoluti characteristic of the mammalian brain.
Cerebral hemispheres: The cerebral cortex, underlying white matter, and subcortical structures.
Cerebrum: Consists of left and right hemispheres that sit at the top of the nervous system and engages in a variety of higher-order functions.
Cerebrum: Usually refers to the cerebral cortex and associated white matter, but in some texts includes the subcortical structures.
Chutes and Ladders: A numerical board game that seems to be useful for building numerical knowledge.
Cingulate gyrus: A medial cortical portion of the nervous tissue that is a part of the limbic system.
Collectivism: The cultural trend in which the primary unit of measurement is the group. Collectivists are likely to emphasize duty and obligation over personal aspirations.
Common ground: Information that is shared by people who engage in a conversation.
Computerized axial tomography: A noninvasive brain-scanning procedure that uses X-ray absorption around the head.
Concrete operations stage: Piagetian stage between ages 7 and 12 when children can think logically about concrete situations but not engage in systematic scientific reasoning.
Conscience: The cognitive, emotional, and social influences that cause young children to create and act consistently with internal standards of conduct.
Conservation problems: Problems pioneered by Piaget in which physical transformation of an object or set of objects changes a perceptually salient dimension but not the quantity that is being asked about.
Consolidation: The process occurring after encoding that is believed to stabilize memory traces.
Consolidation: Process by which a memory trace is stabilized and transformed into a more durable form.
Contingency management: A reward or punishment that systematically follows a behavior. Parents can use contingencies to modify their children’s behavior.
Continuous development: Ways in which development occurs in a gradual incremental manner, rather than through sudden jumps.
Contralateral: Literally “opposite side”; used to refer to the fact that the two hemispheres of the brain process sensory information and motor commands for the opposite side of the body (e.g., the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body).
Converging evidence: Similar findings reported from multiple studies using different methods.
Coronal plane: A slice that runs from head to foot; brain slices in this plane are similar to slices of a loaf of bread, with the eyes being the front of the loaf.
Cross-cultural psychology (or cross-cultural studies): An approach to researching culture that emphasizes the use of standard scales as a means of making meaningful comparisons across groups.
Cross-cultural studies (or cross-cultural psychology): An approach to researching culture that emphasizes the use of standard scales as a means of making meaningful comparisons across groups.
Crossmodal phenomena: Effects that concern the influence of the perception of one sensory modality on the perception of another.
Crossmodal receptive field: A receptive field that can be stimulated by a stimulus from more than one sensory modality.
Crossmodal stimulus: A stimulus with components in multiple sensory modalties that interact with each other.
Crowds: Adolescent peer groups characterized by shared reputations or images.
Cue overload principle: The principle stating that the more memories that are associated to a particular retrieval cue, the less effective the cue will be in prompting retrieval of any one memory.
Cultural differences: An approach to understanding culture primarily by paying attention to unique and distinctive features that set them apart from other cultures.
Cultural intelligence: The ability and willingness to apply cultural awareness to practical uses.
Cultural psychology: An approach to researching culture that emphasizes the use of interviews and observation as a means of understanding culture from its own point of view.
Cultural relativism: The principled objection to passing overly culture-bound (i.e., “ethnocentric”) judgements on aspects of other cultures.
Cultural script: Learned guides for how to behave appropriately in a given social situation. These reflect cultural norms and widely accepted values.
Cultural similarities: An approach to understanding culture primarily by paying attention to common features that are the same as or similar to those of other cultures
Culture: A pattern of shared meaning and behavior among a group of people that is passed from one generation to the next.
Decay: The fading of memories with the passage of time.
Declarative memory: Conscious memories for facts and events.
Depth perception: The ability to actively perceive the distance from oneself of objects in the environment.
Deviant peer contagion: The spread of problem behaviors within groups of adolescents.
Dichotic listening: An experimental task in which two messages are presented to different ears.
Differential susceptibility: Genetic factors that make individuals more or less responsive to environmental experiences.
Diffuse optical imaging (DOI): A neuroimaging technique that infers brain activity by measuring changes in light as it is passed through the skull and surface of the brain.
Discontinuous development: Discontinuous development
Discrimination: Discrimination is behavior that advantages or disadvantages people merely based on their group membership.
Dissociative amnesia: Loss of autobiographical memories from a period in the past in the absence of brain injury or disease.
Distinctiveness: The principle that unusual events (in a context of similar events) will be recalled and recognized better than uniform (nondistinctive) events.
Divided attention: The ability to flexibly allocate attentional resources between two or more concurrent tasks.
DNA methylation: Covalent modifications of mammalian DNA occurring via the methylation of cytosine, typically in the context of the CpG dinucleotide.
DNA methyltransferases (DNMTs): Enzymes that establish and maintain DNA methylation using methyl-group donor compounds or cofactors. The main mammalian DNMTs are DNMT1, which maintains methylation state across DNA replication, and DNMT3a and DNMT3b, which perform de novo methylation.
Double flash illusion: The false perception of two visual flashes when a single flash is accompanied by two auditory beeps.
Drug diversion: When a drug that is prescribed to treat a medical condition is given to another individual who seeks to use the drug illicitly.
Ectoderm: The outermost layer of a developing fetus.
Efferent nerves: Nerves that carry messages from the brain to glands and organs in the periphery.
Effortful control: A temperament quality that enables children to be more successful in motivated self-regulation.
Electroencephalography: A technique that is used to measure gross electrical activity of the brain by placing electrodes on the scalp.
Electroencephalography (EEG): A neuroimaging technique that measures electrical brain activity via multiple electrodes on the scalp.
Encoding: The initial experience of perceiving and learning events.
Encoding: Process by which information gets into memory.
Encoding specificity principle: The hypothesis that a retrieval cue will be effective to the extent that information encoded from the cue overlaps or matches information in the engram or memory trace.
Enculturation: The uniquely human form of learning that is taught by one generation to another.
Endophenotypes: A characteristic that reflects a genetic liability for disease and a more basic component of a complex clinical presentation. Endophenotypes are less developmentally malleable than overt behavior.
Engrams: A term indicating the change in the nervous system representing an event; also, memory trace.
Epigenetics: The study of heritable changes in gene expression or cellular phenotype caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence. Epigenetic marks include covalent DNA modifications and posttranslational histone modifications.
Epigenome: The genome-wide distribution of epigenetic marks.
Episodic memory: Memory for events in a particular time and place.
Ethnocentric bias (or ethnocentrism): Being unduly guided by the beliefs of the culture you’ve grown up in, especially when this results in a misunderstanding or disparagement of unfamiliar cultures.
Ethnographic studies: Research that emphasizes field data collection and that examines questions that attempt to understand culture from it's own context and point of view.
Event-related potentials: A physiological measure of large electrical change in the brain produced by sensory stimulation or motor responses.
Event-related potentials (ERP): Measures the firing of groups of neurons in the cortex. As a person views or listens to specific types of information, neuronal activity creates small electrical currents that can be recorded from non-invasive sensors placed on the scalp. ERP provides excellent information about the timing of processing, clarifying brain activity at the millisecond pace at which it unfolds.
False-belief test: An experimental procedure that assesses whether a perceiver recognizes that another person has a false belief—a belief that contradicts reality.
Family Stress Model: A description of the negative effects of family financial difficulty on child adjustment through the effects of economic stress on parents’ depressed mood, increased marital problems, and poor parenting.
Flashbulb memory: Vivid personal memories of receiving the news of some momentous (and usually emotional) event.
Folk explanations of behavior: People’s natural explanations for why somebody did something, felt something, etc. (differing substantially for unintentional and intentional behaviors).
Forebrain: A part of the nervous system that contains the cerebral hemispheres, thalamus, and hypothalamus.
Foreclosure: Individuals commit to an identity without exploration of options.
Formal operations stage: Piagetian stage starting at age 12 years and continuing for the rest of life, in which adolescents may gain the reasoning powers of educated adults.
Fornix: (plural form, fornices) A nerve fiber tract that connects the hippocampus to mammillary bodies.
Frontal lobe: The most forward region (close to forehead) of the cerebral hemispheres.
Frontal lobe: The front most (anterior) part of the cerebrum; anterior to the central sulcus and responsible for motor output and planning, language, judgment, and decision-making.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging: (or fMRI) A noninvasive brain-imaging technique that registers changes in blood flow in the brain during a given task (also see magnetic resonance imaging).
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): A neuroimaging technique that infers brain activity by measuring changes in oxygen levels in the blood.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): Entails the use of powerful magnets to measure the levels of oxygen within the brain that vary with changes in neural activity. That is, as the neurons in specific brain regions “work harder” when performing a specific task, they require more oxygen. By having people listen to or view social percepts in an MRI scanner, fMRI specifies the brain regions that evidence a relative increase in blood flow. In this way, fMRI provides excellent spatial information, pinpointing with millimeter accuracy, the brain regions most critical for different social processes.
Gender schemas: Organized beliefs and expectations about maleness and femaleness that guide children’s thinking about gender.
Gene: A specific deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequence that codes for a specific polypeptide or protein or an observable inherited trait.
Genome-wide association study (GWAS): A study that maps DNA polymorphisms in affected individuals and controls matched for age, sex, and ethnic background with the aim of identifying causal genetic variants.
Genotype: The DNA content of a cell’s nucleus, whether a trait is externally observable or not.
Globus pallidus: A nucleus of the basal ganglia.
Goodness of fit: The match or synchrony between a child’s temperament and characteristics of parental care that contributes to positive or negative personality development. A good “fit” means that parents have accommodated to the child’s temperamental attributes, and this contributes to positive personality growth and better adjustment.
Gray matter: Composes the bark or the cortex of the cerebrum and consists of the cell bodies of the neurons (see also white matter).
Gray matter: The outer grayish regions of the brain comprised of the neurons’ cell bodies.
Gyri: (plural) Folds between sulci in the cortex.
Gyrus: (plural form, gyri) A bulge that is raised between or among fissures of the convoluted brain.
Gyrus: A fold between sulci in the cortex.
Heritability coefficient: An easily misinterpreted statistical construct that purports to measure the role of genetics in the explanation of differences among individuals.
Hippocampus: (plural form, hippocampi) A nucleus inside (medial) the temporal lobe implicated in learning and memory.
Histone acetyltransferases (HATs) and histone deacetylases (HDACs): HATs are enzymes that transfer acetyl groups to specific positions on histone tails, promoting an “open” chromatin state and transcriptional activation. HDACs remove these acetyl groups, resulting in a “closed” chromatin state and transcriptional repression.
Histone modifications: Posttranslational modifications of the N-terminal “tails” of histone proteins that serve as a major mode of epigenetic regulation. These modifications include acetylation, phosphorylation, methylation, sumoylation, ubiquitination, and ADP-ribosylation.
Homo habilis: A human ancestor, handy man, that lived two million years ago.
Homo sapiens: Modern man, the only surviving form of the genus Homo.
Homophily: Adolescents tend to associate with peers who are similar to themselves.
Horizontal plane: A slice that runs horizontally through a standing person (i.e., parallel to the floor); slices of brain in this plane divide the top and bottom parts of the brain; this plane is similar to slicing a hamburger bun.
Hypothalamus: Part of the diencephalon. Regulates biological drives with pituitary gland.
Identical twins: Two individual organisms that originated from the same zygote and therefore are genetically identical or very similar. The epigenetic profiling of identical twins discordant for disease is a unique experimental design as it eliminates the DNA sequence-, age-, and sex-differences from consideration.
Identity achievement: Individuals have explored different options and then made commitments.
Identity diffusion: Adolescents neither explore nor commit to any roles or ideologies.
Immunocytochemistry: A method of staining tissue including the brain, using antibodies.
Implicit Association Test: Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures relatively automatic biases that favor own group relative to other groups.
Inattentional blindness: The failure to notice a fully visible object when attention is devoted to something else.
Independent self: The tendency to define the self in terms of stable traits that guide behavior.
Individualism: The cultural trend in which the primary unit of measurement is the individual. Individualists are likely to emphasize uniqueness and personal aspirations over social duty.
Information processing theories: Theories that focus on describing the cognitive processes that underlie thinking at any one age and cognitive growth over time.
Ingroup: Group to which a person belongs.
Integrated: The process by which the perceptual system combines information arising from more than one modality.
Intention: An agent’s mental state of committing to perform an action that the agent believes will bring about a desired outcome.
Intentionality: The quality of an agent’s performing a behavior intentionally—that is, with skill and awareness and executing an intention (which is in turn based on a desire and relevant beliefs).
Interdependent self: The tendency to define the self in terms of social contexts that guide behavior.
Interference: Other memories get in the way of retrieving a desired memory
Joint attention: Two people attending to the same object and being aware that they both are attending to it.
Lateral geniculate nucleus: (or LGN) A nucleus in the thalamus that is innervated by the optic nerves and sends signals to the visual cortex in the occipital lobe.
Lateral sulcus: The major fissure that delineates the temporal lobe below the frontal and the parietal lobes.
Lateralized: To the side; used to refer to the fact that specific functions may reside primarily in one hemisphere or the other (e.g., for the majority individuals, the left hemisphere is most responsible for language).
Lesion: A region in the brain that suffered damage through injury, disease, or medical intervention.
Lesion studies: A surgical method in which a part of the animal brain is removed to study its effects on behavior or function.
Lexicon: Words and expressions.
Limbic system: Includes the subcortical structures of the amygdala and hippocampal formation as well as some cortical structures; responsible for aversion and gratification.
Limbic system: A loosely defined network of nuclei in the brain involved with learning and emotion.
Limited capacity: The notion that humans have limited mental resources that can be used at a given time.
Linguistic intergroup bias: A tendency for people to characterize positive things about their ingroup using more abstract expressions, but negative things about their outgroups using more abstract expressions.
Magnetic resonance imaging: Or MRI is a brain imaging noninvasive technique that uses magnetic energy to generate brain images (also see fMRI).
Magnification factor: Cortical space projected by an area of sensory input (e.g., mm of cortex per degree of visual field).
Malingering: Fabrication or exaggeration of medical symptoms to achieve secondary gain (e.g., receive medication, avoid school).
McGurk effect: An effect in which conflicting visual and auditory components of a speech stimulus result in an illusory percept.
Medial temporal lobes: Inner region of the temporal lobes that includes the hippocampus.
Medulla oblongata: An area just above the spinal cord that processes breathing, digestion, heart and blood vessel function, swallowing, and sneezing.
Memory traces: A term indicating the change in the nervous system representing an event.
Metabolite: A substance necessary for a living organism to maintain life.
Mimicry: Copying others’ behavior, usually without awareness.
Mirror neurons: Neurons identified in monkey brains that fire both when the monkey performs a certain action and when it perceives another agent performing that action.
Misinformation effect: When erroneous information occurring after an event is remembered as having been part of the original event.
Mnemonic devices: A strategy for remembering large amounts of information, usually involving imaging events occurring on a journey or with some other set of memorized cues.
Model minority: A minority group whose members are perceived as achieving a higher degree of socioeconomic success than the population average.
Moratorium: State in which adolescents are actively exploring options but have not yet made identity commitments.
Motor cortex: Region of the frontal lobe responsible for voluntary movement; the motor cortex has a contralateral representation of the human body.
Multimodal: Of or pertaining to multiple sensory modalities.
Multimodal perception: The effects that concurrent stimulation in more than one sensory modality has on the perception of events and objects in the world.
Multimodal phenomena: Effects that concern the binding of inputs from multiple sensory modalities.
Multisensory convergence zones: Regions in the brain that receive input from multiple unimodal areas processing different sensory modalities.
Multisensory enhancement: See “superadditive effect of multisensory integration.”
Myelin: Fatty tissue, produced by glial cells (see module, “Neurons”) that insulates the axons of the neurons; myelin is necessary for normal conduction of electrical impulses among neurons.
Nature: The genes that children bring with them to life and that influence all aspects of their development.
Neural crest: A set of primordial neurons that migrate outside the neural tube and give rise to sensory and autonomic neurons in the peripheral nervous system.
Neural induction: A process that causes the formation of the neural tube.
Neuroblasts: Brain progenitor cells that asymmetrically divide into other neuroblasts or nerve cells.
Neuroepithelium: The lining of the neural tube.
Nomenclature: Naming conventions.
Numerical magnitudes: The sizes of numbers.
Nurture: The environments, starting with the womb, that influence all aspects of children’s development.
Object permanence task: The Piagetian task in which infants below about 9 months of age fail to search for an object that is removed from their sight and, if not allowed to search immediately for the object, act as if they do not know that it continues to exist.
Observational learning: Learning by observing the behavior of others.
Occipital lobe: The back most (posterior) part of the cerebrum; involved in vision.
Occipital lobe: The back part of the cerebrum, which houses the visual areas.
Open ended questions: Research questions that ask participants to answer in their own words.
Oppositional defiant disorder: A childhood behavior disorder that is characterized by stubbornness, hostility, and behavioral defiance. This disorder is highly comorbid with ADHD.
Outgroup: Group to which a person does not belong.
Parasympathetic nervous system: A division of the autonomic nervous system that is slower than its counterpart—that is, the sympathetic nervous system—and works in opposition to it. Generally engaged in “rest and digest” functions.
Parent management training: A treatment for childhood behavior problems that teaches parents how to use contingencies to more effectively manage their children’s behavior.
Parietal lobe: An area of the cerebrum just behind the central sulcus that is engaged with somatosensory and gustatory sensation.
Parietal lobe: The part of the cerebrum between the frontal and occipital lobes; involved in bodily sensations, visual attention, and integrating the senses.
Pathologizes: To define a trait or collection of traits as medically or psychologically unhealthy or abnormal.
Phenotype: The pattern of expression of the genotype or the magnitude or extent to which it is observably expressed—an observable characteristic or trait of an organism, such as its morphology, development, biochemical or physiological properties, or behavior.
Phonemic awareness: Awareness of the component sounds within words.
Phrenology: A now-discredited field of brain study, popular in the first half of the 19th century that correlated bumps and indentations of the skull with specific functions of the brain.
Piaget’s theory: Theory that development occurs through a sequence of discontinuous stages: the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages.
Pons: A bridge that connects the cerebral cortex with the medulla, and reciprocally transfers information back and forth between the brain and the spinal cord.
Positron Emission Tomography: (or PET) An invasive procedure that captures brain images with positron emissions from the brain after the individual has been injected with radio-labeled isotopes.
Positron emission tomography (PET): A neuroimaging technique that measures brain activity by detecting the presence of a radioactive substance in the brain that is initially injected into the bloodstream and then pulled in by active brain tissue.
Prejudice: Prejudice is an evaluation or emotion toward people merely based on their group membership.
Preoperational reasoning stage: Period within Piagetian theory from age 2 to 7 years, in which children can represent objects through drawing and language but cannot solve logical reasoning problems, such as the conservation problems.
Primary auditory cortex: A region of the cortex devoted to the processing of simple auditory information.
Primary Motor Cortex: A strip of cortex just in front of the central sulcus that is involved with motor control.
Primary Somatosensory Cortex: A strip of cerebral tissue just behind the central sulcus engaged in sensory reception of bodily sensations.
Primary visual cortex: A region of the cortex devoted to the processing of simple visual information.
Priming: A stimulus presented to a person reminds him or her about other ideas associated with the stimulus.
Principle of Inverse Effectiveness: The finding that, in general, for a multimodal stimulus, if the response to each unimodal component (on its own) is weak, then the opportunity for multisensory enhancement is very large. However, if one component—by itself—is sufficient to evoke a strong response, then the effect on the response gained by simultaneously processing the other components of the stimulus will be relatively small.
Projection: A social perceiver’s assumption that the other person wants, knows, or feels the same as the perceiver wants, know, or feels.
Psychological control: Parents’ manipulation of and intrusion into adolescents’ emotional and cognitive world through invalidating adolescents’ feelings and pressuring them to think in particular ways.
Qualitative changes: Large, fundamental change, as when a caterpillar changes into a butterfly; stage theories such as Piaget’s posit that each stage reflects qualitative change relative to previous stages.
Quantitative changes: Gradual, incremental change, as in the growth of a pine tree’s girth.
Quantitative genetics: Scientific and mathematical methods for inferring genetic and environmental processes based on the degree of genetic and environmental similarity among organisms.
Receptive field: The portion of the world to which a neuron will respond if an appropriate stimulus is present there.
Recoding: The ubiquitous process during learning of taking information in one form and converting it to another form, usually one more easily remembered.
Retrieval: The process of accessing stored information.
Retrieval: Process by which information is accessed from memory and utilized.
Retroactive interference: The phenomenon whereby events that occur after some particular event of interest will usually cause forgetting of the original event.
Retrograde amnesia: Inability to retrieve memories for facts and events acquired before the onset of amnesia.
Right-wing authoritarianism: Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) focuses on value conflicts but endorses respect for obedience and authority in the service of group conformity.
Ritual: Rites or actions performed in a systematic or prescribed way often for an intended purpose. Example: The exchange of wedding rings during a marriage ceremony in many cultures.
Rostrocaudal: A front-back plane used to identify anatomical structures in the body and the brain.
Rubber hand illusion: The false perception of a fake hand as belonging to a perceiver, due to multimodal sensory information.
Sagittal plane: A slice that runs vertically from front to back; slices of brain in this plane divide the left and right side of the brain; this plane is similar to slicing a baked potato lengthwise.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: The hypothesis that the language that people use determines their thoughts.
Security of attachment: An infant’s confidence in the sensitivity and responsiveness of a caregiver, especially when he or she is needed. Infants can be securely attached or insecurely attached.
Selective attention: The ability to select certain stimuli in the environment to process, while ignoring distracting information.
Self-categorization theory: Self-categorization theory develops social identity theory’s point that people categorize themselves, along with each other into groups, favoring their own group.
Self-construal: The extent to which the self is defined as independent or as relating to others.
Semantic memory: The more or less permanent store of knowledge that people have.
Sensorimotor stage: Period within Piagetian theory from birth to age 2 years, during which children come to represent the enduring reality of objects.
Sensory modalities: A type of sense; for example, vision or audition.
Shadowing: A task in which the individual is asked to repeat an auditory message as it is presented.
Simulation: The process of representing the other person’s mental state.
Situation model: A mental representation of an event, object, or situation constructed at the time of comprehending a linguistic description.
Situational identity: Being guided by different cultural influences in different situations, such as home versus workplace, or formal versus informal roles.
Social brain: The set of neuroanatomical structures that allows us to understand the actions and intentions of other people.
Social brain hypothesis: The hypothesis that the human brain has evolved, so that humans can maintain larger ingroups.
Social dominance orientation: Social dominance orientation (SDO) describes a belief that group hierarchies are inevitable in all societies and even good, to maintain order and stability.
Social identity theory: Social identity theory notes that people categorize each other into groups, favoring their own group.
Social networks: Networks of social relationships among individuals through which information can travel.
Social referencing: The process by which one individual consults another’s emotional expressions to determine how to evaluate and respond to circumstances that are ambiguous or uncertain.
Sociocultural theories: Theory founded in large part by Lev Vygotsky that emphasizes how other people and the attitudes, values, and beliefs of the surrounding culture influence children’s development.
Somatic nervous system: A part of the peripheral nervous system that uses cranial and spinal nerves in volitional actions.
Somatosensory (body sensations) cortex: The region of the parietal lobe responsible for bodily sensations; the somatosensory cortex has a contralateral representation of the human body.
Spatial principle of multisensory integration: The finding that the superadditive effects of multisensory integration are observed when the sources of stimulation are spatially related to one another.
Spatial resolution: A term that refers to how small the elements of an image are; high spatial resolution means the device or technique can resolve very small elements; in neuroscience it describes how small of a structure in the brain can be imaged.
Spina bifida: A developmental disease of the spinal cord, where the neural tube does not close caudally.
Split-brain patient: A patient who has had most or all of his or her corpus callosum severed.
Standard scale: Research method in which all participants use a common scale—typically a Likert scale—to respond to questions.
Stereotype Content Model: Stereotype Content Model shows that social groups are viewed according to their perceived warmth and competence.
Stereotypes: Stereotype is a belief that characterizes people based merely on their group membership.
Storage: The stage in the learning/memory process that bridges encoding and retrieval; the persistence of memory over time.
Strange situation: A laboratory task that involves briefly separating and reuniting infants and their primary caregivers as a way of studying individual differences in attachment behavior.
Subcortical: Structures that lie beneath the cerebral cortex, but above the brain stem.
Subliminal perception: The ability to process information for meaning when the individual is not consciously aware of that information.
Subtle biases: Subtle biases are automatic, ambiguous, and ambivalent, but real in their consequences.
Sulci: (plural) Grooves separating folds of the cortex.
Sulcus: (plural form, sulci) The crevices or fissures formed by convolutions in the brain.
Sulcus: A groove separating folds of the cortex.
Superadditive effect of multisensory integration: The finding that responses to multimodal stimuli are typically greater than the sum of the independent responses to each unimodal component if it were presented on its own.
Sympathetic nervous system: A division of the autonomic nervous system, that is faster than its counterpart that is the parasympathetic nervous system and works in opposition to it. Generally engaged in “fight or flight” functions.
Synchrony: Two people displaying the same behaviors or having the same internal states (typically because of mutual mimicry).
Syntax: Rules by which words are strung together to form sentences.
Temperament: Early emerging differences in reactivity and self-regulation, which constitutes a foundation for personality development.
Temporal lobe: An area of the cerebrum that lies below the lateral sulcus; it contains auditory and olfactory (smell) projection regions.
Temporal lobe: The part of the cerebrum in front of (anterior to) the occipital lobe and below the lateral fissure; involved in vision, auditory processing, memory, and integrating vision and audition.
Temporal resolution: A term that refers to how small a unit of time can be measured; high temporal resolution means capable of resolving very small units of time; in neuroscience it describes how precisely in time a process can be measured in the brain.
Temporally graded retrograde amnesia: Inability to retrieve memories from just prior to the onset of amnesia with intact memory for more remote events.
Thalamus: A part of the diencephalon that works as a gateway for incoming and outgoing information.
Theory of mind: Children’s growing understanding of the mental states that affect people’s behavior.
Theory of mind: The human capacity to understand minds, a capacity that is made up of a collection of concepts (e.g., agent, intentionality) and processes (e.g., goal detection, imitation, empathy, perspective taking).
Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS): A neuroscience technique that passes mild electrical current directly through a brain area by placing small electrodes on the skull.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS): A neuroscience technique whereby a brief magnetic pulse is applied to the head that temporarily induces a weak electrical current that interferes with ongoing activity.
Transduction: A process in which physical energy converts into neural energy.
Transverse plane: See “horizontal plane.”
Twin studies: A behavior genetic research method that involves comparison of the similarity of identical (monozygotic; MZ) and fraternal (dizygotic; DZ) twins.
Unimodal: Of or pertaining to a single sensory modality.
Unimodal components: The parts of a stimulus relevant to one sensory modality at a time.
Unimodal cortex: A region of the brain devoted to the processing of information from a single sensory modality.
Value judgment: An assessment—based on one’s own preferences and priorities—about the basic “goodness” or “badness” of a concept or practice.
Value-free research: Research that is not influenced by the researchers’ own values, morality, or opinions.
Visual hemifield: The half of visual space (what we see) on one side of fixation (where we are looking); the left hemisphere is responsible for the right visual hemifield, and the right hemisphere is responsible for the left visual hemifield.
Visual perspective taking: Can refer to visual perspective taking (perceiving something from another person’s spatial vantage point) or more generally to effortful mental state inference (trying to infer the other person’s thoughts, desires, emotions).
Wernicke’s area: A language area in the temporal lobe where linguistic information is comprehended (Also see Broca’s area).
White matter: The inner whitish regions of the cerebrum comprised of the myelinated axons of neurons in the cerebral cortex.
White matter: Regions of the nervous system that represent the axons of the nerve cells; whitish in color because of myelination of the nerve cells.
Working memory: Short transitory memory processed in the hippocampus.