Vocabulary

Age identity: How old or young people feel compared to their chronological age; after early adulthood, most people feel younger than their chronological age.
Anchoring: The bias to be affected by an initial anchor, even if the anchor is arbitrary, and to insufficiently adjust our judgments away from that anchor.
Anterograde amnesia: Inability to form new memories for facts and events after the onset of amnesia.
Audience design: Constructing utterances to suit the audience’s knowledge.
Autobiographical memory: Memory for the events of one’s life.
Autobiographical narratives: A qualitative research method used to understand characteristics and life themes that an individual considers to uniquely distinguish him- or herself from others.
Average life expectancy: Mean number of years that 50% of people in a specific birth cohort are expected to survive. This is typically calculated from birth but is also sometimes re-calculated for people who have already reached a particular age (e.g., 65).
Awareness: A conscious experience or the capability of having conscious experiences, which is distinct from self-awareness, the conscious understanding of one’s own existence and individuality.
Basic-level category: The neutral, preferred category for a given object, at an intermediate level of specificity.
Behaviorism: The study of behavior.
Biases: The systematic and predictable mistakes that influence the judgment of even very talented human beings.
Blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD): The signal typically measured in fMRI that results from changes in the ratio of oxygenated hemoglobin to deoxygenated hemoglobin in the blood.
Bounded awareness: The systematic ways in which we fail to notice obvious and important information that is available to us.
Bounded ethicality: The systematic ways in which our ethics are limited in ways we are not even aware of ourselves.
Bounded rationality: Model of human behavior that suggests that humans try to make rational decisions but are bounded due to cognitive limitations.
Bounded self-interest: The systematic and predictable ways in which we care about the outcomes of others.
Bounded willpower: The tendency to place greater weight on present concerns rather than future concerns.
Category: A set of entities that are equivalent in some way. Usually the items are similar to one another.
Central nervous system: The part of the nervous system that consists of the brain and spinal cord.
Chutes and Ladders: A numerical board game that seems to be useful for building numerical knowledge.
Cognitive psychology: The study of mental processes.
Cohort: Group of people typically born in the same year or historical period, who share common experiences over time; sometimes called a generation (e.g., Baby Boom Generation).
Common ground: Information that is shared by people who engage in a conversation.
Concept: The mental representation of a category.
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.
Conscious experience: The first-person perspective of a mental event, such as feeling some sensory input, a memory, an idea, an emotion, a mood, or a continuous temporal sequence of happenings.
Consciousness: Awareness of ourselves and our environment.
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: Process by which a memory trace is stabilized and transformed into a more durable form.
Consolidation: The process occurring after encoding that is believed to stabilize memory traces.
Contemplative science: A research area concerned with understanding how contemplative practices such as meditation can affect individuals, including changes in their behavior, their emotional reactivity, their cognitive abilities, and their brains. Contemplative science also seeks insights into conscious experience that can be gained from first-person observations by individuals who have gained extraordinary expertise in introspection.
Continuous development: Ways in which development occurs in a gradual incremental manner, rather than through sudden jumps.
Convoy Model of Social Relations: Theory that proposes that the frequency, types, and reciprocity of social exchanges change with age. These social exchanges impact the health and well-being of the givers and receivers in the convoy.
Cross-sectional studies: Research method that provides information about age group differences; age differences are confounded with cohort differences and effects related to history and time of study.
Crystallized intelligence: Type of intellectual ability that relies on the application of knowledge, experience, and learned information.
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.
Decay: The fading of memories with the passage of time.
Declarative memory: Conscious memories for facts and events.
Deoxygenated hemoglobin: Hemoglobin not carrying oxygen.
Depolarization: A change in a cell’s membrane potential, making the inside of the cell more positive and increasing the chance of an action potential.
Depth perception: The ability to actively perceive the distance from oneself of objects in the environment.
Dichotic listening: An experimental task in which two messages are presented to different ears.
Discontinuous development: Discontinuous development
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.
Empiricism: The belief that knowledge comes from experience.
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.
Engrams: A term indicating the change in the nervous system representing an event; also, memory trace.
Episodic memory: Memory for events in a particular time and place.
Eugenics: The practice of selective breeding to promote desired traits.
Exemplar: An example in memory that is labeled as being in a particular category.
False memories: Memory for an event that never actually occurred, implanted by experimental manipulation or other means.
First-person perspective: Observations made by individuals about their own conscious experiences, also known as introspection or a subjective point of view. Phenomenology refers to the description and investigation of such observations.
Flashbulb memory: Vivid personal memories of receiving the news of some momentous (and usually emotional) event.
Flashbulb memory: A highly detailed and vivid memory of an emotionally significant event.
Fluid intelligence: Type of intelligence that relies on the ability to use information processing resources to reason logically and solve novel problems.
Foils: Any member of a lineup (whether live or photograph) other than the suspect.
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.
Framing: The bias to be systematically affected by the way in which information is presented, while holding the objective information constant.
Functionalism: A school of American psychology that focused on the utility of consciousness.
Gestalt psychology: An attempt to study the unity of experience.
Global subjective well-being: Individuals’ perceptions of and satisfaction with their lives as a whole.
Hedonic well-being: Component of well-being that refers to emotional experiences, often including measures of positive (e.g., happiness, contentment) and negative affect (e.g., stress, sadness).
Hemoglobin: The oxygen-carrying portion of a red blood cell.
Heterogeneity: Inter-individual and subgroup differences in level and rate of change over time.
Heuristics: cognitive (or thinking) strategies that simplify decision making by using mental short-cuts
Hyperpolarization: A change in a cell’s membrane potential, making the inside of the cell more negative and decreasing the chance of an action potential.
Inattentional blindness: The failure to notice a fully visible object when attention is devoted to something else.
Individual differences: Ways in which people differ in terms of their behavior, emotion, cognition, and development.
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.
Inhibitory functioning: Ability to focus on a subset of information while suppressing attention to less relevant information.
Interference: Other memories get in the way of retrieving a desired memory
Intra- and inter-individual differences: Different patterns of development observed within an individual (intra-) or between individuals (inter-).
Introspection: A method of focusing on internal processes.
Invasive Procedure: A procedure that involves the skin being broken or an instrument or chemical being introduced into a body cavity.
Lesions: Abnormalities in the tissue of an organism usually caused by disease or trauma.
Lexicon: Words and expressions.
Life course theories: Theory of development that highlights the effects of social expectations of age-related life events and social roles; additionally considers the lifelong cumulative effects of membership in specific cohorts and sociocultural subgroups and exposure to historical events.
Life span theories: Theory of development that emphasizes the patterning of lifelong within- and between-person differences in the shape, level, and rate of change trajectories.
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.
Longitudinal studies: Research method that collects information from individuals at multiple time points over time, allowing researchers to track cohort differences in age-related change to determine cumulative effects of different life experiences.
Medial temporal lobes: Inner region of the temporal lobes that includes the hippocampus.
Memory traces: A term indicating the change in the nervous system representing an event.
Misinformation effect: When erroneous information occurring after an event is remembered as having been part of the original event.
Misinformation effect: A memory error caused by exposure to incorrect information between the original event (e.g., a crime) and later memory test (e.g., an interview, lineup, or day in court).
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.
Mock witnesses: A research subject who plays the part of a witness in a study.
Nature: The genes that children bring with them to life and that influence all aspects of their development.
Neural impulse: An electro-chemical signal that enables neurons to communicate.
Neural plasticity: The ability of synapses and neural pathways to change over time and adapt to changes in neural process, behavior, or environment.
Neuroscience methods: A research method that deals with the structure or function of the nervous system and brain.
Noninvasive procedure: A procedure that does not require the insertion of an instrument or chemical through the skin or into a body cavity.
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.
Outgroup: Group to which a person does not belong.
Overconfident: The bias to have greater confidence in your judgment than is warranted based on a rational assessment.
Oxygenated hemoglobin: Hemoglobin carrying oxygen.
Parasympathetic nervous system (PNS): One of the two major divisions of the autonomic nervous system, responsible for stimulation of “rest and digest” activities.
Peripheral nervous system: The part of the nervous system that is outside the brain and spinal cord.
Phonemic awareness: Awareness of the component sounds within words.
Photo spreads: A selection of normally small photographs of faces given to a witness for the purpose of identifying a perpetrator.
Piaget’s theory: Theory that development occurs through a sequence of discontinuous stages: the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages.
Positron: A particle having the same mass and numerically equal but positive charge as an electron.
Practitioner-Scholar Model: A model of training of professional psychologists that emphasizes clinical practice.
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.
Priming: A stimulus presented to a person reminds him or her about other ideas associated with the stimulus.
Processing speed: The time it takes individuals to perform cognitive operations (e.g., process information, react to a signal, switch attention from one task to another, find a specific target object in a complex picture).
Psychological essentialism: The belief that members of a category have an unseen property that causes them to be in the category and to have the properties associated with it.
Psychometric approach: Approach to studying intelligence that examines performance on tests of intellectual functioning.
Psychophysics: Study of the relationships between physical stimuli and the perception of those stimuli.
Psychophysiological methods: Any research method in which the dependent variable is a physiological measure and the independent variable is behavioral or mental (such as memory).
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.
Realism: A point of view that emphasizes the importance of the senses in providing knowledge of the external world.
Recall: Type of memory task where individuals are asked to remember previously learned information without the help of external cues.
Recoding: The ubiquitous process during learning of taking information in one form and converting it to another form, usually one more easily remembered.
Recognition: Type of memory task where individuals are asked to remember previously learned information with the assistance of cues.
Retrieval: Process by which information is accessed from memory and utilized.
Retrieval: The process of accessing stored information.
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.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: The hypothesis that the language that people use determines their thoughts.
Schema (plural: schemata): A memory template, created through repeated exposure to a particular class of objects or events.
Scientist-practitioner model: A model of training of professional psychologists that emphasizes the development of both research and clinical skills.
Selective attention: The ability to select certain stimuli in the environment to process, while ignoring distracting information.
Self-perceptions of aging: An individual’s perceptions of their own aging process; positive perceptions of aging have been shown to be associated with greater longevity and health.
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.
Shadowing: A task in which the individual is asked to repeat an auditory message as it is presented.
Situation model: A mental representation of an event, object, or situation constructed at the time of comprehending a linguistic description.
Social brain hypothesis: The hypothesis that the human brain has evolved, so that humans can maintain larger ingroups.
Social network: Network of people with whom an individual is closely connected; social networks provide emotional, informational, and material support and offer opportunities for social engagement.
Social networks: Networks of social relationships among individuals through which information can travel.
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.
Socioemotional Selectivity Theory: Theory proposed to explain the reduction of social partners in older adulthood; posits that older adults focus on meeting emotional over information-gathering goals, and adaptively select social partners who meet this need.
Spatial resolution: The degree to which one can separate a single object in space from another.
Storage: The stage in the learning/memory process that bridges encoding and retrieval; the persistence of memory over time.
Structuralism: A school of American psychology that sought to describe the elements of conscious experience.
Subjective age: A multidimensional construct that indicates how old (or young) a person feels and into which age group a person categorizes him- or herself
Subliminal perception: The ability to process information for meaning when the individual is not consciously aware of that information.
Successful aging: Includes three components: avoiding disease, maintaining high levels of cognitive and physical functioning, and having an actively engaged lifestyle.
Sympathetic nervous system (SNS): One of the two major divisions of the autonomic nervous system, responsible for stimulation of “fight or flight” activities.
Syntax: Rules by which words are strung together to form sentences.
System 1: Our intuitive decision-making system, which is typically fast, automatic, effortless, implicit, and emotional.
System 2: Our more deliberative decision-making system, which is slower, conscious, effortful, explicit, and logical.
Temporal resolution: The degree to which one can separate a single point in time from another.
Temporally graded retrograde amnesia: Inability to retrieve memories from just prior to the onset of amnesia with intact memory for more remote events.
Third-person perspective: Observations made by individuals in a way that can be independently confirmed by other individuals so as to lead to general, objective understanding. With respect to consciousness, third-person perspectives make use of behavioral and neural measures related to conscious experiences.
Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: The inability to pull a word from memory even though there is the sensation that that word is available.
Typicality: The difference in “goodness” of category members, ranging from the most typical (the prototype) to borderline members.
Voltage: The difference in electric charge between two points.
Working memory: Memory system that allows for information to be simultaneously stored and utilized or manipulated.