Author Archives: Brian Hopkins

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The permissibility, or even sufficiency, of an account in developmental psychology to issue global conclusions for educational accounts.

The anthropological doctrine originating with the Greek Sophists, and especially as espoused by J. Melville Herskovits (1895-1963), that the values and institutions of any culture are self-validating.  Thus, there are no universals in human behaviour or anything like a ‚aapsychic unity of mankind‚aa, and no universal standards of good, bad, right and wrong. The issue can …

Continue reading “Relativism (or cultural relativism)”

The spatial relationships among objects and surfaces relative to each other and the observer that indicate which are nearer or farther (e.g., “the red ball is halfway between the yellow ball and the blue ball.”).  See Absolute distance, Allocentric search, Binocular disparity, Depth perception, Kinetic depth information, Pictorial depth cues

Two or more items or actions, in which the properties of one must be understood in part by its connections to another or set of others . See System approaches

In contrast to reactivation, a periodic re-exposure to a small amount of partial practice or repetition of the original training experience that maintains the memory for that experience.  See Reactivation

A stimulus that has the power to alter the strength or probability of a behavior if it is made contingent on that behavior.  See Behavior modification, Discrimination, Escape learning, Mobile conjugate reinforcement, Operant (or instrumental) conditioning, Operant train task, Reinforcement schedule

To regard or treat an abstraction as if it had a concrete or material existence. Some have argued that IQ and the attention deficit hyperactivity syndrome, as well as some other medicalized behaviour disorders (e.g., Munchausen‚was syndrome by proxy), are examples of reification or rather a reification fallacy.

A well-defined procedure for reinforcing a given response only a certain proportion of the time it occurs.  See Behavior modification, Discrimination, Learning, Mobile conjugate reinforcement, Observational learning, Operant (or instrumental) conditioning, Operant train task, Reinforcer

Also known as a transacting element and a transcriptional regulatory element, it is a gene whose protein controls the activity and expression of one or more structural genes or metabolic pathways.  In the Jacob-Monod operon model, these hypothetical genes acted only as repressors, but in later models they were assigned both repressor and activator roles. …

Continue reading “Regulator (or regulatory) genes”