Behaviors that interfere with harmonious social relationships or normal everyday activity (e.g., aggression, hyperactivity, excess irritability). See Aggressive behavior, Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Conduct disorder, Fetal programming, Indirect aggression, Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), Risk factors
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Behavior system
Any organization of perceptual, central, and motor units that acts as a larger unit in some situations or tasks. See Action unit
Behavior modification
In psychotherapy, a treatment approach that uses techniques such as biofeedback, conditioning, reinforcement, or aversion therapy to extinguish or inhibit inappropriate or maladaptive behavior, rather than remove the causes of such behaviour. It can involve social praise, material reinforcers, and tokens, punishment-oriented techniques, including verbal reprimand, and time-outs when the person receiving the therapy has …
Behavior genetics
The study of behavioral variation among individuals, which is separated into genetic versus environmental components. The most common research methodologies employed are family, twin, and adoption studies. Environmental influences are divided into two classes, shared and non-shared (or unique) environment. The former is the environment shared by siblings reared in the same family, and which …
Behavior mechanism
A hypothetical structure in the central nervous system that, when activated, produces an event of behavioral interest such as a particular perception, a specific motor pattern, or an identifiable internal state. Similar in meaning to cognitive structure. See Cause (or causal factor), Cognitive structures, Mechanism, Process
Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development
Used to assess infant and toddler mental and motor development through a series of standardized tasks. From performance on the tasks, a normed developmental quotient is derived for each scale. The Mental Scale is designed to assess a range of responses involving, for example, object permanence, memory, problem solving, and language-related abilities. The Motor Scale …
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Bayesian learning
Process of learning by means ofprobabilistic Bayesian inferences. In Bayesian learning, current knowledge isrepresented as a set of hypotheses with a probability distribution (priorprobabilities, or shortly priors). Learning consists in observing evidence andre-estimating probability distribution of the hypotheses given the observedevidence (thus creating posterior probabilities). The inference that generatesposterior probability of each hypothesis follows Bayes’ …
Basket cells
One of three inhibitory GABA interneurons in the cerebellar cortex that together total somewhere in the region of 200 million, each one synapsing on the soma and proximal dendrites of 20 or more Purkinje cells that they laterally inhibit via short axons through the release of the neurotransmitter GABA. In turn, they are excited by …
Bayes’ rule
Formula describing how to appraise the posteriorprobability P of a hypothesis H given observed evidence E: P(H|E) = (P(E|H) *P(H) ) / P(E). See Bayesian learning
Basal ganglia (functions)
In the past, the basal ganglia were considered to act as funnels and as an integration center for many cortical inputs. Based on research with rats, this view was changed to one in which the basal ganglia consist of functionally segregated thalamocortical circuits or loops that are involved in the parallel processing of different information. …