stimulus

…inevitably triggered by a particular stimulus or by collections of stimuli. Depending on the internal state of the potential attacker, the same opponent may be attacked on one occasion but ignored on another. In particular, an individual’s tendency to attack a rival is influenced by the activity of key structures…

…principle that relates response to stimulus in excitable tissues. It was first established for the contraction of heart muscle by the American physiologist Henry P. Bowditch in 1871. Describing the relation of response to stimulus, he stated, “An induction shock produces a contraction or fails to do so according to…

…red colour is the paramount stimulus by which a territory-holding male detects an intruder. Models that accurately imitated sticklebacks but lacked the red markings were seldom attacked, whereas models that possessed a red belly but lacked many of the other characteristics of the sticklebacks, or even of fish in general,…

…in response to a mechanical stimulus from the left side of the body, for example, the right one is inactivated. Inactivation prevents it from interfering with the crucial, initial contractions of the trunk muscles on the goldfish’s right side. The net effect is that 20 milliseconds after sensing danger the…

…Darwinian algorithm may involve a stimulus threshold (such as “when the day-length exceeds 10 hours, migrate north”) or may depend on the occurrence of a cue that is normally associated with a fitness-enhancing outcome (such as “build nests in dense vegetation where chick survival is predictably high”). Darwinian algorithms are…

…in animals exposed to adverse stimuli, in which the tendency to act defensively is stronger than the tendency to attack. The underlying implication that a single neural mechanism is involved (such as a specific part of the brain, which, under electrical stimulation, seems to inflict punishment) remains only a hypothesis.…

…to connect a previously irrelevant stimulus with a particular response, occurs mainly through the process of conditioning, in which reinforcement crystallizes new behaviour patterns. The earliest well-known conditioning experiment was performed by 19th-century Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, who conditioned dogs to salivate

Some neutral stimulus, such as a bell, is presented just before delivery of some effective stimulus (say, food or acid placed in the mouth of a dog). A response such as salivation, originally evoked only by the effective stimulus, eventually appears when the initially neutral stimulus is…

…that the first two (stimulus discrimination and response selection) precede the associative stage.

stimulus produces amusement.

…in one-to-one relation to physical stimuli, the effect of the phi phenomenon was apparently inexplicable. However, Wertheimer understood that the perceived motion is an emergent experience, not present in the stimuli in isolation but dependent upon the relational characteristics of the stimuli. As the motion is perceived, the observer’s nervous…

…sensory structures is by the stimuli to which they normally respond; thus, there are photoreceptors (for light), mechanoreceptors (for distortion or bending), thermoreceptors (for heat), chemoreceptors (e.g., for chemical odours), and nociceptors (for painful stimuli). This classification is useful because it makes clear that various sense organs

…misrepresentation of a “real” sensory stimulus—that is, an interpretation that contradicts objective “reality” as defined by general agreement. For example, a child who perceives tree branches at night as if they are goblins may be said to be having an illusion. An illusion is distinguished from a hallucination, an experience…

…organism forced to bear aversive stimuli, or stimuli that are painful or otherwise unpleasant, becomes unable or unwilling to avoid subsequent encounters with those stimuli, even if they are “escapable,” presumably because it has learned that it cannot control the situation.

model of conditioning, an unconditioned stimulus is followed by an appropriate response; for example, food placed in a dog’s mouth is followed by the dog salivating. If a bell is rung just before food is offered to a dog, eventually the dog will salivate at the sound of the bell…

Muscles differ in the stimuli required to activate them. In vertebrates, voluntary muscles require action potentials (electrical signals) in their nerves to initiate every contraction. Some involuntary muscles are spontaneously active, and the action potentials in their nerves only modify the natural rhythm of contraction. The leg muscles of…

…in the environment is the stimulus; the reaction of the organism to it is the response. In single-celled organisms, the response is the result of a property of the cell fluid called irritability. In simple organisms, such as algae, protozoans, and fungi, a response in which the organism moves toward…

…intensity or position of a stimulus. Receptors are also classified as exteroceptive (reporting the external environment), interoceptive (sampling the environment of the body itself), and proprioceptive (sensing the posture and movements of the body). Exteroceptors report the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Interoceptors report the state of…

…excited by three types of stimuli—mechanical, thermal, and chemical; some endings respond primarily to one type of stimulation, whereas other endings can detect all types. Chemical substances produced by the body that excite pain receptors include bradykinin, serotonin, and histamine. Prostaglandins are fatty acids that are released when inflammation occurs…

…to respond to a particular stimulus to respond as well to similar stimuli beyond the original conditions of training. The measured effects of prior training on the performance of a subsequent task define the transfer of psychomotor learning. In practical skills, transfer is more likely to take place between tennis…

…between the first and second stimulus, meaning the subject will be relatively unprepared should the second arrive earlier than usual. Furthermore, people learn to expect certain kinds of stimuli over others. Performance declines when a person is uncertain about whether regularly occurring stimuli will be auditory or visual, or when…

…and immediate responses to particular stimuli uniquely correlated with them.

…immediate response to a particular stimulus. The primary components of the reflex arc are the sensory neurons (or receptors) that receive stimulation and in turn connect to other nerve cells that activate muscle cells (or effectors), which perform the reflex action.

…in the movement itself, and stimuli received through other sensory organs. Thus the term sensorimotor skill is used to denote the close relationship between movement and sensation involved in complex acts.

…of the meaningfulness of the stimulus (and of the possibility of its incorporation into an ongoing dream sequence). With a meaningful stimulus (e.g., one that cannot be ignored with impunity), the capacity for responsivity can be demonstrated to be roughly equivalent to that of “light” NREM sleep (stages 1 and…

, the apparent painful stimulus, sound of a bell, or red glow of a fire). This double meaning has produced confusion about whether or not sensations are purely mental (as opposed to physical). Though the process of sensing is thought by some to be purely mental, some psychologists and…

…depends on the number of stimulus elements presented. When a clock strikes three or four times, one knows without counting that it is three or four o’clock. At noon one must count; the first chimes no longer belong to the psychological present that includes the last. Most people also can…

…of this sort are called stimulus generalization. At the very root of modern theories of personality development is the assumption that what a person learns during his childhood will show a pervasive degree of transfer to his adult behaviour. In some cases stimulus generalization mediates this transfer. Some cases of…

…the basis of principles of stimulus generalization, how a response to a relational stimulus could be explained by assuming that organisms do indeed respond to the absolute properties of the stimuli. Both explanations were found to be too simple for the variety of findings obtained with transposition studies. As a…