The study of a relatively large and diverse group of people at a single point in time. Compare with LONGITUDINAL EFFECT and see also COHORT EFFECT.

Name given to a mental test that requires the subject to fill in the missing letter, word or phrase. First devised by the German psychologist Hermann von Ebbinghaus in the late nineteenth century.

Filling in blanks in the MEMORY with plausible stories that are untrue but not deliberate lies. Occurs in people whose memory is disturbed through BRAIN DAMAGE and who don’t realise that their stories are confabulations.

A point of development at which a human or animal is thought to be optimally ready to learn certain skills or be open to certain influences.

See IMPRINTING.

Something that is present in an individual at birth but is not necessarily genetically inherited, or INNATE.

The AWARENESS of oneself in every aspect of one’s being.

The point at which a flickering light no longer appears to flicker but is perceived as a steady light.

A group of people of known characteristics, achievement or BEHAVIOUR who are used as a standard against which other people are compared in terms of scores on psychological tests.

See IQ and INTELLIGENCE TEST.

In PSYCHOANALYSIS, a group of REPRESSED, emotionally-charged ideas that conflict with other ideas (representing other aspects of the PERSONALITY) that the individual is CONSCIOUS of.

A theory of COGNITIVE SCIENCE opposed to the older INFORMATION PROCESSING model as a way of understanding mental functioning. It suggests the brain operates as a network, capable of performing many operations at the same time and also of learning from its experience, unlike a computer which operates sequentially (i.e. a form of processing in which the operations are distributed over a vast network and occur in parallel).