the theory, developed by American psychologist E. L. Thorndike, that behaviours that lead to ‘good’ outcomes are repeated whilst those that lead to ‘bad’ outcomes are not, and which can form the basis for an evolutionary account of how the organism learns to make appropriate responses in its environment.

one of the main theories developed to explain the experience of depressions, derived from experiments in which animals, subjected to inescapable aversive stimulation, became very passive in their responding.

the various ways in which children underachieve or perform badly at school, often caused by dyslexia o other difficulties in dealing with reading, writing or solving mathematical problems.

in environmental cognition, the image people develop of places in a form which is easy to comprehend and to remember.

an alternative to the modal model in which the relation between perception and memory is emphasized.

in the study of genetics, the link between the genetic basis of characters which results from both genes lying on the same chromosome.

in the study of evolution, the optimization by natural selection on a local scale, of animals living within a particular habitat.

an increase in postsynaptic potential caused by repeated stimulation of a cell, which is thought to occur in many structures, providing the basis for much of learning and memory, probably in the form of long-term modification of neural pathways.

in personality assessment, a study of adult development drawn from research data compiled from the same group of adults at different points in their lives, which are based on material form Q- and R-data.