Okuzeka
Psychology vocabulary · Learning and Behaviour

Stimulus

Meaning in psychology, with examples

/ˈstɪmjələs/nounCore term

In psychology, stimulus means: Anything in the environment or inside the body that can be detected and can trigger a response, such as a sound, an image, a smell or a touch.

In Turkish: uyaran

How it is used

Used in perception research, learning theory and experiments, where stimuli are shown on a screen for a set time. Researchers talk about visual stimuli, emotional stimuli, stimulus onset and stimulus duration.

Example sentences

  1. Each stimulus appeared on the screen for 200 milliseconds.

  2. Angry faces were used as threatening stimuli in the attention task.

Common collocations

  • visual stimuli
  • present a stimulus
  • conditioned stimulus
  • stimulus onset
  • classical conditioningA type of learning in which a neutral stimulus, after being paired many times with a stimulus that naturally causes a response, comes to cause a similar response on its own.
  • perceptionThe process by which the brain organises and interprets information from the senses, so that we can recognise objects, sounds, faces and movement.
  • attentionThe ability to focus mental resources on some information while ignoring the rest, for example following one conversation in a noisy room.
  • experimentA study in which the researcher deliberately changes one factor and measures the effect on another, while keeping other conditions as constant as possible.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Learning and Behaviour

Practise with graded reading

Reading at the right level is the fastest way to make new words stick. Pick free English books by level:

This page explains English vocabulary for learners. It is not medical advice.