exteroception

n. sensitivity to stimuli that are outside the body, resulting from the response of specialized sensory cells called exteroceptors to objects and occurrences in the external environment. Exteroception includes the five senses of sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste, and exteroceptors thus take a variety of forms (e.g., photoreceptors—retinal rods and cones—for sight; cutaneous receptors—Pacinian corpuscles, Meissner’s corpuscles, Merkel’s tactile disks—for touch). Compare interoception. —exteroceptive adj.

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Psychology term of the day

July 27th 2024

script

1. a cognitive schematic structure—a mental road map—containing the basic actions (and their temporal and causal relations) that comprise a complex action. Also called script schema.

2. a structured representation consisting of a sequence of conceptual dependencies grouped together to capture the semantic relationships implicit in everyday human situations. It was designed for the purpose of computer-based story understanding. [created in 1966 by U.S. cognitive and computer scientist Roger C. Schank (1946– ) and U.S. psychologist Robert P. Abelson (1928–2005)]

3. see prescription drug.

4. see script analysis.