family medicine

the practice of treating a wide variety of illnesses and disorders in individuals and family members of all ages. Physicians now specializing in this area (called family practice doctors) must first undergo special training and become certified or board-eligible in family medicine in order to practice; such requirements did not apply until the 1970s. Family physicians trained before family medicine became a certifiable specialty are usually called general practitioners or GPs (labels sometimes also used by osteopaths). Both types of family physician are considered primary care providers.

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Psychology term of the day

January 13th 2025

reference memory

in animal cognition, the representation of an association between objects, spatial locations, or other stimuli that remains consistent across several trials of an experimental session and is used to guide behavior. Matching to sample and various other tasks involving simultaneous or successive discrimination are commonly used to assess reference memory in nonhuman animals. For example, a pigeon presented with both a green and a red disk is rewarded with a food pellet for pecking the green one. If the green disk remains the correct choice across all trials in which the two objects are presented, the pigeon relies on reference memory to retain this information and choose the correct disk. Compare working memory. [initially described in 1978 by German-born U.S. psychologist Werner Konstantin Honig (1932–2001) and subsequently elaborated by U.S. physiological psychologist David Stuart Olton (1943–1994) and various colleagues]