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imprinting

n. a simple yet profound and highly effective learning process that occurs during a critical period in the life of some animals. It was first described in 1873 by British naturalist Douglas A. Spalding (1840–1877) when he observed that newly hatched chicks tended to follow the first moving object, human or animal, that caught their attention. The term itself was introduced by Konrad Lorenz in 1937. Some investigators believe that such processes are instinctual; others regard them as a form of preparedness.

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Psychology term of the day

January 30th 2025

Gödel’s proof

Gödel’s proof

a proof that in any logic system at least as powerful as arithmetic it is possible to state theorems that can be proved to be neither true nor false, using only the proof rules of that system. Published in 1931, this incompleteness result was very challenging to the mathematics of the time. British mathematician Alan Turing (1912–1954), with his proof of the undecidability of the halting problem, extended this result to computation (see Turing machine). [Kurt Gödel (1906–1978), Austrian-born U.S. mathematician]