PSYB45H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Intellectual Disability, Behaviorism
Document Summary
Essentially, behavior is anything that a person says or does. Technically, behavior is any muscular, glandular, or electrical activity of an organism. Walking, talking out loud, throwing a baseball, yelling at someone all are overt (visible) behaviors that could be observed and recorded by an individual other than the one performing the behavior. The term behavior can also refer to covert (private, internal) activities that cannot be readily observed by others. Sometimes we think in words, called private self-talk. Imagining and private self-talk, in addition to being called covert behaviors, are sometimes referred to as cognitive behaviors. Characteristics of behavior that can be measured are called dimensions of behavior. The duration of a behavior is the length of time that it lasts (e. g. , mary studied for 1 hour). The frequency of a behavior is the number of instances that occur in a given period of time (e. g. , frank planted 5 tomato plants in his garden in 30 minutes).
