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discriminative stimulus

discriminative stimulus noun: a stimulus, associated with reinforcement or punishment, that exerts control over a particular form of behavior; the subject discriminates between closely related stimuli and elicits a specific behavior more frequently or less frequently only in the presence of that stimulus.

Noun

discriminative stimulus (plural discriminative stimuli)

  1. (behavioral psychology) A stimulus, associated with reinforcement or punishment, that exerts control over a particular form of behavior; the subject discriminates between closely related stimuli and elicits a specific behavior more frequently or less frequently only in the presence of that stimulus.
    Synonyms:
    Sd

Synonyms of discriminative stimulus

Forms of discriminative stimulus

pluraldiscriminative stimuli

Questions about discriminative stimulus

What does discriminative stimulus mean?
Discriminative stimulus means a stimulus, associated with reinforcement or punishment, that exerts control over a particular form of behavior; the subject discriminates between closely related stimuli and elicits a specific behavior more frequently or less frequently only in the presence of that stimulus.
What part of speech is discriminative stimulus?
Discriminative stimulus is a noun.
What is the plural of discriminative stimulus?
The plural of discriminative stimulus is discriminative stimuli.

Words near discriminative stimulus in the dictionary

  1. discrimination
  2. discriminational
  3. discriminations
  4. discriminative
  5. discriminative stimuli
  6. discriminative stimulus
  7. discriminatively
  8. discriminativeness
  9. discriminator
  10. discriminatorily
  11. discriminators

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: discriminative stimulus (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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