Hebbian theory
From Psychology Wiki
Community portal · Tasks to do · News · Help
Clinical · Educational · Ind&Org · Other fields · Professional · Transpersonal · World
Assessment |
Biopsychology |
Comparative |
Cognitive |
Developmental |
Language
Personality |
Philosophy |
Research Methods |
Social |
Statistics
Cognitive Psychology: Attention · Learning · Memory · Motivation · Perception · Thinking
Hebbian theory describes a basic mechanism for synaptic plasticity wherein an increase in synaptic efficacy arises from the presynaptic cell's repeated and persistent stimulation of the postsynaptic cell. It was introduced by Donald Hebb in 1949 and states that:
- Let us assume that the persistence or repetition of a reverberatory activity (or "trace") tends to induce lasting cellular changes that add to its stability.… When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.
The theory is often summarized as cells that fire together, wire together, though this is an oversimplification of the nervous system and should not be taken literally.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Hebb, D.O. (1949) The organization of behavior. Wiley, New York.
[edit] External link
 | This neuroscience article is a stub. You can help the Psychology Wiki by expanding it. |
| This page uses content from the English-language version of Wikipedia. The original article was at Hebbian theory. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Psychology Wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. |
