Chapter 1: Introduction - Fundamental Themes in the Psychology of Learning & Memory Flashcards
Who is Aristotle?
A keen observer of the natural world who loved data, facts, and figures from which he could infer conclusions.
What is Aristotle’s key interest?
Memory
What is the theory of associationism?
Argued that memory depends on the formation of linkages (“associations”) between pairs of events, sensations, or ideas, so that recalling or experiencing one member of the pair elicits a memory or anticipation of the other
Who created the theory of associationism?
Aristotle
What are the three fundamental laws of associationism?
Contiguity
Frequency
Similarity
What is the law of contiguity?
Events or items that occur in close proximity to each other in time or space are readily associated with each other
What is the law of frequency?
The more frequently two events or items occur together, the more strongly they are associated
What is the meaning of similarity in the theory of associationism?
Events or items that are similar are readily associated
What is empiricism?
All ides that we have are the result of experience
What did Aristotle argue?
Knowledge emerges from experience
What is nativism?
The bulk of our knowledge is hardwired in our brain when we are born
Definition of Learning?
the process by which changed in behaviour arise as a result of an organism’s experience with the world.
Definition of memory?
The organism’s internal record of past experiences, acquired through learning
Who is William James?
He taught the first psychology course ever given in America
What was William James especially interested in?
In how we learn new habits and acquire new memories
What did William James state about the act of remembering an event, such as a dinner party?
To remember the event, it would involve a network of multiple connections between the components of the evening such as tests of food, or smell of perfume.
Who is Ivan Pavlov?
Known for developing methods for studying animals that are still in widespread use today.
Definition of Stimulus?
A stimulus is any object or event that causes a sensory or behavioural response in an organism
Definition of classical conditioning?
Two stimuli are linked together to produce a new learned response
What is another name for classical conditioning?
Pavlovian Conditioning
What is a learning curve?
A graph representation of the rate at which you make progress learning new information.
Definition of the independent variable?
What is being intentionally changed in the experiment
How are modern studies of classical conditioning usually reported?
The results are reported as a learning curve.
Where are the dependent and independent variables plotted on the learning curve?
Independent: Horizontal axis
Dependent: Vertical axis
What is Ivan Pavlov’s process of extinction?
Pavlov and his assistants showed that they could also weaken an animal’s trained response resulting in the process called extinction.
Definition of Extinction Ivan Pavlov?
The process of reducing a learned response to a stimulus by ceasing to pair the stimulus with a reward or punishment
What is Ivan Pavlov’s concept of generalisation?
Pavlov also demonstrated that a dog will transfer what it has learned about one stimulus to similar stimulus
Who is Edward Thorndike?
A student of William James, and also studied how animals learn associations
What is Operant Conditioning?
organisms learn to make responses in order to obtain or avoid important consequences; The behaviour is instrumental in determining whether the consequences occur.
What was Throndike’s most influential study?
Observing how cats learn to escape from puzzle boxes.
What is another name for operant conditioning?
instrumental conditioning
What did Edward Thorndike observe?
The probability of a particular behaviours response increased or decreased depending on the consequences that followed/
What is Edward Thorndyke’s Law of Effect?
Suggested that when satisfaction follows an association, it is more likely to be repeated. If an unfavorable outcome follows an action, then it becomes less likely to be repeated.
What did Edward Thorndike argue?
The psychology of learning should center on the search for the rules describing how, when, and to what degree associations among stimuli and responses are increased or decreased through experience
What is nature and what is nurture?
Nature: Genetics
Nurture: Environment and upbringing
Who is René Descrates?
He was the first to write of the concept of emotions and known for his concept of dualism
What did René Descrates believe?
That much of what we know is innate (genetically hardwired)
What was René Descrates a firm believer in?
Dualism
What is Dualism?
The principle that the mind and body exist as separate entities, each with different characteristics and governed by its own laws
Definition of reflex arc?
An automatic pathway from a sensory stimulus to a motor response
Definition of sensory stimulus?
Is any event or object that is received by the senses and elicits a response from a person
Who is John Locke?
Introduced the concept of tabula rasa which is the belief that the mind is a ‘blank slate’ at birth and we are formed and develop from our own experiences with the environment
What did John Locke argue?
that all knowledge is derived from experience
What did John Locke suggest?
that children arrive in the world as a black slate (tabula rasa), ready to be influenced by experience and learning
Who is John Watson?
Considered the founder of behaviourism
What is behaviourism?
a school of thought that says psychology should restrict itself to the study of observable behaviours and not seek to infer unobservable mental processes
What did Watson come to believe in his studies with rats?
That all behaviour is learning and a product of our environments
What did John Watson argue regarding his study with rats?
Rats had learning an automatic set of motor habits for moving through a maze and that these motor habits were largely independent of any external sensory cues.
Who is B. F. Skinner?
best-known for his influence on behaviourism
What did B. F. Skinner believe?
Psychologists should limit themselves to the study of observable behaviours that can be learned through experience, and not try to speculate about what is going on in the mind of an animal while it learns
What extreme form of Behaviourism did Skinner advocate?
Radical Behaviourism
What is Radical behaviourism?
school go thought that behavior, rather than mental states, should be the focus of study in psychology
What did Skinner argue?
That humans, like all other animals, function by blindly producing learned responses to environmental stimuli.
Who is Erasmus Darwin?
He formulated one of the first formal theories on evolution
What is the theory of evolution?
Living species change over time, with new traits or characteristics emerging and being passed from one generation to the next
What theory did Charles Darwin propose?
Natural Selection
What is the theory of natural selection?
The process by which such forces as competition, disease, and climate tend to eliminate individuals who are less well adapted to a particular environment and favor the survival and reproduction of better adapted individuals, thereby changing the nature of the population over successive generations.
What did Charles Darwin are about species evolving?
That species evolve when they possess a trait that meets three conditions
What are the three conditions that Charles Darwin argued that species possess?
Inheritable
Variable
Relevant survival
What did Edward Tolman argue?
that rats are like humans in that they are intrinsically motivated to learn the general layout of mazes by forming what he called a cognitive map.
What is a cognitive map?
an internal representation of the spatial layout of the external world
Definition of intrinsically?
The act of doing something without any obvious external rewards
What is latent learning?
Learning that is unconnected to a positive or negative consequences and that remains undetected (latent) until explicitly demonstrated at a later stage.
How did Edward Tolman show value in cognitive maps with rats?
showed the value for understanding how rats can apply what they have leaned in novel situations; rates are able to find food mazes by using alternative routes if their preferred route is blocked.
What did Edward Tolman argue about rats regarding latent learning?
during their free exploration, the rats were learning a cognitive map that they could exploit late – latent learning
Old ____ was a greek who thought about association
Aristotle
____, the dualist, liked to speak of mind-and-body separation
Descrates
To _____, a baby’s mind was blank, as all empiricists have said. Nativists called him a crank, believing knowledge is inbred.
John Locke
Who is Clark Hull?
He devoted his career to developing mathematical equations by which he hoped to describe the relationships among the factors that influence learning
What was Clark Hull’s goal?
To develop a comprehensive mathematical model of animal learning that would predict exactly what an animal will learn in any given situation
What intensive program of learning did Clark Hull conduct?
Program of research on learning in animals and humans, seeking to text and refine his mathematical models.
Who is William K. Estes?
Established a new sub-discipline of psychology, mathematics psychology
What is mathematical psychology?
Mathematical equations used to describe the laws of learning and memory demonstrated how quantitate approaches can be applied to observable behaviours in order to understand, and formally model, mental functions
Who is W. K. Estes build on ?
Clark Hull
What did Clark Hull assume about a pigeon trained to peck whenever it sees a yellow light in order to obtain food?
Assumed that this training caused the formation of a direct link between the stimulus and the response, so that later presentation of the yellow light evoked the peck-for-food response
Who is David Rumelhart?
Developed models of learning and thinking that he described as “connectionist network models”
What are “connectionist network models”?
Mathematical networks of connections between simple processing unites that could be applied to a wide range of problems in understanding human learning and memory
In connectionist models, ideas and concepts in the external worlds are not represented as?
distinct and discrete symbols but rather as patterns of activity over populations of many nodes (processing units)
What is distributed representation?
a representation in which information is coded as a patter of activation distributed across many different nodes
definition of inheritable traits?
traits can be passed from parents
definition of natural variability?
variations exist in traits exhibited by plants and animals
definition of relevance to survival?
More offspring are produced than will survive.
Those with beneficial traits survive and reproduce, and those with negative traits will perish
