Exam 5 Flashcards
the period between a learning experience and its recall
retention interval
memory for events following a retention interval shorter than one minute, often a matter of seconds
short-term memory
memory for events following a retention interval longer than one minute and sometimes many years
long-term memory
deals with information that can be declared, or expressed, usually in words
declarative memory
memory that includes facts and knowledge
declarative memory
Declarative knowledge is also sometimes called ______ knowledge
explicit
2 types of declarative memories:
semantic and episodic
“knowledge of the world”
semantic memory
memory for information about the world
semantic memory
memory for personally experienced events (also called autobiographical memory)
episodic memory
______ memories happen to you, while semantic memories happen to others
episodic
memory that cannot be declared or expressed in words
nondeclarative memory
2 types of nondeclarative memory
Pavlovian conditioning and procedural
Memory for procedures. Involves knowing how.
procedural memory
_______ behavior is not inherited
learned
Gardner and Gardner showed that the failure of chimpanzees to learn to speak may be due more to differences in _______ than in learning ability.
anatomy
_______ believed that physical characteristics were acquired adaptations that were passed on from generation to generation
Lamarck
The theories of Lamark and Darwin both assume that species evolve as a result of the influence of the __________
environment
The environment may limit learning ability and therefore what we learn by damaging the:
nervous system
Substances that damage neural tissues are called _____
neurotoxins
stages for optimal learning
critical periods
the tendency of some animals, particularly birds, to follow the first moving object they see after birth, usually their mother
imprinting
What scientists used terry cloth-covered surrogate mothers for chimpanzees to imprint on?
Harlow and Harlow
The Brelands showed that ______ might facilitate learning in one situation and inhibit in another.
heredity
the tendency of an animal to revert to a fixed action pattern
instinctive drift
an animal comes to a learning situation genetically prepared to learn (in which case learning proceeds quickly), unprepared (in which case learning proceeds steadily but more slowly), or contraprepared (in which case the course of learning is slow and irregular)
continuum of preparedness
the variable that is manipulated by the researcher
independent variable
the variable that is measured by the researcher
dependent variable
What an individual can learn to do is limited by
what it is physically capable of doing
Who taught Washoe, a young chimpanzee, how to use sign language?
The Gardners
By the age of 2, Washoe knew over 30 signs and by the age of 7, ____ signs
200
Who is credited with the first theory of evolution?
Lamarck
British psychologist ________ adopted a Lamarckian view of learned behavior
William McDougal
Who compared the problem solving abilities of wolves and dogs?
Harry and Martha Frank
_______ demonstrated that there are differences in learning abilities of individuals within a given species, and these differences are also partly due to heredity by breeding rats who made the fewest errors with each other and those who made the most errors with each other. The gap between performance increased with each generation.
Robert Tyron
Parental exposure to ____ and other drugs can interfere with neurological development.
alcohol
Head injury (Traumatic Brain Injury-TBI) can diminish _____
learning ability
Konrad Lorenz was one of the first to study:
imprinting
______ proposed that humans are prepared to acquire certain fears
Seligman
deterioration in learned behavior following a period without practice
forgetting
improvement in performance following a retention interval
reminiscence
a way of measuring forgetting in which the individual is given the opportunity to perform a previously learned behavior following a retention interval
free recall
a way of measuring learning in which hints or prompts are presented to increase the likelihood that the behavior will be produced
prompted or cued recall
measures forgetting in terms of the amount of training required to reach the previous level of performance (if it took fewer trials to learn a list the second time, the savings provided a measure of forgetting–the greater the savings, the less the forgetting)
relearning (savings) method
The relearning method is also called the ______ method.
savings
a way of measuring learning where the participant only has to identify the material previously learned
recognition
a method of measuring forgetting in which the opportunity to match a sample follows a retention interval
delayed matching to sample (DMTS)
a method of measuring forgetting by comparing the rate of extinction after a retention interval with the rate of extinction immediately after training
extinction method
a method of measuring forgetting in which a behavior is tested for generalization before and after a retention interval
gradient degradation—a flattening of the generalization gradient indicates forgetting
______ interference is when we forget something that we recently learned because a previous memory is befuddling our memory.
Proactive
______ interference is when we forget something we learned in the past because a more recent memory is interfering with the effort.
Retroactive
the continuation of training beyond the point required to produce one errorless performance
overlearning
number of correct responses per minute
fluency
a learning task involving pairs of words or other stimuli in which the subject is presented wit the first item of a pair and is expected to produce the second item
paired associate learning
Thune and Underwood used the ______ method of studying forgetting.
relearning/savings
forgetting that results from the absence of cues that were present during training
cued-dependent forgetting
Loftus found that use of the word _____ resulted in higher estimates of car speed than use of the word hit.
smashed
any device for aiding recall
mnemonic
any of several systems for aiding recall, including the method of loci and the peg word system
mnemonic system
a mnemonic system in which each item to be recalled is “placed” in a distinctive spot in an imagined scene such as walking a path
method of loci
a mnemonic system in which each of the first n integers is associated with a particular image (a “peg”), and each item to be recalled is “placed” on a peg
peg word system
