Final Exam

Question 1

What are the two commonly held views of extinction?

Answer 1

1. Increasing the proportion of reinforced trials increases learning
2. Resistance to extinction provides a measure of associative strength

Question 2

If you were to train rates on four different proportioned trial types, what result would you expect? What actually happens?

Answer 2

You would expect the rats that get 100% reinforcement longer to extinguish and the rats that get 30% reinforcement to be the first to extinguish

What actually happens is the opposite

Question 3

Why do the rats with 100% reinforcement extinguish first and the rats with 30% reinforcement extinguish last?

Answer 3

It takes longer for the less reinforced rate to extinguish because it likely doesn’t even know that it is under an extinction trial. They got rewarded so infrequently they figure that they were still waiting on a reward. Rats who were rewarded in every trial gave up quickly once they saw the reward had gone away.

Question 4

The extinction test with rats reinforcement trials had what result?

Answer 4

Observed partially reinforced animals take longer to extinguish —> PREE (partial reinforcement extinction effect)

Question 5

What are the two possibilities of implications of PREE?

Answer 5

• One possibility: theories are wrong
• Alternative possibility: resistance to extinction is not a good measure of learning

Question 6

What does the discriminative task with black and white boxes suggest?

Answer 6

Increasing the proportion of reinforced trials increased associative strength and implies that there is no problem with using resistance to extinction to measure learning

Question 7

Partially reinforced animals learned something that was _______ through the period of 100% reinforcement —> that produces PREE

Answer 7

Preserved

Question 8

Frustration theory (Amsel)

Answer 8

Posits partially reinforced animal becomes frustrated on non-reinforced trials

Question 9

How can we test to see if animals get frustrated?

Answer 9

Allow a pigeon to get grain 100% off the time while the other pigeon is tied up in the corner. Once the first pigeon is no longer reinforced, he goes and attacks the pigeon that is tied up, expressing frustration

Question 10

What are the 3 properties of frustration?

Answer 10

1. It induces drive
2. It can be conditioned to the environment (establishing a context -> frustration association)
3. Frustration has stimulus properties

Question 11

True or false: you extinguish faster in the same environment that you were trained in

Answer 11

False. You extinguish faster in a different context than the one trained in

Question 12

What are the two forms of learning?

Answer 12

Short term and long term

Question 13

Which one has alternations in synaptic function that depends on pre-existing proteins? Short term or long term?

Answer 13

Short term

Question 14

Which one has structural modifications depends on protein synthesis? Short term or long term?

Answer 14

Long term

Question 15

What two passes does LTP form in?

Answer 15

Early form and late form

Question 16

What happens during the early form of LTP?

Answer 16

Not affected by drugs that block protein synthesis (ex: anisomycin)

Question 17

What happens during the late form of LTP?

Answer 17

Blocked by anisomycin

Question 18

What occurs as a result of long-term sensitization in Aplysia?

Answer 18

Structural changes (growth of new synaptic connections)

Question 19

Can Aplysia lay down a long-term memory of protein synthesis is interrupted?

Answer 19

No

Question 20

If you give anisomycin prior to Tone (CS) —> shock (US)
If you test CS 0-4 good later (short-term), what happens?

Answer 20

No effect (CS —> CR fear)

Question 21

If you give anisomycin prior to Tone (CS) —> shock (US)

Test CS 24 hours later (long-term), what happens?

Answer 21

Anisomycin blocks CRfear

Question 22

Consolidation

Answer 22

Learning can engage process that continues after the training episode that help to lay down a long-term memory

Question 23

What does electroconvulsive shock after training cause?

Answer 23

disruption of memory -> retrograde amnesia for recently learned material

Question 24

fear conditioning depends on which brain structure?

Answer 24

the basolateral amygdala (BLA)

Question 25

Which three things all have the same long and short-term patterns?

Answer 25

LTP, fear conditioning, and extinction

Question 26

what does long-term behavioral modification depend on?

Answer 26

protein synthesis

Question 27

What does short-term behavioral modification depend on?

Answer 27

preexisting proteins

Question 28

Who tested transitive inferential reasoning in chimps?

Answer 28

Gillan and Premack

Question 29

What do perceptual analogies allow the chimp to do?

Answer 29

directly see the relationships between objects

Question 30

What is the ONLY reason why Sarah the chimp was able to solve analogies?

Answer 30

because she was language trained

Question 31

What do second order relations require?

Answer 31

an understanding of language

Question 32

Who was Sarah the chimp?

Answer 32

Premack’s chimp that had linguistic abilities

Question 33

True or false: brain size covaries with intelligence. Why?

Answer 33

false. Brain size Covaries with body size. Whales are larger than humans but aren’t smarter than humans

Question 34

Why may some bird species share some of the same intellectual capacity as humans?

Answer 34

because they faced similar evolutionary pressures

Question 35

What is unique about a Scrub Jay’s ability to cache food?

Answer 35

It would remember where the food was, and would also remember what was hidden relative to how quickly it would go bad. For example, worms decay and nuts don’t, so they would eat the worms first.

Question 36

What kind of memory are scub Jays said to have?

Answer 36

a kind of episodic memory

Question 37

In a social context, a bird caches food in public and then re-caches the food when it is in private. What does that say about the bird?

Answer 37

That he is a thief, and assumes that the other bird also is.

Question 38

Behaviorists position on language

Answer 38

language is acquired via general learning processes

given the right environment, a chimp can learn language

Question 39

Linguists position on language

Answer 39

principles of conditioning are not sufficient

you can only acquire language because we have to have an innate structure

Question 40

Did Washoe have productive language or syntax abilities?

Answer 40

no, he could just poorly sign in response to questions

Question 41

How did Sarah learn language

Answer 41

arbitrary tokens

Question 42

What were limitations of Sarah’s language?

Answer 42

she did not use it in a productive fashion and had a poor grasp of syntax

Question 43

Which chimp understood syntax and used language in a productive manner as well as learned a lot about spoken language?

Answer 43

Kanzi

Question 44

What were the limitations of Alex the parrot?

Answer 44

does not understand the importance of syntax, does not understand second order relations, and does not use language in a productive manner

Question 45

Who is the Godfather of AI?

Answer 45

Geoffrey Hinton

Question 46

Who’s style of learning was utilized to create the soccer playing robots? What type of learning was it?

Answer 46

Thorndike (trial and error learning)

Question 47

How does ChatGPT learn?

Answer 47

1) Pretraining: scrape the web
2) supervised fine-tuning
(learning imitation)
3) reinforcement learning from human feedback (rank answer)