Test 2 Flashcards
Classical Conditioning
- type of learning in which a stimulus acquires the capacity to evoke a response that was originally evoked by another stimulus
- Ivan Pavlov: Russian psychologist who stumbled onto conditioned responses while collecting data for the role of saliva in digestion
- Includes US, UR, CS, CR, extinction, spontaneous recovery, and stimulus generalization
Unconditioned Stimulus?
Unconditioned Response?
- Evokes a response without previous conditioning
- Typically a reflexive unlearned reaction to an unconditioned stimulus
- Conditioned and unconditioned response are usually the same
Conditioned Response?
- The learned reaction to a conditioned stimulus
- Ex: just seeing Marge in kitchen makes Homer salivate
Conditioned Stimulus?
- A stimulus that was previously neutral but has become paired or associated with an unconditioned stimulus
- It’s a learned stimulus
Extinction?
- Describes the gradual weakening or disappearance of a conditioned response
- Because you aren’t exposed to it as much, it’s just going away
- Ex: boyfriend location no longer associated with him
Spontaneous Recovery?
- The reappearance of an extinguished behavior
- Response/behavior comes about again
- Ex: older sibling starts to act like baby
What type of response was the dog’s response to the unconditioned stimulus (food)?
Unconditioned response
Stimulus Generalization?
-Occurs when an organism has a learned response to a specific stimulus and responds the same way to other stimuli that are similar to the original stimulus
What type of response was the dog’s response to the bell?
Conditioned response; salivating
Operant Conditioning
- A form of learning in which voluntary responses come to be controlled by their consequences
- B.F. Skinner: he was a behaviorist, but not as much as John B. Watson; responsible for operant conditioning
- Includes consequence (positive/negative reinforcement and positive/negative punishment) and shaping
Consequence?
- The outcome of a behavior
- Includes reinforcement and punishment
Reinforcement?
-Type of consequence that INCREASES the likelihood of an organism to reproduce that behavior again.
Punishment?
-Type of consequence that DECREASES the likelihood of an organism to reproduce that behavior again
Positive vs. Negative?
- Positive: something’s being added
- Negative: something’s being taken away
Positive Reinforcement?
- A response is strengthened at the presentation of a rewarding stimulus
- Something’s being added and increases likelihood of it happening again
Positive Punishment?
- A response is weakened at the presentation of an aversive stimulus
- Something’s being added & decreases likelihood of it happening again
- Ex: like spraying cat with water, so it stops doing something
Negative Reinforcement?
- A response is strengthened at the removal of an aversive stimulus
- Something’s being taken away & increases likelihood of it happening again
- Ex: being cold, so put on sweater
Negative Punishment?
- A response is weakened at the removal of a rewarding stimulus
- Something’s being taken away & decreases likelihood of it happening again
- Ex: taking away door for bad grades
Stella cleaned her house and then her mother gave her five dollars. Next week, Stella cleaned her house again. What type is this?
Positive Reinforcement.
Glen stayed out past curfew. The next day, Glen’s parents grounded him for two weeks. Next time Glen went out with his friends, he came home on time. What type is this?
Negative Punishment.
Shaping?
- The reinforcement of closer and closer approximations of a desired response
- She gave example of learning to ride bike
- Common Example: potty training
- Doesn’t have to be something physical (like candy); can just be praise
Observational Learning?
- Occurs when an organism’s response is influenced by the observation of others
- Albert Bandura’s discovery
- Ex: learning how to cook by watching mom
- Ex: parents involved with politics, so you may be more likely to join too
- Ex: kid sees aggressive behavior, so they’ll be more aggressive
The reappearance of a conditioned response after extinction and a period of rest is called?
-Spontaneous recovery
Jenna got straight A’s and then her mother gave her the week off from chores. Next semester, Jenna tried hard and got straight A’s again. What is this called?
-Negative reinforcement
What are the 3 key processes (and order)?
-Encoding → Storage → Retrieval
Encoding?
- Involves forming a memory code
- Like entering data through keyboard
- Pay attention!
- Requires attention (it’s critical)
Attention?
- Focusing awareness on narrowed range of stimuli or events
- Selective attention (the selection input) is critical
Divided Attention?
- Focus on two or more inputs simultaneously
- Results in decrements in memory performance
- It’s not multitasking, it’s task switching
- Ex: testing during lecture
Storage?
- Involves maintaining encoded information in memory over time
- Like saving data in file on hard disk
- Includes sensory memory, short-term memory, rehearsal, chunking, working memory, and long-term memory
Retrieval?
- Involves recovering information from memory stores
- Like pulling up file and displaying data on monitor
- Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: failure of retrieval
- Retrieval cues: hints, related information or partial recollections; can help with tip-of-the-tongue
- Context cues: she says it’s like going by chapter on tests (ex: asks question about behavior, then question about Watson)
Ways of improving memory?
- Elaboration
- Visual Imagery
- Motivation to remember
Elaboration?
- The linking of a stimulus to other information at the time of encoding
- Making connections or applying the idea to your life
Visual Imagery?
- The creation of visual images to represent the other words to be remembered
- Easier for concrete objects than abstract concepts
- Dual-code theory
Motivation to Remember?
-Perceived importance – extra effort, attention, and organization
Memory Storage Model?
Sensory Input → Sensory Memory → Attention (if you don’t tend to it, it will be lost) → Short-Term Memory (needs rehearsal) → Storage → Long-Term Memory
Long-Term Memory → Retrieval→ Short-Term Memory
*Look in Chapter 7 Packet! Page 2
Which memory can go out the quickest if you don’t tend to it?
-Sensory Memory
Sensory Memory?
-Information is preserved in its original sensory form for a very brief time (¼ of a second)
How long is information held in sensory memory if not tended to?
¼ of a second
Short-Term Memory?
- STM
- Limited capacity store that can maintain unrehearsed information for up to about 20 seconds
- Capacity:
- Magical number: 7 plus or minus 2
- Miller
- More like 4 plus or minus 1
- Cowan
Chunking?
- Grouping of familiar stimuli stored as a single unit
- (usually in threes)
- Ex: FBI-NBC-CIA-IBM
- A lot of books and stuff use chunking to make things easier
- Good way to remember different strings of #s
Working Memory?
- Modular system for temporary storage and manipulation of information
- Working to help you solve problems
- People with ADHD have problem with working memory
- Includes phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, central executive, and episodic buffer
- Ex: math problem (uses most working memory because uses multiple steps and task-switching)
A math problem is using multiple steps. What type of memory is it using?
Working memory.
Phonological Loop?
-Recitation to hold information
Visuospatial Sketchpad?
-Temporarily holds and manipulates visual information
Central Executive?
-Controls attention (switching, dividing attention)
Episodic Buffer?
-Integrates information, interface between STM and LTM
Working Memory Capacity?
- One’s ability to hold and manipulate information in conscious attention
- Stable personality trait (it’s related to personality)
- Influenced by situational factors (stress, anxiety)
Long-Term Memory?
- Unlimited capacity store for holding information for long periods of time
- Probably most important type of memory
- Includes flashbulb memories
Flashbulb Memories?
- Usually vivid and detailed recollections of momentous events
- Not as accurate as once believed
- People tend to be overly confident about accuracy
- Emotionally intense
Reconstructing Memories?
- Memories are reconstructions
- May be distorted and inaccurate
- Misinformation Effect
Misinformation Effect?
- Reconstruction of an event is altered by introducing misleading post-event information
- Adding/taking out details
- Ex: eye witnesses; criminals do it to justify their actions
Forgetting?
-Retention: the proportion of material remembered
- Retention Interval: length of time between the presentation and the measurement of forgetting
- How long you’re able to retain information without forgetting it
- How do we measure retention or forgetting?
- Recall: freely; no information to go based off of
- Recognition: answers are right in front of you
- Relearning
Why We Forget
- Ineffective Encoding
- Decay Theory
- Interference Theory
- Repression
Ineffective Encoding?
- Pseudoforgetting (not really forgetting, just didn’t learn it)
- Lack of attention
- Ex: Studying when tired
Decay Theory?
- Forgetting occurs because memory traces fade with time
- Ex: You remember what you learned last week better than in high school
Interference Theory?
- Forgetting occurs because of competition from other material
- Ex: master at your classes in the fall, but once you begin spring semester, you forget some fall stuff
Repression?
- Keeping distressing thoughts and feelings buried in the unconscious
- Freudian
The anatomy of memory?
- Extensive memory loss can aid in the study of the anatomical bases of memory
- Retrograde Amnesia
- Anterograde Amnesia
Retrograde Amnesia?
- Loss of memories for events that occurred prior to injury
- Can be caused by traumatic brain injury
Anterograde Amnesia?
- Loss of memories for events that occur after an injury
- Ex: think 50 First Dates
Patient H.M.
- Suffered from epileptic seizures
- Had his hippocampus and adjacent regions removed
- Anterograde amnesia
- Could not remember anything that happened since 1953
- Loss the ability to form long-term memories
- Could only remember the most recent 20 seconds
Where is memory in the brain?
-Prefrontal Cortex, Cerebral Cortex, and Hippocampus
- Consolidation: the gradual conversion of new, unstable memories into stable, durable memory code stored in LTM
- Takes time and rehearsal for info to stick
- Hippocampus
-Memory code is stored throughout the cortex
- Reconsolidation: retrieved memories may be weakened, strengthened, or updated
- Possible distortions
Different types of memory systems?
- Declarative Memory
- Semantic memory
- Episodic memory
-Nondeclarative (Procedural) Memory
Declarative Memory?
-Factual Information
Semantic Memory?
- General knowledge that is not tied to the time when the information was learned
- Type of factual memory
- Ex: when you learned who the first president was (don’t know where you learned it, but you just know it)
Episodic Memory?
- Chronological or temporally dated recollections of personal experience
- Like episode of your life
- Kind of related to flashbulb (she says flashbulb is type of episodic memory)
- Ex: high school graduation
Nondeclarative (Procedural) Memory?
- Memory for actions, skills, and conditioned responses
- More automatic, like skills
- Ex: riding bike
What type of memory is riding a bike?
Nondeclarative (a.k.a. procedural)
What type of memory is first trip to Disneyland?
Episodic
“Who was the first president?” What type of memory is this?
Semantic
“What is a bicycle?” What type of memory is this?
Semantic
What type of memory is your high school graduation?
Episodic
Retrospective Memory?
- Remembering events from the past; previously learned information
- Ex: Any type of memory from the past
Prospective Memory?
- Remembering to perform actions in the future
- Ex: remembering to pack when you get home
Things to remember about memory
-Attention is inherently selective
- Memory is fallible; memory is not perfect; we don’t remember things 100%
- Inaccuracies in eyewitness testimony
- Memory is multifaceted
- Influenced by attention and level of processing
Language Acquisition According to Behaviorist Theories.
- B.F. Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior
- Argued that children learn language the same way they learn everything else
- Vocalizations that are not reinforced gradually decline in frequency and remaining vocalizations are shaped with reinforcers until correct; reinforcing kid along the way
Language Acquisition According to Nativist Theories.
-Noam Chomsky’s rival explanation
- Proposed humans are equipped with a language acquisition device, an innate mechanism or process that facilitates the learning of language
- Natural process
- Something we’re born with
- Language Acquisition Device
- Children learn the rules of language, not specific verbal responses
- Ex: of Genie disproved this theory
Language Acquisition According to Interactionist Theories.
- Assert that we are biologically well equipped to learn language and it involves the learning of rules (like the nativists)
- AND social exchanges play a critical role in molding language skills (like the behaviorists)
- Combines behaviorist and nativist theories
- Most popularly held theory
Problem Solving
- Refers to active efforts to discover what must be done to achieve a goal that is not readily attainable
- Ex: when she gave us putting hands in pocket problem
Barriers to Problem Solving
- Irrelevant Information
- Ex: In Thompson family, there are five brothers, and each brother has one sister. If you count Mrs. Thompson, how many females are there in the Thompson family?
- Functional Fixedness
- The tendency to perceive an item only in term of its most common use
- Mental Set
- A mental set exists when people persist in using problem-solving strategies that have worked in the past
- Ex: learn technique in math, so when move on to next section, you try to use it again
Approaches to Problem Solving
- Trial and Error
- Heuristics
- Forming Subgoals
- Searching for Analogies
- Taking a break: Incubation
- These don’t always work
Trial and Error
-Involves trying possible solutions sequentially and discarding those that are in error until one works
Heuristics
- A heuristic is a guiding principle or “rule of thumb” used in solving problems or making decisions
- Ex: At doctor’s office, we see someone walking by in lab coat, we assume they’re physician but not necessarily true
Forming Subgoals
- Dividing a problem into subgoals, or intermediate steps towards a solution, can facilitate an ending solution
- Ex: writing paper little-by-little
Searching for Analogies
-If you can spot an analogy between problems, you may be able to use the solution to a previous problem to solve a current one
Taking a Break
-Incubation Effect: occurs when new solutions surface for a previously unsolved problem after a period of not consciously thinking about the problem
Decision Making
-Decision making involves evaluating alternatives and making a choice among them
- Theory of bounded rationality: asserts that people tend to use simple strategies in decision making that focus on only a few facets of available options and often result in “irrational” decisions that are less than optimal
- We want to go with what has worked in the past
Tendency to Ignore Base Rates
- Base Rate: the prior odds that a member of a specific population will have a certain characteristic
- Ex: of Blackhawks in Chicago
-People tend to ignore base rates, particularly in regards to themselves
- Part of the “it can’t happen to me” problem
- Like when a burglar ignores the likelihood that they will end up in jail
- We make assumptions before looking at facts and data
- Ex: of schizophrenia?
Conjunction Fallacy
- Occurs when people estimate that the odds of two uncertain events happening together are greater than the odds of either event happening alone
- Ex: of Linda being a bank teller vs. Linda being a bank teller and an active feminist
History of Measuring Intelligence
- Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon: the Binet-Simon Scale
- Lewis Terman at Stanford: Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale
- David Wechsler: Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)
Binet-Simon Scale
- Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon
- First useful test of general mental ability in 1905
- Mental age: indicated that the child displayed the mental ability typical of a child of that chronological (actual) age
Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale
- Lewis Terman at Stanford
- Major revision of the Simon-Binet
- Intelligence Quotient (IQ)
- A child’s mental age divided by chronological age, multiplied by 100
- IQ = (Mental Age/Chronological Age) x 100
Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)
- David Wechsler
- Less dependence on verbal ability and more nonverbal reasoning
- No longer using an actual quotient for IQ, instead relying on the normal distribution
- Ex: Block design (give person blocks and tell them to build the image on a picture)
Who came up with first individual mental age test?
-Binet and Simon with Binet-Simon Scale
What type of test is most commonly used today?
- WAIS (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale)
- David Wechsler
Normal Distribution
- Symmetrical, bell-shaped curve that represents the pattern in which many characteristics are dispersed in the population
- Standard Deviation (SD): a statistical index of variability in a data distribution
- Deviation IQ:
- Raw scores are translated into deviational IQ scores that locate respondents precisely within the normal distribution
- For IQ scores, mean is 100 and 1 standard deviation is 15
- Percentile Score: indicates the percentage of people who score at or below the score one has obtained
- People with mean (average 100 score), they’re at the 50%
Reliability
- Refers to the measurement consistency of a test (answers “Are the test results consistent?”)
- A reliable rest yields similar scores when repeated
- If correlation was .10, something’s off and it’s not reliable
- Use a correlation coefficient to test reliability, usually between two administrations of the test on the same person
- Acceptable reliability coefficients are around .70 and up, always positive
-IQ scores are exceptionally reliable (around .90)
Validity
- Refers to the ability of the test to measure what it was designed to measure
- Ex: online IQ tests are NOT valid
- Intelligence tests were originally designed to relate to school performance
- Have good “construct validity” with the intelligence necessary to do academic work
- But what about other kinds of intelligence? WAIS is trying to get at other types of intelligence
Heredity Influence on Intelligence
- Twin studies:
- Comparing identical twins to fraternal twins
- Supported the notion that intelligence is inherited
- Adoption studies:
- Looking at the correlation between biological parents and adopted children
- Supports that there is some measureable similarity between adopted children and their biological parents
-IQ is highly heritable (explained in “heritability estimates” card)
Heritability Estimates?
- Heritability Ratio: an estimate of the proportion of trait variability in a population that is determined by variations in genetic inheritance; looks at how much is inherited
- Experts estimate as high as 80% for IQ (so only 20% of the variation in intelligence would be based on environment) (IQ is highly heritable)
- Some estimate as low as 40% for IQ
- The current consensus is 50%
- There is some ambiguity with this
Limitations of heritability Estimates?
-Based on studies of trait variability within a specific group and cannot be applied meaningfully to individuals
- Heritability can fluctuate over the lifespan (THIS IS THE FACT SHE FINDS MOST IMPORTANT AND WANTS US TO KNOW)
- Kids more susceptible to environmental influence on IQ
- Heritability can vary from one group to the next
- Poverty can have negative environmental influence that can suppress the effect of heritability
Environmental Influence on Intelligence
- Adoption studies:
- Adopted children show some resemblance to their adopted parents in IQ (adopted parents are shaping the environment)
- Siblings reared together have more similarity than siblings reared apart because of shared environment (even true for identical twins)
- This suggests some influence of environment causing those differences
- Entirely unrelated siblings raised in the same home (environment) show a significant resemblance in IQ
The Interaction of Heredity and Environment
- Not “which one is it?” but instead “how they interact?
- It’s an interaction between the two!
- Heredity may set certain limits while environment determines where someone falls within those limits
- Reaction range refers to these genetically determined limits on IQ (and other traits)
What is development? Stages?
-It’s a sequence of age-related changes that occur as a person progresses from conception to death
- Prenatal
- Childhood
- Adolescence
- Emerging Adulthood (where we are right now)
- Adulthood
-Start from conception (time you’re conceived)
Prenatal Development. And order of prenatal development?
- Prenatal Period: extends from conception to birth, usually encompassing 9 months of pregnancy
- Some can come slightly before/after 9 months
- Stages?
- Germinal
- Embryonic
- Fetal
Germinal Stage?
- 0 to 2 weeks
- Fertilization
- Zygote is created
- Zygote becomes a mass of multiplying cells
- Implantation
- Placenta begins to form
Placenta?
Structure that allows oxygen and nutrients to pass into the fetus from the mother’s bloodstream and bodily wastes to pass out to the mother
-Whatever mom is taking in, so is the baby