General Psychology Exam 2 - Rutgers Prof. Larry Jacobs

Learning

A relatively permanent change in behavior due to experience; the process of acquiring knowledge, skills, attitudes, or values, through our experience, research, or teaching, that causes a change of behavior that is measurable

Stimulus-Response Psychology

Explains behavior in terms of how each stimulus triggers a response (or how we respond to a stimulus)

Stimulus

An incentive, a motive, something to stimulate

Determinism

The belief that your future is fixed or determined either by what you have genetically inherited or by your social environment

Ivan Pavlov

Founder of Classical Conditioning (Dog experiment)

Pavlov's Dog Experiment

Dog was conditioned to salivate when a bell was rung, which originally signaled that it was time to eat (learned the association between the bell and food)

Habituation

A decrease in response to a stimulus after repeated presentations

Unconditioned Stimulus (US)

A stimulus that evokes an unconditioned response without any prior conditioning (no learning needed for the response to occur)

Unconditioned Response (UR)

An unlearned reaction/response to a unconditioned stimulus that occurs without prior conditioning

Conditioned Stimulus (CS)

A previously neutral stimulus that has, through conditioning, acquired the capacity to evoke a conditioned response

Conditioned Response (CR)

A learned reaction to a conditioned stimulus that occurs because of prior conditioning

Acquisition

The process that establishes or strengthens a conditioned response; when an organism learns something new, it adds it to its knowledge

Extinction

To extinguish a classically conditioned response; a gradual weakening and eventual disappearance of the CR tendency

Spontaneous Recovery

Sometimes there will be a reappearance of a response that had been extinguished. The response seems to reappear out of nowhere

Stimulus Generalization

A response to a specific stimulus becomes associated to other stimuli and now occurs to those other similar stimuli

Stimulus Discrimination

Learning to respond to one stimulus and not another. Thus, an organism becomes conditioned to respond to a specific stimulus and not to other stimuli

Learning Curve

A graph of the changes in behavior that occur over successive trials of an experiment

Edward Thorndike

Created learning curves, studied operant conditioning with puzzle boxes and animals; Founder of the Law of Effect

Puzzle Box

small chamber that animals would have to figure out how to escape from

Operant Conditioning

(Instrumental Conditioning) Involves changing behavior by following responses with reinforcements; Increasing a behavior by following it with a reward, or decreasing a behavior by following it with punishment

The Law of Effect

Behaviors that are followed by pleasant consequences will be strengthened, and will be more likely to occur in the future. Behaviors that are followed by unpleasant consequences will be weakened, and will be less likely to be repeated in the future

BF Skinner

Studied operant conditioning with 'The Operant Chamber' or 'Skinner Box'

Operant Chamber/Skinner Box

Skinner studied operant conditioning in rats and pigeons by placing them in a box that came with a bar or key that an animal manipulated to obtain a reinforcer like food or water; Trained by shaping

Shaping

A reinforcement technique that is used to teach animals or people behaviors that they have never performed before

Positive Reinforcement

The presentation of an event that strengthens or increases the likelihood of an event; Occurs when an event is presented as a consequence of a stimulus and the behavior increases

Passive Avoidance/Negative Reinforcement

In response to punishment, the organism avoids the outcome by being passive; Occurs when the rate of a behavior increases because an aversive event or stimulus is removed or prevented from happening

Chaining Behavior

An operant conditioning method in which sequential behaviors are reinforced by opportunities to engage in the next one; Forward chaining breaks a task down into understandable and manageable steps

Reinforcer

Something that increases the likelihood of the preceding response

Primary Reinforcers

Unlearned, innate, Biological (like food, drink and pleasure)

Secondary Reinforcers

Learned association with primary reinforcers (like money pays for primary reinforcers or learning good grades gets parents' approval)

Conditioned Taste Aversion

You learn to avoid foods, especially unfamiliar foods, if you become ill afterwards; Associate eating something with getting sick

Albert Bandura

Founder of Observational Learning

Social-Learning Approach

We learn many behaviors because we attempt them for the first time

Observational Learning

An animal learns by watching others (Bobo clown doll experiment)

Memory

A process by which we store, save, and recall information

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Sought to examine the concept of memory from a purely scientific standpoint; Studied his own ability to memorize new material

Von Resteroff Effect

The tendency of people to remember unusual information than more common items; distinctive or unusual information is easier to retain

Recall (Free Recall)

Information must be produced with little to no hint provided; A memory task in which the individual must reproduce material from memory without cue; The simplest method for the tester but most difficult for person being tested

Cued Recall

Gives significant hints about the correct answer (fill-in-the-blank)

Recognition

Requires the person being tested to identify the correct item from a list of choices (multiple choice); A memory task in which the individual indicates whether presented information has been experienced previously

Saving (Relearning) Method

Compares the speed the new material is learned to the speed of relearning of old material; It measures whether someone relearns faster than he or she learned the first time

Explicit Memory

Memory that we are aware we are using; Your ability to retain informations that you've put real effort into learning

Implicit (Indirect) Memory

Any experience that influences us without our awareness; Your ability to remember information that you did not deliberately try to learn, that you did not know exists

Declarative Memory

The ability to state a fact, information, names, dates, faces; Fact Memory; It stores why, how, when, where, what, who

Procedural Memory

Memory of how to do something; Skills Memory; It's conditioned responses like writing, riding a bike, typing; Performing actions

Semantic

Dealing with principles of knowledge; Like mental dictionary; Stores meanings of words

Episodic

Containing events and details of life history; Autobiography of thoughts, things that happened to us, retention of info about what happened to you, what you did on your birthday

Sensory Memory

The first stage of memory processing; a combination of memory and perception; lasts less than a second; registers perception of the moment called "now"

Short-term (working) Memory

Attention moves information from the sensory store to short-term memory; limited capacity memory of information for 30 seconds (something said in class and friends asks you to repeat it immediately)

Long-term Memory

A relatively permanent storage of mostly meaningful information, including your birthday, address, social security number, and parent's names

Chunking

Grouping or packing information into units, making information more manageable to remember

Encoding, Storage, and Retrieval

3 Mental Operations Required for Memory

Primary Effect

We tend to remember best that which comes first; The tendency to remember the beginning of a list

Recency Effect

Second best that which comes last; The tendency to remember the items at the end of the list

SPAR Method

The best strategy for anyone who needs to learn a lot of material is to space out the study sessions; study and review with substantial intervals between sessions

Mnemonic Device

Any memory aid that is based on encoding each item in a special way; use acronyms, strategies, or tricks for improving memory

Reconstruction

When remembering an event, you start with details you remember clearly and fill in the gaps; we reconstruct based on serving memories combined with expectations

Proactive Interference

Retaining old materials makes it hard to recall new material

Retroactive Interference

Learning new material makes it hard to recall old material

Hindsight Bias

The tendency to mold our recollection of the past to how events later turned out ("I knew that would happen")

Memory for Traumatic Events

Sigmund Freud believed it was possible to repress a painful memory, motivation, or emotion, to move it from the conscious to the unconscious mind

False Memory

A report that an individual believes to be a memory but actually never happened; Memories may or may not be reliable

Repressed Memory

Memory of a traumatic event that is made unavailable for recall

Flashbulb Memory

A clear moment of an emotionally significant moment or event; Long-lasting, deep memories in response to traumatic events (Where were you on 9/11?)

Amnesia

A severe loss or deterioration of memory; A memory disorder that is caused by brain damage or a traumatic event

Anterograde Amnesia

A disorder that results in the loss of memory after an injury; unable to store new memories

Retrograde Amnesia

A disorder that results in the loss of memory prior to an injury; Ex: man could not remember many events that occurred between 1 and 3 years before his surgery

Korsakoff's Syndrome

A degenerative memory disorder caused by chronic alcoholism and vitamin deficiency; Symptoms include amnesia, confabulation, lack of insight and apathy

Confabulation

Wild guessing mixed in with correct information in an effort to hide memory gaps; Patients have pre-frontal cortex damage in brain; Fills in gaps or reconstructs their memory (similar to false memory)

Dementia

Condition of a slow decline in memory, problem solving ability, learning ability, and judgment

Alzheimer's Disease

A degenerative brain disease where the brain starts wearing down; nerve cell death in parts of brain for memory; Symptoms include repeating questions, forgetting how to do simple tasks, forgetting who you are and where you are

Cognition

Thinking, Acquiring and Managing Knowledge

Cognitive Psychologists

Study how people think and acquire knowledge, know what they know, and how they solve problems and imagine

Stroop Test

A psychological test of our mental (attentional) vitality and flexibility; Stroop effect is phenomenon where it is difficult to name colors in which words are written, instead of reading the words themselves

Directed Attention

You have to manage your attention, inhibit or stop one response in order to say or do something else

Change Blindness

People believe they remember everything in a scene they have recently scanned; Failing to notice changes in the environment, but they frequently fail to detect changes in parts of a scene upon viewing it again (Derren Brown videos)

Inattentional Blindness

Failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere; Ex: failing to notice moon-walking bear in basketball passing video

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

ADD is characterized by easy distraction, impulsiveness, moodiness, and inability to follow through on plans; When these symptoms include noticeable fidgetiness, it is ADHD

Categorization

The formation of categories or concepts is one of the primary ways that we organize information about our world

Prototypes

Ways of describing a category; A familiar or typical example of a category; We decide whether or not an object belongs in a category by determining how well it resembles the prototypical members of that category

1) Understanding the Problem

2) Devising A Plan

3) Carrying out the Plan (Testing Hypothesis)

4) Looking Back & Checking the Result

4 Phases of Problem Solving

Algorithms

A mechanical, repetitive, step-by-step procedure for arriving at the solution to a problem; Often used for mathematical problems

Heuristics

Used for less well-defined problems; Strategies for simplifying a problem or guiding an investigation

Insight

Involves a sudden novel realization of a solution to a problem; Where we have no idea whether or not we would be able to solve the problem; Solutions often seem to be arrived at suddenly

Representative Heuristics

If an item resembles members of a particular category, we assume it belongs in that category; We often fail to consider the data; Ex: If something looks like a UFO, so you decide that it is

Availability Heuristics

We make decisions on how easy things come to our minds rather than judging how common something is; Ex: You remember more reports of airplane crashes, so you think air travel is more dangerous, despite being one of the safest form of travel

Metacognition

Thinking about thinking; When you think about your thoughts; When you reflect on why you are so nervous before an exam, you are using your conscious awareness to examine your own thought processes

Overconfidence

We believe our answers are more accurate than they actually are

Premature Commitment to a Hypothesis

Can lead us to fail to consider other plausible possibilities and fail to arrive at a correct answer

Functional Fixedness

The tendency to adhere to a single, narrow approach to a problem or a single way to use an item, leading to failure or incorrect conclusions

Fixation [problem solving]

An inability to see a problem from a fresh perspective; this impedes problem solving; example of functional fixedness

Framing

the way a question is presented can influence the way in which we answer it; used especially in marketing of certain products

Belief Perseverance Phenomenon

The tendency to cling to our beliefs in the face of contrary evidence

Sunk Cost Effect

Our tendency to do something that we'd otherwise choose not to do, just because we spent the money to do it

Noam Chomsky

What linguist called the quality of language transformational grammar?

Animal Languages

Comprised of prepackaged messages

Human Languages

Communicate a deep structure, the intended meaning of the words

Broca's Area

Vital for using and understanding grammatical devices - prepositions, conjunctions, prefixes, suffixes; production of coherent speech

Wernicke's Area

Important for naming objects and comprehending language; Involved in speech processing and understanding language

Aphasias

A term for various inabilities to process or use language (damage to broca's or wernicke's area)