University of Pittsburgh: Intro to Psychology Exam 2

Classical Conditioning

When a neutral stimulus produces a response after being paired with a stimulus that naturally produces a response

first studied by Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Pavlov's experiment

Unconditioned stimulus (US)

Something that reliably produces a naturally occurring reaction in an organism

Unconditioned response (UR)

A reflexive reaction the is reliably produced by an unconditioned stimulus

Conditioned stimulus (CS)

A stimulus that is initially neutral and produces no reliable response in an organism

Conditioned response (CR)

A reaction that resembles an unconditioned response but is produced by a conditioned stimulus

Second-order conditioning

Conditioning where the US is a stimulus that acquired its ability to produce learning from an earlier procedure in which it was used as a CS

Operant conditioning

A type of learning in which the consequences of an organism's behavior determine wether it will be repeated in the future

Edward thorndike (1874-1949) focused on instrumental behaviors and created a puzzle box to show the law of effect

Negative reinforcement

Something is taken away that increases the likelihood of behavior being repeated

Taking bad things from an organism

Examples: removing pain, toothache, hunger

**If you don't force your son to eat his vegetables after he cleans his room

Positive reinforcement

Something is given that increases the likelihood of the behavior being repeated

Bringing good things to an organism

Examples: Money, Praise, Food

**If you give your daughter candy after she cleans her room

Negative punishment

Something is taken that decreases the likelihood of the behavior being repeated

**If you take away your son's TV privileges if he doesn't clean his room

Positive punishment

Something is given to decreases the likelihood of the behavior being repeated

**If you yell at your daughter if she doesn't clean his room

Fixed ratio reinforcement (FR)

Reinforcement is delivered after a specific number of responses have been made

**You are paid each time you complete a chore

Fixed interval reinforcement (FI)

Reinforcements are presented at fixed time periods, provided the appropriate response is made

**when quizzes are scheduled at fixed intervals, students study only when the quiz is to be administered (the grade is the reinforcer)

This leads to the lowest rate of response

Variable ratio reinforcement (VR)

The delivery of reinforcement is based on a particular number of responses

**A slot machine pays off an average of every few pulls, but you never know which pull will pay

this leads to the highest rate of response

Variable interval reinforcement (VI)

Behavior is reinforced based on an average time that has expired since the last reinforcement

**You listen to the radio to hear your favorite song. you do not know when you will hear it

Social Learning theory/Bandura

Albert Bandura (1925-) studied aggressive observational learning using the Bobo doll experiment

Social influence on learning - observation and imitation instead of reinforcement

Social cognitive theory-

Observational

(vicarious) Learning

Modeling

Imitation

Memory: encoding

The process by which we transform what we perceive, think, or feel into an enduring memory

Memory: storage

The process of maintaining information in memory over time

Memory: retrieval

The process of bringing to mind information that has been previously encoded and stored

Elaborate encoding

The process of actively relating new information to knowledge that is already in memory

Visual encoding

The process of storing new information by converting it into mental pictures

Organizational encoding

The process of categorizing information according to the relationships among a series of items

Sensory Memory

Storage that holds sensory information for a few seconds or less

Iconic memory

A fast-decaying store of visual information

Echoic memory

A fast-decaying store of auditory information

Short-term memory (STM)

Also called working memory; Storage that holds non-sensory information for more than a few seconds but less than a minute; can hold about 7 items

Working memory

Active maintenance of information in STM

Chunking

Combining small pieces on information into larger clusters that are more easily held by STM

Rehearsal

The process of keeping information in STM by mentally repeating it

Long-term memory (LTM)

Storage that holds information for hours, day, weeks, months, or years; no known capacity

Storage

The process of maintaining information in memory over time

Consolidation

The process by which memories become stable in the brain

Brain regions associated with long-term memory

Hippocampus: critical as an "index" for long-term memory storage

Types on retrieval cues

Retrieval cues: External information that helps bring stored information to mind

State dependent retrieval: the tendency for information to be better recalled when the person is in the same state during encoding and retrieval

Transfer-appropriate processing: memory is likely to transfer from one situation to another when the encoding context of the situations match

Types of interferences

Retroactive: Situations in which information learned later impairs memory for information acquired earlier

Proactive: Situations in which information learned earlier impairs memory for information acquired later

Types of amnesia

Anterograde amnesia: The inability to transfer new information from the short-term store into the long-term store

Retrograde amnesia: The inability to retrieve information that was acquired before a particular date, usually the date of an injury or operation

Forms of long-term memory

Explicit (semantic and episodic) and implicit (procedural and priming)

Explicit memory

The act of consciously or intentionally retrieving past experiences

Explicit memory: Semantic

A network of associated facts and concepts that make up our general knowledge of the world

Explicit memory: Episodic

The collection of past personal experiences that occurred at a particular time and place

Also involves images imagining the future

7 sins of memory

Transience, Absentmindedness, Blocking, memory misattribution, Suggestibility, Bias, Persistence

Implicit memory: Priming

An enhanced ability to think of a stimulus as a result of a recent exposure to the stimulus; less cortical activation (perceptual and conceptual priming)

Implicit memory: Procedural

The gradual acquisition of skills as a result of practice; or "knowing how" to do things

Implicit memory

The influence of past experiences on later behavior, even without an effort to remember them or an awareness of the recollection

Transience

Forgetting what occurs with the passage of time

Curve of forgetting: involves a switch from specific to more gradual memories; memory fades more quickly at first, then slowly over time

Retroactive interference: Situations in which information learned later impairs memory for information acquired earlier

Proactive interference: Situations in which information learned earlier impairs memory for information acquired later

Absentmindnesses

A lapse in attention that results in memory failure

Blocking

A failure to retrieve information that is available in memory even though you are tying to produce it (tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon)

Memory misattribution

Assigning a recollection or an idea to the wrong source

Source memory: recall of when, where, and how information was acquired

False recognition: a feeling of familiarity about something that hasn't been encountered before

Brain activation pattern

Suggestibility

The tendency to incorporate misleading information from external sources into personal recollections

False-memory syndrome: individuals claim to recover memories of traumatic events that they had suppressed for years

Bias

The distorting influences of present knowledge, beliefs, and feelings on recollection of previous experiences

Consistency bias: The tendency to reconstruct the past to fit the present

Change bias: The tendency to exaggerate differences between what we feel or believe now and what we felt or believed in the past

Egocentric bias: The tendency to exaggerate change between present and past in order to make ourselves look good in retrospect

Persistance

The intrusive recollection of events that we wish to forget

Language

A system for communicating with others usng signals that are combined according to rules of grammar and to convey meaning

Human language is more complex, involves words representing intangible things, and is used to think and conceptualize different than other animal species)

Grammar

A set of rules that specify how the units of language can be combined to produce meaningful messages

Phoneme

The smallest unit of a sound that is recognizable as speech rather than random noise

Morpheme

The smallest meaningful units of language

Syntactical rules

A set of rules that indicate how words can be combined to form phrases

Deep structure vs. surface structure

Deep structure is the meaning of a sentence, whereas surface structure is how a sentence is

Language development for infants

There are three characteristics of language development:

1. Children learn language at an astonishing rate.

2. Children make few errors while learning to speak.

3. Children's passive mastery develops faster than their active mastery.

Fast mapping

The fact that children can map a word onto an underlying concept after only a single exposure

Babbling

Telegraphic speech

Speech that is devoid of function morphemes and consists mostly of content words

Overgeneralizations

speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular

"We buyed it"

"I just about felled"

"Feets"

"Goed"

Sing-->singed (sang)

Theories of language development: Behaviorist

Behaviorist explanations state that language is learned through operant conditioning and imitation, although:

Parents spend little time teaching language, children generate more than simply what they hear, and the errors made cannot be explained through conditioning or imitation

Theories of language development: Nativist

Nativist explanations argue that language is innate; more evidence converges on this theory

Nativist theory: language development is best explained as an innate biological capacity

Theories of language development: Interactionalist

Interactionist explanations argue that social interactions play a crucial role in language

Social experience interacts with innate, biological language abilities

Linguistic relatively hyphothesis

The proposal that language shapes the nature of thought

Originated by Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941)

Concept

A mental representation the groups or categories shared features of related objects, events, or stimuli

Family resenblance theory

Members of a category have features that appear to be characteristic of category members but may not be possessed by every member

Prototype theory

People make category judgements by comparing new instances to the caetgorys prototype

Exemplar theory

People make category judgement by comparing a new instance with stored memories for other instances of that category

Rational choice theory

View that we make decisions by determining how likely something is to happen, judging the value of the outcome, then multiplying by two

Heuristics

A fast and effective strategy that may facilitate decision making but does not guarantee that a solution will be reached

Availability bias

Items that are more readily available in memory are judged as having occurred more frequently

Alghorithm

A well-defined sequence of procedures or rules that guarantees a solution to a problem

Conjunction fallacy

When people think that two events are more likely to occur together than either individual event

Representativeness hueristic

Making a probability judgement by comparing an object or event to a prototype of the object or event

Framing effects

When people give different answers to the same problem depending on how that problem is phrased

Problem-solving

Means-end analysis: A process of searching for the means or steps to reduce the differences between the current situation and the desired goal

Analogical problem solving: Solving a problem by finding a similar problem with a known solution and applying that solution to the current problem

Functional fixedness

The tendency to perceive the functions of objects as fixed