Comprehensive Lecture Review: Learning, Memory, and Attention

Flashcards covering classical and operant conditioning schedules, observational learning, cognitive models of memory (Atkinson-Shiffrin, Baddeley & Hitch), amnesia case studies (H.M. and Clive Wearing), and visual attentional mechanisms.

Fixed Ratio (FR) Schedule

An operant reinforcement schedule in which a reward is delivered only after a specific, unvarying number of target behaviors are performed, such as receiving $\$5$ for every $3$ parts completed on an assembly line.

Variable Ratio (VR) Schedule

An operant conditioning schedule where reinforcement is delivered after an unpredictable, random number of responses (exemplified by slot machines), which produces high, persistent response rates resistant to extinction.

Fixed Interval (FI) Schedule

A schedule of reinforcement where the first response is rewarded only after a set, predictable amount of time has elapsed, such as an in-hospital patient-controlled analgesia (pain pump) that delivers medication at intervals of $6\,\text{hours}$.

Variable Interval (VI) Schedule

An operant schedule in which reinforcement is provided following unpredictable, random time intervals regardless of response frequency, exemplified by receiving incoming text messages.

Negative Reinforcement

The removal or avoidance of an aversive stimulus following a target response to increase the future probability of that behavior, such as fastening a seatbelt to terminate an annoying chime.

Positive Punishment

The addition or administration of an unpleasant, aversive consequence following an undesirable behavior to decrease that behavior's occurrence, such as historically washing a child's mouth out with soap for using vulgar language.

Negative Punishment

The removal of a pleasant, rewarding stimulus following an unwanted behavior to decrease the likelihood of that behavior, such as grounding an adolescent or revoking car privileges.

Shaping (Successive Approximations)

An operant procedure of establishing a novel, non-hardwired behavior by selectively reinforcing step-by-step actions that get progressively closer to the terminal target behavior, such as training a rat to press a lever or using a Procter & Gamble Pampers potty chart.

Extinction and Spontaneous Recovery

The temporary suppression—rather than permanent reversal—of a conditioned response when reinforcement ceases, demonstrated when the extinguished response reappears after a rest period.

Latent Learning

Learning demonstrated by Edward Tolman that occurs without immediate reinforcement or observable behavioral changes at the time of exposure, remaining hidden until motivation or incentives are introduced.

Cognitive Map

An internal, spatial mental layout of an environment acquired through latent learning and exploration, allowing animals in a T-maze to navigate directly to food even when started from novel orientations.

Insight Learning

A sudden, spontaneous emergence of a solution into conscious awareness without stepwise trial-and-error conditioning, demonstrated by Josep Call's study where chimpanzees solved a puzzle by spitting water into a tube to float a peanut.

Bobo Doll Experiment

Albert Bandura's foundational study demonstrating observational learning, showing that children exposed to an aggressive adult model pummeling an inflatable clown doll imitated those novel behaviors and displayed unmodeled aggression, such as picking up guns.

Catharsis Hypothesis (Freud)

Sigmund Freud's proposition that releasing or viewing aggressive actions depletes aggressive energy; refuted by modern psychological research showing that acting on or observing aggression actually increases aggressive drives.

Bandura's Four Components of Observational Learning

The sequence required for modeling: Attention and Memory/Retention during the acquisition stage, followed by Reproducibility and Motivation (identified by Bandura as the most critical factor) during the performance stage.

Biological Preparedness (Limits of Modeling)

The evolutionary predisposition that constrains observational learning, shown when captive capuchin monkeys readily acquired a fear response from watching wild capuchins react to snakes, but failed to learn fear when the video was spliced to show a fear reaction to flowers.

Mirror Neurons

Specialized neurons located in areas such as the parietal cortex that fire both when an individual executes a specific motor action and when they observe another individual performing that same action, hypothesized to underpin observational learning, empathy, and vicarious disgust.

Henry Molaison (H.M.)

A landmark neurosurgical patient whose bilateral medial temporal lobe resection in $1953$ to control seizures removed his hippocampi, leaving him with intact short-term memory of approximately $30\,\text{seconds}$ but a complete inability to consolidate new long-term declarative memories.

The Cognitive Revolution

A late-$1950\text{s}$ intellectual shift originating during a conference in Boston where approximately $400$ researchers rejected strict behavioral 'black box' stimulus-response models to investigate internal mental information processing.

Free Recall

A memory retrieval assessment where subjects must generate stored information without prompts, making it the most difficult test format for test-takers and the easiest to construct for examiners.

Cued Recall

A memory testing method where the subject is provided with specific cues or hints (such as short-answer questions) to aid the retrieval of target information from storage.

Recognition Test

A retrieval task (exemplified by multiple-choice exams) where participants merely identify previously encountered material from among presented options; this represents the easiest test format for students and the hardest to write for instructors.

Savings Effect

A quantitative measure of memory retention discovered by Hermann Ebbinghaus, defined as the reduction in time or number of practice trials required to relearn previously mastered nonsense syllables compared to original learning.

Sensory Memory

The initial, brief buffer in the Atkinson-Shiffrin model that holds an unprocessed, low-resolution replica of environmental stimuli for a few milliseconds with an exceptionally high capacity.

Iconic and Echoic Memory

The subcomponents of sensory memory dedicated to visual stimuli (iconic memory) and auditory stimuli (echoic memory), responsible for continuous perceptual phenomena like motion continuity and sparkler trails.

Partial Report Technique

George Sperling's experimental paradigm in which an auditory tone (high, medium, or low frequency) presented immediately after a brief display of $12$ items cued subjects to report a single row, proving that sensory memory possesses a vast capacity that rapidly decays during full report.

'Say What?' Phenomenon

An everyday experience demonstrating echoic memory, where an individual initially believes they did not register a spoken question, yet answers accurately before the speaker repeats it because the auditory trace persisted long enough to be retrieved.

Working Memory Model (Baddeley and Hitch)

A dynamic multi-component system that actively manipulates and maintains information online for roughly $30\,\text{seconds}$, replacing the passive short-term memory store proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin.

Episodic Buffer

The 'workbench' component of Baddeley and Hitch's working memory model where multi-modal representations are integrated, temporarily held, and modified before being consolidated into or retrieved from long-term memory.

Central Executive

The attentional project manager of working memory that allocates cognitive resources, manages focus, and coordinates activity between the visuospatial sketchpad, phonological loop, and episodic buffer.

Alvarez and Cavanagh Working Memory Findings

Research proving that working memory capacity is constrained by stimulus detail and visual complexity (yielding capacities around $4.5$ for simple colored squares, but significantly fewer items for complex visual symbols like kanji) rather than a rigid item count.

Articulatory Suppression

The disruption of phonological loop retention caused by concurrent verbalization or distracting auditory input (such as counting backwards or listening to spoken lyrics), leading to trace loss in working memory.

Chunking

The cognitive process of recoding individual pieces of information into larger, cohesive units of meaning (such as historical dates or sports statistics), allowing an individual to fit extensive data within the working memory limit of $7 \pm 2$ units.

Korsakoff's Disease

A severe neurological disorder caused by a dietary deficiency in thiamine (vitamin $B_1$)—frequently associated with chronic severe alcoholism—that damages the pathways linking the hippocampus to the brain and causes profound anterograde amnesia.

Equipotentiality

The principle stating that long-term memories are not localized to a single brain structure, but rather are distributed across cortical and subcortical networks depending on memory modality.

Synaptic Consolidation (Long-Term Potentiation)

The rapid strengthening of synaptic connections through repetitive stimulation, characterized by presynaptic and postsynaptic structural modifications and heightened communication efficiency between neurons.

Systems (Cortical) Consolidation

The prolonged biological reorganization of long-term memories across neocortical regions—a process taking up to $2\,\text{years}$—after which memory retrieval becomes independent of the hippocampus.

Semantic Memory

A subtype of explicit/declarative long-term memory containing generalized factual knowledge, concepts, and rules (such as the Pythagorean theorem) divorced from personal autobiographical contexts.

Episodic Memory

A subtype of explicit/declarative memory that enables 'mental time travel' to personally experienced, autobiographical events situated in specific times and places, which is prone to progressive distortion.

Flashbulb Memory

An exceptionally vivid, emotionally charged episodic memory of learning about significant societal events (such as the assassination of JFK or Martin Luther King Jr.); accurate for approximately $6\,\text{months}$, but eventually prone to decay and distortion.

Infantile (Childhood) Amnesia

The typical inability of adults to retrieve episodic autobiographical memories from before age $3$ to $4$ (averaging ages $5$ to $6$), largely attributed to the absence of elaborative language abilities, which do not mature until ages $3$ to $4$.

Implicit (Nondeclarative) Memory

Long-term memories that influence behavior without conscious awareness or intentional recollection, encompassing motor habits (taking roughly $30\,\text{days}$ to establish), classical conditioning, priming, and procedural skills.

Incidental Learning (Hyde and Jenkins)

The acquisition of knowledge without conscious intent to memorize, demonstrated when participants rating word pleasantness retained just as many words on a surprise recall test as subjects intentionally instructed to study them.

Clive Wearing

An accomplished British conductor who contracted viral encephalitis that produced severe damage to his limbic system and hippocampus, leaving him with a memory span under $30\,\text{seconds}$ while preserving his procedural memory to speak fluently and play piano.

Elizabeth Loftus's Misinformation Effect

A research paradigm demonstrating memory malleability, shown when evaluating a fabricated Disneyland advertisement induced participants to form vivid, false episodic memories of meeting Warner Brothers' Bugs Bunny at Disneyland.

Dichotic Listening and Shadowing Task

An attentional experiment where different auditory messages are presented simultaneously to each ear via headphones, requiring the subject to repeat aloud ('shadow') the input from one ear while ignoring the unattended stream.

Spotlight Theory of Attention

A visual attention model stating that attention acts as an adjustable beam focused on a target area, requiring distinct operations to engage, disengage, and re-engage across spatial coordinates or stimuli.

Perceptual Load Theory

An attentional framework reconciling filter models: when processing high-load, complex perceptual tasks, resources are exhausted, triggering early selection filtering; when perceptual load is low, leftover capacity allows late selection filtering.

Inattentional Blindness

A failure to perceive an unexpected, fully visible stimulus when attention is heavily absorbed by another task, demonstrated when approximately $85\%$ of observers counting basketball passes miss a person in a gorilla suit walking across the screen.

Attentional Blink

The brief temporal deficit in detecting a second target stimulus presented in rapid serial visual presentation if it occurs immediately after an initial target, caused by the time required to disengage and reallocate attentional resources.

Change Blindness

The inability to detect substantial visual changes across successive scenes or interruptions, illustrated in Dan Simons and Chris Chabris's Harvard counter experiment where $75\%$ of subjects failed to notice the experimenter handing them a form had been swapped.

Second-Order Conditioning

A classical conditioning procedure where a previously established conditioned stimulus ($CS_1$, such as a bell) is paired with a novel neutral stimulus (such as a light) until the new stimulus ($CS_2$) elicits the conditioned response without ever being paired directly with the unconditioned stimulus.