Psychology Notes

Chapters - Textbook 5, 6, 7, & 8

Sensation v. Perception

Sensation: The biological process occurring when cells at the periphery of the body detect physical stimuli

Perception: The biological process occurring when systems in the brain process sensory signals and produce awareness of sensory inputs

Sensation and Perception to Psychological Events

Once physical stimuli are encountered, the important part is interpreting how that translates to a psychological experience.

Transduction: A biological process in which physical stimuli activate cells in the nervous system, which then send nerve impulses to the brain, where processing gives rise to perceptual and sensory experience

(Though critical, transduction is not the only thing that contributes to a person’s sensory experience, other things like the person’s state of mind or the environment in which it occurs are important too)

Receptors: Nervous system cells that are sensitive to specific types of physical stimulation from the environment and send signals to the brain when stimulated

Ex. photoreceptors are in the eye and sensitive to light

Systems of Perception

• The visual system: enables you perceive information that comes in the form of light

• The auditory system: enables you to ge information in the form of sound waves

• The gustatory system: sensitive to chemical substances provides the sense of taste

• The olfactory system: detects airborne chemical substances and provides the sense of smell

• The haptic system: a way to gain information about objects by touching them

• The kinesthetic system: detects information about the location of body parts

VAGOHK - very ancient gorillas own Hong Kong

Human Vision

• Reality is real and it exists as a thing

• Lots of confusion between our perception of the world and reality

Naive Realism - we think that what we perceive is reality

• Reality is filtered through our visual system

• Human visuals are built to detect change

Parts of the Eye

The cornea focuses light, which passes through the pupil, whose size is controlled by the iris. The lens further focuses incoming light, which is projected onto the retina, which contains two types of photoreceptors: rods and cones. The retina picks up most of its visual information during visual fixations, which occur between saccades. Rods and cones send information via ganglion cells, which form the optic nerve. These visual signals cross at the optic chiasm. After crossing, signals reach the lateral geniculate nucleus, which perform “computations” on these signals.

Seeing Color

Opponent process - red green, blue yellow

The Visual System

The visual system provides information in four ways

1. Distance and size

2. Motion

3. Shape

4. Brightness and color

Distance and Size

Contributing to the brain’s understanding of distance and size is depth perception

Depth perception: The perception of distance

Cues to Depth

Motion

This information is of two types: relating to (1) the movement of objects in the environment (with respect to you, who are not moving), and (2) your own movement through an environment (which is stationary)

Motion parallax - the fact that the stuff in the back is moving slowly and the stuff in the front is going by very quickly helps us evaluate depth

Perception of Shape

There are several examples of this. One is that in the context of the numbers 12 and 14, a vertical line next to a curved letter “m” shape on its side looks like the number 13. In the context of letters, that same shape looks like a B. Another example concerns cultural contexts. As seen in this chapter’s Cultural Opportunities, Japanese students, raised in a culture that values holistic thinking, were better at reproducing the relative (versus absolute) length of a line. North American students, raised in a culture that values analytic thinking, showed the opposite pattern of perception.

Brightness and JND

A just noticeable difference’s (JND’s) value depends on how much light is already in the environment. If a lot of light is present, then a larger change in illumination is needed for us to notice the change in brightness.

Color and Environment

The psychological experience of color is determined not only by the wavelength of light, but also by our ability to mentally compute how changes in illumination in the environment will affect perception; this ability is responsible for color constancy.

The Auditory System

The auditory system has four qualities

1. Loudness

2. Pitch

3. Timbre

4. Location

Timing

We use cues based on timing (how long it takes a sound to reach your right or left ear) and differences in pressure created by sound waves on our right and left ears. These cues can make right/left localization easy but can make front/back localization difficult. Up/down localization is made possible by the asymmetrical shape of the ear.

Auditory Recognition

Auditory recognition—that is, recognizing sounds—requires you to maintain a sound in short-term memory, to activate knowledge of sounds stored in long-term memory, and to compare the two (the incoming sound and the sound stored in memory).

Sound Waves and the Ear

The outer ear captures sound waves and directs them down the auditory canal. In the middle ear, motion of the eardrum causes motion in ossicles, which, in turn, creates activity in the inner ear. Transduction occurs in the cochlea, which contains auditory hair cells whose movement triggers neural impulses that travel via the auditory nerve to the brain’s auditory cortex, in the temporal lobe. Signals from the left ear reach the right side of the brain and vice versa. The auditory cortex is organized systematically according to pitch; similar sound wave frequencies are processed in neighboring areas. In addition, specialized regions of the auditory cortex process information about the location of sounds, the source of sounds, and vocalizations by members of one’s own species.

The Olfactory System

Humans can smell three things:

1. Food

2. Pheromones

3. Disease

Olfactory Receptors

Signals from the receptor cells (activated by odorants, pheromones, and disease-related molecules in the air) are sent to the olfactory bulbs, which send information to the olfactory cortex, where the processing of the signals that allow you to recognize smells is completed.

The Gustatory System

Humans can taste five different things:

1. Sweet

2. Salty

3. Bitter

4. Sour

5. Umami (Savory)

Localization and Hedonics

Even when two foods share a quality, such as saltiness, there are four other dimensions that can influence their taste. Hedonics refers to how much you like the taste. Localization is the perception of where within the mouth a taste is experienced. Onset/aftertaste describes whether a taste will linger or vanish. Intensity describes the strength of the gustatory experience. Two foods might both be salty, but one could have a much greater intensity of saltiness than the other and perhaps a longer aftertaste, too.

Flavor v. Taste

When you eat, some of the perceptual information you gather comes from taste and some of it comes from smell. The combination of two perceptual systems—gustation and olfaction—contributes to its flavor.

Gustatory Receptors

When taste receptors, bundled together in taste buds, are stimulated by food chemicals, they release neurotransmitters that begin the process of transmitting gustatory information to the brain. Signals from taste receptors travel along neural pathways to the brain stem and then to the gustatory cortex, which is highly connected to other regions of the brain. This means that taste perception is affected by other sensory inputs and the overall state of the body. As we saw in This Just In, five distinct regions of the cortex process each of the five types of gustatory signals: sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami.

The Haptic System

Acuity is the strength of the sensation. The greatest acuity is found at the fingers. The lowest is found at the shoulder, back, and areas of the leg.

Mass

We detect mass by holding objects and moving them around. Size influences judgments of weight; when given two objects of the same weight but different size, people judge the larger object to be lighter.

Cutaneous Receptors

Cutaneous receptors convert physical stimulation into nervous-system impulses, which send impulses that travel to your spinal cord and then to your brain.

The Kinesthetic System

Our sixth sense is the kinesthetic system, the perceptual system that delivers information about the orientation of your body and its various parts.

Pain

Nociceptors send electrical signals to the brain when activated by harmful stimuli, such as a cut or burn. Nociceptors send fast signals, which produce sudden, sharp pain, as well as slow signals, which produce prolonged, lingering, dull pain. According to the gate control theory of pain, the spinal cord contains a biological mechanism that acts like a gate. When it’s closed, pain signals can’t get past the spinal cord to the brain, so people don’t feel pain even though their nociceptors have fired.

Face Recognition

Across the course of evolution, the ability to recognize others would have been critical to survival, reproduction, and the survival of offspring. Natural selection thus would have favored the evolution of this ability.

Psychophysics

A branch of psychology that studies relations between physical stimuli and psychological reactions. Talks about the way in which we translate the physical into the psychological.

Gestalt principles - threshold (how much stimulus do we need to be able to detect something).

1. Absolute threshold - the difference between no experience of something and saying yes there's something there

2. Difference threshold - can we tell if there's a difference between one thing and another thing, the least amount of change necessary to notice something different, depends on the base stimulus

Weber’s Law - difference threshold, is a percentage change (weight for example, the difference threshold percentage is 2%, loudness requires 4.8% difference, brightness requires a 7.9% and saltiness requires an 8.3% difference) sensitivity varies across senses

Signal Detection Theory - the detection of a stimulus depends on both the intensity of the stimulus and the psychological state of the individual

Attention

Attention - bringing stimulus into conscious awareness, might be like a filter, might be like a spotlight

Dichotic listening task - one ear is unattended, sensory change gets through filters

Posner cueing test

Inattentional blindness - if we’re not attending to something we’re often unaware of it

Multitasking - experiments with cars and cell phones

Memory

Memory is the capacity to retain knowledge. Examples include experiences involving attitudes, personal goals, and perceptions of the type of person you are. Improvements in psychological well-being that result when people think about these experiences in a new way would not occur if they were unable to remember their attitudes, goals, and past experiences.

Sensory Memory

Sensory memory is an ability to retain information that is based on the functioning of sensory systems. Two types of sensory memory are iconic memory, which is sensory memory of visual images, and echoic memory, which is sensory memory for sound.

Short Term Memory

Short-term memory is a system that enables people to keep a limited amount of information actively in mind for brief periods of time. Encoding is the process through which information is transferred from sensory memory to short-term memory. Contemporary evidence suggests that the capacity of short-term memory is four pieces of information.

Two factors that cause people to forget information after it reaches short-term memory are decay, which is the fading of information from memory, and interference, which is a failure to retain information in short-term memory that occurs when material learned earlier or later prevents its retention. Both rehearsal and deep processing are strategies for reducing forgetting.

Short Term Memory v. Working Memory

Working memory expands the original concept of short-term memory by recognizing that there are three components, each of which keeps information in mind for brief periods of time: the phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, and central executive.

Long Term Memory

Long-term memory is a mental system that stores knowledge for extended periods of time and whose capacity is essentially unlimited. The different types of long-term memory are semantic memory, which is memory for factual information; procedural memory, which is memory of how to do things; and episodic memory, which is memory for events.One type of episodic memory is autobiographical memory. As described in Cultural Opportunities, American children, who are from an individualist culture, had more specific autobiographical memories than did Chinese children, who are from a collectivist culture.

Long term memory is forgettable; it can take hours or days for information in long-term memory to consolidate, that is, to change from a fragile state in which information can be lost, to a more fixed state in which the memory is available relatively permanently.

Long term memory is retrieved through two cues. They are retrieval cues, which are bits of information related to memories you are trying to recall, and context, that is, contextual cues from the situation or environment you were in when you originally encountered the information you are trying to remember.

Semantic Model

In a semantic network model, the meaning of concepts determines how closely they are related. Concepts with similar meaning are related more closely.

Are people generally aware of when ideas in their minds have been primed? No, people are not always aware of when ideas have been primed, which means that information can influence our thoughts and feelings without our even knowing it.

What are the basic elements in a parallel distributed processing model of mind? The basic elements are simple units of knowledge that do nothing other than turn on or off. Concepts are represented in a PDP system by patterns of activation in large numbers of these units.

How does an embodied cognition approach to memory differ from semantic network and PDP models? In semantic network and PDP models, perceptual systems play no role in remembering; they are active only when people first experience an event. In the embodied cognition model, perceptual and motor systems are what enable people to think about and remember events. Embodied cognition can help us understand physical metaphors, whereas semantic network and PDP models cannot.

How do errors of memory show that human memory processes differ substantially from memory storage in an electronic device, such as a computer’s memory system?Electronic devices record information passively, whereas human memory processes involve active thinking; unlike electronic devices, people combine different pieces of information creatively. When they do so, they sometimes exhibit errors of memory.

Memory Techniques

Chunking is a strategy for increasing the amount of information you can retain in short-term memory by combining different pieces of information into one “chunk.” If each chunk contains a few pieces of information, then the overall amount of information in short-term memory increases.

Mnemonics are strategies for organizing information in long-term memory. The organization makes it easier to find information in memory when it’s needed, thereby improving memory.

The Brain and Memory

Contemporary evidence indicates that the frontal lobes are key to this working memory activity.

The hippocampus, a neural system within the temporal lobes, is critical for memory consolidation—that is, for the formation of permanent memories. Consolidation occurs during long-term potentiation, when cell-to-cell communications become more efficient due to changes in the biochemical processes through which brain cells influence one another’s firing. The amygdala also takes part in this process, especially for the consolidation of information acquired during shallow processing. Research indicates that aerobic exercise can enhance memory by increasing the size of the hippocampus.

The hippocampus is particularly critical for this ability, which is one of many spatial memory skills.

A book is stored in a library in a single spot. By contrast, our memories for experiences are stored across multiple parts of the brain.

Categories

The categories most natural to use are those that are basic-level: moderately abstract categories that provide a good combination of being informative and efficient.

Classical categories possess a set of features that determine, unambiguously, whether individual items belong to the category, whereas the boundaries of fuzzy categories are ambiguous. A family resemblance category is one in which category members share a large number of features, but no single feature is absolutely necessary for membership in the category. Within categories, prototype refers to the most central member of a category. Categories vary in abstraction. One category is more abstract than a second if the second category is contained within the first. Ad hoc categories are groupings of items that go together because they relate to a goal that people have in a specific situation.

Language

Language is organized by levels. At the highest level is conversation, followed by sentences, phrases, and words. Words are made up of parts called morphemes that themselves convey meaning. At the lowest level of analysis, language consists of sounds.

B. F. Skinner proposed that children learn language through environmental rewards. Noam Chomsky proposed that all humans possess a mechanism in the brain that is dedicated to processing the syntax of language, that is, a universal grammar (although, as we saw in This Just In on universal grammar, more recent research indicates that grammar may not be as universal as Chomsky believed). Statistical language learning proposes that children acquire language by learning patterns of sounds and words that are statistically more common than others.

This evidence suggested that the brain contained two distinct regions dedicated entirely to, and independently responsible for, the use of language. One, Broca’s area, produced grammatical language, and the other, Wernicke’s area, was responsible for the understanding of spoken language.

Contemporary brain imaging evidence reveals that multiple areas of the brain, beyond merely Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, contribute to language use. Furthermore, Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area take part in psychological functions other than just language.

According to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, language shapes reality. The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis states that language shapes our thinking, implying that individuals who speak different languages could have fundamentally different views of reality. One prediction from the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is that if language affects thought, people who speak languages with different numbers of color terms should think differently about colors. However, a study by Berlin and Kay (1969) demonstrated that people who spoke different languages thought similarly about colors. This and other evidence contradict the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and reminds us that people’s thoughts about color are embodied cognitions determined, in part, by the workings of the visual system.

Psychologists have used as evidence the difficulty we experience when trying to express ideas in words that we already communicated by gesturing. Moreover, as we saw in Cultural Opportunities, there are cultural variations in patterns of thinking that are reflected in language. Individuals from Australia use more adjectives and fewer state verbs than do individuals from South Korea.

Animals and Language

Herbert Terrace tried to teach a chimp, Nim Chimpsky, to use sign language to communicate. Terrace found that Nim never combined sequences of signs in a novel manner to express ideas—a behavior that defines language use.

Dogs do communicate, often with scent. Language differs from general communication in two ways: (1) There is an arbitrary relation between words and things and (2) language’s rules are generative.

Syntax

Rules of syntax specify whether a series of phrases form a sentence that is grammatically correct and how a core sentence can be transformed. A transformational grammar is the full set of rules that indicates how components of a sentence can be shifted around to create other sentences that are grammatically correct.

Logical Reasoning

People’s ability to reason logically is impaired by confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out information that is consistent with initial conclusions and to disregard information that might contradict them. Confirmation bias is dangerous because it may cause us to overlook important information. Leda Cosmides’s research demonstrates that people can reason accurately about problems involving the possibility of cheating when goods are exchanged, even if they do poorly on other reasoning tasks.

Judgment

People judge the likelihood of uncertain events by using judgmental heuristics, which are simple cognitive procedures for making estimates that otherwise might be made through formal calculations. In the availability heuristic, people base their judgments on the ease with which information comes to mind. In the representativeness heuristic, people base judgments about the likelihood that an individual belongs to a given category on the degree to which the person or object resembles the category. In the anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic, people estimate an amount by formulating an initial guess (the “anchor”) and adjusting it to reach a final judgment. These heuristics can be helpful but they can also lead us to make judgmental errors.

Decisions

Though the standard model of decision making suggests that we make decisions by considering the subjective value and net worth of outcomes, framing effects and mental accounting suggest that people are not always this logical. In a framing effect, people’s decisions are influenced by the way that alternative choices are described, not by the subjective value of choices. In mental accounting, people divide their assets and expenditures into distinct cognitive categories and, in doing so, ignore net costs. Behavioral economics, Tuersty and Kahneman.

Problems

Think-aloud protocol analysis (see Research Toolkit). Because people can’t envision a problem’s entire problem space, they rely on problem-solving heuristics, such as means–ends analysis. In means–ends analysis, instead of imagining every possible step that could lead to a desired outcome, people simply try to reduce the distance between where they are now and where they want to end up.

Researchers studying problem solving have written computer programs that solve problems using means–ends analysis. When they compare the computer’s performance to human performance, results are similar, which suggests that both computers and humans use a means–ends problem-solving strategy.

Mental Imagery

According to research by Shepard and colleagues, the time it takes people to rotate images correlates almost perfectly with the number of actual degrees the images must be mentally rotated.

Kosslyn and colleagues’ research indicates that people take longer to answer a question about a mental image if they have to cover more distance across the image in their minds to do so.

Intelligence

Intelligence is the ability to acquire knowledge, to solve problems, and to use acquired knowledge to create new, valued products. It does not refer to personality traits, physical abilities, or specific skills.

In the early 1900s, French psychologist Alfred Binet constructed a test including items important to school achievement: logical reasoning, vocabulary use, and factual knowledge. He found that individual differences in test performance predicted individual differences in classroom achievement, a finding that holds true today. A German psychologist, William Stern, supplemented Binet’s efforts with a scoring system that included children’s mental age in a formula for intelligence quotient, or IQ: IQ 5 (mental age/chronological age) 3 100. When intelligence tests are given to adults, the tests are scored so that the mean score in a population is 100 and the standard deviation 15; about two-thirds of people, then, get IQ scores between 85 and 115.

People’s scores on tests measuring different mental abilities tend to correlate positively. These positive correlations can be explained by proposing that there exists general intelligence, an overall mental ability that affects performance on different types of tests.

Individual differences in fluid intelligence, which refers to mental abilities that are useful in the performance of almost any challenging task that a person may attempt, can be explained by individual differences in working memory capacity, which refers to the ability to focus attention and avoid distraction.

Four findings suggest that biological factors alone cannot explain people’s level of intelligence. The first is the Flynn effect, which refers to the rise in a population’s average IQ over time. This change has occurred over decades—too fast to be accounted for by genetic changes. The second is the finding that education increases intelligence. The third is that individual differences in intelligence can change over time. The fourth is that the effect of genes on intelligence depends on the population being studied.

According to Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory, people possess a number of different mental abilities, each of which is a distinct form of intelligence. He cites as evidence the existence of child prodigies. Another source of evidence is savant syndrome, characterized by mental impairment in most areas of life but exceptional performance in one domain. A third type of evidence consists of cases in which people develop exceptional intellectual abilities late in life, in the midst of declining overall mental capacity.

Intelligent behavior requires the use of multiple regions of the brain. People who have relatively strong neural connections among these brain regions can process information more efficiently, and thus tend to get higher IQ scores.

Classical Conditioning and Learning

In classical conditioning, we learn that one stimulus predicts another. For example, if you were in a relationship that broke up during a trip to an amusement park, you might avoid amusement parks because, for you, they “predict” a breakup. Think of Pavlov’s dogs, ring a bell and then present food, and after a while if you just ring the bell the dogs would salivate. Essentially the association of two things, the food and the bell.

In classical conditioning, animals learn an association between an unconditioned stimulus (US), which elicits reactions prior to any learning experiences, and a conditioned stimulus (CS), which originally is neutral but subsequently elicits a reaction, after being associated with the unconditioned stimulus.

A wide range of organisms, from very simple (such as fruit flies) to very complex (such as humans), learn through classical conditioning.

If you slightly alter the stimulus, organisms still respond, but not quite as strongly as they had responded to the original stimulus. This process is known as generalization.

Extinction is a gradual lessening of a conditioned response when a CS is presented repeatedly without any presentations of the US.

The Garcia effect, which is the rapid learning of a connection between the taste of food and illness, shows that not all associations are learned in the same manner. Stimulus–response connections that were important to a species across the course of evolution are learned particularly rapidly.

A valuable research strategy for identifying the biological bases of classical conditioning has been to study a simple organism that has relatively few neurons. Eric Kandel has pursued this strategy in studies of classical conditioning in Aplysia, a sea slug that has only about 20,000 neurons.

Consequences alter behavior. For example, when a parent “gives in” to a child’s demands, the child is more likely to argue in the future because “giving in” is a positive consequence that raises the likelihood of the child repeating the behavior.

Drugs and Compensatory Response

Drug users sometimes suffer fatal overdoses from a drug when they use the drug in a setting in which they previously have not taken it. In the new situation, their bodies do not produce compensatory responses, the biological reactions that are the opposite of the effects of a stimulus and that counteract the drug effect. The absence of compensatory responses results in the overdose.

Blocking

Blocking is a phenomenon in which animals fail to learn an association between a conditioned stimulus and an unconditioned stimulus that are repeatedly paired; specifically, they fail to learn the association when they already are able to predict the occurrence of the US, even before being exposed to the CS. It tells us that animals do not learn only about simple pairings of stimuli. Rather, they acquire information about the environment as a whole.

Little Albert

Albert’s fear developed through classical conditioning. Through classical conditioning, he learned to associate something that at first was not fear-provoking, the rat, with something that was fear-provoking, a loud noise. Once this association was formed, the rat elicited fear in Albert.

Habituation

Neurons reduce the amount of neurotransmitters that they send. For example, when an Aplysia is touched by an object, it reflexively retracts its gill. When a stimulus strikes the Aplysia repeatedly, the neuron that detects this stimulus gradually sends lesser amounts of neurotransmitters to the neuron that controls motor movement. When this latter neuron receives fewer neurotransmitters, it is less likely to fire and to thus cause the gill to retract.

The organism habituates to the stimulus, that is, it responds to a lesser and lesser degree to the stimulus.

Operant/Instrumental Conditioning

Unlike classical conditioning, in which a stimulus triggers a subsequent response, in operant conditioning, a behavior is followed by a stimulus, known as a response consequence. In classical conditioning, behaviors are internal physiological reactions; in operant conditioning, they are actions that affect the external world.

In Skinner’s analysis of operant conditioning, a reinforcer is any stimulus that occurs after a response and raises the future probability of that response.

In operant conditioning, organisms learn complex behaviors through shaping, a step-by-step learning process in which, at first, psychologists reinforce behaviors that merely approximate a desired, final behavior.

The results of the Bobo doll experiment contradict the expectations of an operant conditioning analysis in that children in the study learn a relatively complex behavior in the absence of reinforcement, which Skinnerians had seen as necessary to learning. Also, they learn without any gradual, step-by-step learning trials of the sort observed in Skinnerian analyses of shaping.

Reinforcement

In positive reinforcement, the occurrence of a stimulus increases the likelihood that the given type of behavior occurs. In negative reinforcement, the removal of an unpleasant stimulus increases the likelihood of a given type of behavior.

Punishment is a stimulus that decreases the likelihood of a behavior. It differs from reinforcement (positive or negative), in that reinforcement increases the probability of the behavior.

A schedule of reinforcement is a timetable that indicates when reinforcers occur, in relation to the occurrence of behavior.

Different schedules of reinforcement produce different rates of behavior. For example, ratio schedules produce higher response rates than interval schedules.

A discriminative stimulus is a stimulus that provides information about the relation between a behavior and a reinforcer. Specifically, a discriminative stimulus signals whether a behavior is or is not likely to be reinforced.

Many everyday situations contain discriminative stimuli that indicate the type of behavior likely to be reinforced in that situation. Because these stimuli vary from one situation to another, and people respond to them, individuals’ behavior varies from one situation to the next.

Biological Constraints

This means that it is difficult for organisms to learn some behaviors, in some situations, due to their inherited biology. The ability to learn the behavior, then, is “constrained” by their biological predispositions.

Research findings in the study of biological constraints on learning indicate that some combinations of behavior and reinforcement fail to work; that is, the likelihood of behavior in organisms does not increase. Skinnerian principles presumed that all combinations of behavior and reinforcers would work the same way, and thus these principles are violated by such findings.

Reward Center

Rewards can lower people’s tendency to engage in an activity when the activity initially is performed because it is interesting, but then the provision of rewards changes people’s understanding of their own behavior, causing them to see it as something done not out of personal interest, but to gain external rewards.

They know this thanks to research in which electrical stimulation of an area of the limbic system was used as a response consequence. Rats repeatedly pressed a lever in order to gain stimulation of this area. This brain region, then, was a reward center whose stimulation reinforced behavior. Subsequent research indicates that rewards influence behavior through their effect on the dopamine system.

Law of Effect

The law of effect is a principle of learning which states that when an organism performs a behavior that leads to a satisfying outcome in a given situation, it will be more likely to perform that behavior when it encounters the same situation in the future.

Observational Learning

The four subprocesses are attention (paying attention to the model’s behavior), retention (retaining memory for the model’s actions), production (using a mental representation of the model’s behavior to guide your own behavior), and motivation (being motivated to perform the modeled behavior).

One way that this technology can enhance the power of modeling is through the use of virtual representations of the self(VRSs), in which people see an image of themselves performing a desired behavior. This technology enables learners to see a psychological model that is of great personal relevance to them.

Spanking as Conditioning

Research indicates that, in the long run, spanking is associated with an increase in children’s aggressiveness. Evidence of this comes from a long-term study relating spanking at 3 years of age to level of aggressiveness at age 5.

Spanking, a punishment for unruly behavior, fails to reduce that behavior, as you might expect from an operant conditioning analysis. Instead, the spanking seems to serve as a model of aggressive behavior and is associated with increases in aggressiveness in children, as you might expect from an observational learning analysis.

Mirror Neurons

The brains of complex organisms—people and nonhuman animals—contain mirror neurons, which are neurons in the brain’s motor cortex that fire not only when you engage in a certain type of action, but also when you observe someone else engage in that same action.