Untitled Flashcards Set

Study Guide #2 for PSYC 100: General Psychology

Disclaimer:

This study guide is intended as a starting point for your preparation for the midterm exam, covering basic and fundamental concepts. It is not a comprehensive resource and should not be relied upon as your sole reference. You are encouraged to consult textbooks, class notes, and any other materials provided by your instructor. Ultimately, it is your responsibility to ensure that you are fully prepared for the exam.

Chapter 6: Learning

1. Learning: Acquiring new, relatively permanent information or behaviors.

   1. Associative Learning: Forming connections between events.

      1. Classical Conditioning: Linking two stimuli to anticipate events.

      2. Operant Conditioning: Associating behavior with consequences.

   2. Cognitive Learning: Learning through observation and mental processes.

2. Classical Conditioning

   1. Ivan Pavlov: discovered classical conditioning by showing how animals can link a neutral stimulus with a significant one.

   2. Neutral Stimulus (NS): Evokes no response before conditioning; Unconditioned Stimulus (US): Naturally triggers a response; Unconditioned Response (UR): Natural reaction to US; Conditioned Stimulus (CS): Previously neutral, now triggers response; Conditioned Response (CR): Learned reaction to CS.

[Understand the relationship between them, use the flow chart from slides]

2. Major conditioning process:

   1. Acquisition

   2. Extinction

   3. Spontaneous recovery

   4. Generalization (stimulus generalization)

   5. Discrimination

3. Operant conditioning

   1. The consequences of a behavior change the likelihood of a behavior’s occurrence (actions followed by rewarding/punishing event increase/decrease behavior)

   2. Thordike’s Puzzle Box (1989)

      1. Law of Effect: Behaviors followed by satisfying outcomes are more likely to recur, while behaviors followed by unsatisfactory outcomes are less likely.

   3. Operant Chamber

      1. By B.F. Skinner:  founder of behaviorism, believed that mechanism of learning were the same for all species

      2. Pigeon superstitions: what is the experiment?

      3. Superstitious behavior: response that is accidentally reinforced

   4. Shaping: procedure which reinforcers guide behavior closer and closer to a desired behavior (rewarding desired behaviors and ignoring all other responses)

      1. Reinforcement: positive/negative

      2. Schedules of reinforcement: fixed/variable ratio; Fixed/Variable interval

[learn to distinguish them; how each of them shows a relationship between time and cumulative responses]

3. Punishment: positive/negative

4. Influences on Conditioning

   1. Biology and cognition limit the range of behaviors that can be conditioned

      1. Biological constraints: predisposes organism to learn behaviors that are evolutionarily adaptive.

      2. Cognition: Behaviorism underestimated the effects of cognitive processes on learning

         1. Purposive behavior: most behavior is goal-directed– if we only consider rewards and punishments, we might miss underlying reasons why people do things

         2. Tolman’s cognitive maps: rats exploring maze

[what is the experiment? What’s the conclusion/implication?]

5. Observational learning

   1. Modeling: attention/retention/motor reproduction

   2. Reinforcement: vicarious reinforcement/punishment

Chapter Questions:

Q: How do continuous and partial reinforcement schedules affect behavior?

Q: What limits does biology place on conditioning?

Q: What roles do acquisition, extinction, spontaneous recovery, generalization, and discrimination play in classical conditioning?

Chapter 7: Memory

1. Memory

   1. The process of retaining, retrieving, and using information about past events, stimuli, or skills.

2. Modal Model of Memory

   1. Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1968

      

[What are structural features? What are Control Processes? Do they interact with each other?]

3. Sensory Memory

   1. Holds all information; less than a second long - brief retention of stimuli

      1. visual/auditory; Iconic/Echoic

   2. Initial experiments about visual sensory memory

      1. Sperling (1961): sensory memory has a large capacity but decays rapidly.

4. Short-Term Memory (STM)

   1. Holds information for 15-30 seconds

   2. Capacity: limited to 5-9 items

      1. Digit Span: A measure of STM capacity by recalling numbers in a sequence.

   3. Rehearsal: repetition to prolong STM duration

   4. Chunking: Grouping items into meaningful units to expand capacity.

5. Encoding

   1. The process of storing information in LTM.

   2. Types: Automatic/Effortful Encoding

   3. Levels of Processing: a continuum from shallow to intermediate to deep encoding of a stimulus

6. Long-Term Memory (LTM)

   1. Declarative (Explicit) Memory: facts and events

      1. Semantic/Episode Memory

[distinguish examples from each of them]

6. Retrograde/anterograde amnesia

7. Nondeclarative (Implicit) Memory: unconscious memories, often automatic

   1. Procedural Memory: Skills and tasks

      1. Link exists between semantic and procedural memory

8. Retrieval: People report memories as constructions of what they experienced

   1. Recall

      1. Generating information from memory without cues.

      2. Generate + Recognize

      3. Free/Cued Recall

   2. Recognition

      1. Identifying information without producing it

   3. Retrieval Cues

      1. Context-Dependent Learning

      2. State-Dependent Learning

   4. Roediger and Karpicke (2006)

      1. Which is better study technique (rereading or retrieval practice?)

9. Forgetting

   1. 3 reasons for forgetting

      1. Information never encoded

      2. Information completely erased from memory

         1. Decay

      3. Information still in LTM, but inaccessible

         1. Interference: proactive/Retroactive

         2. Retrieval failure

10. Misinformation Effect

    1. Loftus & Palmer (1974): wording (e.g., “smashed” vs. “hit”) can change memory recall of car crash speeds.

11. False Memories: Constructed memories influenced by suggestions or prior associations.

12. Study and Retrieval Techniques

    1. Distributed Practice: Spacing out study sessions over time.

    2. Testing Effect: Practicing retrieval improves memory better than rereading.

Chapter Questions:

Q: What is a retrieval cue?

Q: Why is cramming for an exam ineffective, and what is a more effective study method?

Q: How do misinformation, imagination and source amnesia influence our memory construction?

Chapter 8: Thinking and Language

1. Key terms

○      Cognition: how information is processed and manipulated when remembering, thinking, and knowing

■      thinking:Manipulating information mentally by forming concepts, solving problems, making decisions, and reflecting in a critical or creative manner

○      concept: mental representation of a class/individual; categories of objects, events, abstract ideas

2. Categorization

○      prototype theory: one object is a “prototype” for each category; one object represents a category

■      includes graded membership (more or less)

■      includes typicality (high or low)

3. Decision Making

○      reasoning: process of drawing conclusions

○      judgment: assessment of the likelihood of a given event occurring on the basis of incomplete information

○      decision making: making a selection from a variety of options

4. Heuristics

○      availability heuristic: frequency of a given event is estimated on basis of how easily information about the event can be accessed

■      can lead to stereotypes

○      representativeness heuristic: an object belongs to a category because it is representative/typical of that category

○      base-rate information: relative frequency with which an event occurs in the population

○      base-rate neglect: paying insufficient attention to the true frequency of an event

○      confirmation bias: looking for information that confirms beliefs, ignoring information that refutes beliefs

5. Problem solving heuristics

○      hill-climbing strategy: at every point, choose the option that moves in the direction of your goal

6. Creativity

○      functional fixedness: inflexible focus on the usual function(s) of an object in problem solving

○      Four stages of the creative process:

■      preparation: gather information about problem

■      incubation: set problem aside; work on it unconsciously

■      illumination: key insight or new idea emerges

■      verification: confirm new idea will solve problem

7. Language

○      hierarchical organization: from smallest unit to the largest unit (phoneme, morpheme, word, sentence)

○      rule-based nature: components can be arranged in certain ways but not in others

○      Characteristics of language:

■      generative- can combine symbols in infinite ways

■      semantic- symbols are used to convey meaning

■      arbitrary- symbols don’t directly map onto a meaning

■      displacement- ability to talk about things that are distant in time/space

○      Linguistic relativity hypothesis: the language we speak determines the way we think

8. Phoneme perception

○      context cues: using information about a sound’s acoustic context to infer what sound you’re hearing

○      phoneme restoration effect: when a predictable phoneme within a word is replaced with a non-speech sound, people will hear both

■      top-down processing

○      statistical learning: infants notice patterns in speech stimuli and analyze those patterns to identify subcomponents

9. Conversations

○      given-new contract: statements should contain both given and new information for communication to be successful

○      common ground: mental knowledge and beliefs shared among conversational parties

10. Bilingualism

○      Sequential and Simultaneous bilingualism

○      Advantages: executive functions

■      Why?

○      Disadvantages: 2 mental dictionaries

11. Animal Communication

○      How do bees communicate nectar distance/location/quality?

■      Similarities/differences with human communication

○      How do vervet monkeys communicate information about predators?

■      Similarities/differences with human communication

○      Washoe the chimpanzee

■      Training method

■      Sign capabilities

○      Differences between how humans and apes use signs

■      Syntactic differences

■      Social differences

Chapter Questions:

Q: How do infants take advantage of the statistics of language to identify words in speech?

Q: What is insight and how does it facilitate problem solving?

Q: How is an algorithm different from a heuristic?