Chapter 7
Define behaviourist
People that studied psychology only by looking at behaviour, not mental processes
What is learning?
Process of acquiring new information or behaviours through experience / a relatively permanent change in behaviour due to experience
What is associative learning?
Linking two events that occur close together in time
Give three ways that we learn
Through associative learning: Certain events occur together (classical conditioning); stimuli that are not controlled are associated and the response becomes automatic (respondent behaviour)
Through consequences: Association between a response and a consequence is learned (operant behaviour)
Through acquisition of mental information that guides behaviour: Cognitive learning
Explain Pavlov’s dog food experiment and name the stages that represent the Unconditioned Stimulus, the Unconditioned Response, the Neutral Stimulus, the Conditioned Stimulus and the Conditioned Response
Pavlov realised that if he trained a dog by repeatedly presenting dog food to a dog immediately after ringing a bell, the dog would start to salivate at the sound of the bell
Unconditioned Stimulus → yummy dog food!
Unconditioned Response → salivating at the dog food
Neutral Stimulus → the bell
Conditioned Stimulus → also the bell! But after it has been associated with the food
Conditioned Response → the dog salivating at the sound of the bell
Define Unconditioned Stimulus (US)
A stimulus that naturally triggers a response
Define Unconditioned Response (UR)
A naturally occurring response to the US
Define Neutral Stimulus (NS)
A stimulus that has not been paired with the US and elicits no response
Define Conditioned Stimulus (CS)
A previously neutral stimulus (NS) that is paired with the US and as a result, triggers a conditioned response (CR)
Define Conditioned Response (CR)
A learned response to a previously neutral stimulus, but now a conditioned stimulus
Define Higher-order conditioning / second-order conditioning
A procedure in which the conditioned stimulus in one conditioning experience is paired with a new neutral stimulus, creating a second (often weaker) conditioned stimulus
For example, an animal that has learned that a tone predicts food might then learn that a light predicts the tone and begin responding to the light alone.
Name some uses of classical conditioning
Classical conditioning can help us to expedite a response so that it occurs before the US begins
Acquisition of expectancies help organisms prepare for good or bad events.
Necessary for our survival from an evolutionary perspective.
Act as notifications to prepare for fight or flight, or to extend pleasure
Name five stages of learning / conditioning
Acquisition
Extinction
Spontaneous recovery
Generalisation
Discrimination
Define the Acquisition stage
The association between a neutral stimulus (NS) and an unconditioned stimulus (US)
We know that acquisition has occurred when neutral stimulus previously didn’t cause anything, but now it does trigger something
Usually, for the association to be acquired, the neutral stimulus (NS) needs to repeatedly appear before the unconditioned stimulus (US), about a half-second before, in most cases (the bell must come right before the food).
Define the Extinction stage
Refers to the diminishing of a conditioned response.
If the US (food) stops appearing with the CS (bell), the CR decreases.
Define the Spontaneous Recovery stage
After a CR (salivation) has been conditioned and then extinguished:
Following a rest period, presenting the tone alone might lead to a spontaneous recovery (a return of the conditioned response despite a lack of further conditioning)
If the CS (tone) is again presented repeatedly without the US, the CR becomes extinct again.
Define the Generalization stage
Once a response has been conditioned, generalisation would be defined as the tendency to respond in a similar way to stimuli similar to the CS (ex: a dog that is conditioned to salivate at the sound of a dinner bell may also salivate at the sound of a doorbell)
Define the Discrimination stage
The learned ability to distinguish between a CS and other similar stimuli that do not signal an US (discriminating between relevant and not relevant stimuli) (ex: Infants can tell the difference between their mother's voice and the voice of other women)
Explain the implications of this on abuse in children
A study showed that abused children’s brains respond differently to angry faces compared to non abused peers (association between anger and danger)
Why do we still care about Pavlov?
Most psychologists agree that classical conditioning is a basic learning form among all species and that can be studied objectively
Pavlov’s principles are used to influence human health and well-being (including addiction)
Pavlov’s work provided a basis for Watson’s ideas that human emotions and behaviours, though biologically influenced, are mainly conditioned responses.
Explain classical conditioning relating to drug cravings
Former drug users crave the drug when they are in the environment in which they took drugs or they associate with people with whom they took drugs
These contexts act as CS and trigger cravings for the drug (CR)
Using what we know about classical conditioning, drug counsellors advise former users to stay away from these contexts. (same with staying/going on a diet)
How do advertisers often use classical conditioning?
To pair already-existing positive responses with their products; to control and influence human behaviour, such as purchasing behaviour
Describe the US,UR,CS, and CR in an ad attempting to associate a product with a celebrity
US → Known celebrity.
UR → Positive feelings.
CS → Product / Brand
Hoped for CR → Positive feelings towards product / brand
Explain what happened when researchers present a baby with a rat toy paired with a loud noise
Baby started to develop fear of rat - whenever they showed the rat, the baby started crying - association has occurred - “irrational fear” of the rat
Everything that had a similar feel of the rat toy - the baby started fearing those too → generalisations
Define Operant Conditioning
If the organism is learning associations between its behaviour and the resulting events, it is operant conditioning.
Define Thorndike’s Law of effect
The Law of Effect states that behaviours followed by favourable consequences become more likely, and that behaviours followed by unfavourable consequences become less likely.
If a cat is put into a puzzle box many times and subsequently gets faster at escaping, what does this demonstrate?
Declining rate of seconds taken to escape over times tried → learning rate
Explain how researchers used a skinner box to classically condition pigeons to “learn to read” or distinguish between cancerous and normal tissue
They rewarded a pigeon with food every time that it correctly accomplished a task, teaching it to peck at the correct answer
Explain shaping behaviour / how to apply classical conditioning
Reinforcers guide behaviour towards the desired target behaviour through successive approximations
Reward behaviour that approaches the desired behaviour
Allows animal trainers to get animals to perform complex behaviours
Define Reinforcer
An event that increases the likelihood of a behaviour being repeated
Give the six types of reinforcers
Positive + negative, primary + secondary, immediate + delayed
Define each of them
Positive reinforcement → Presenting a rewarding stimulus after a response
Negative reinforcement → Removing an unpleasant stimulus after a response (scream until daddy stops the car ad dairy queen)
Primary reinforcer → an innately reinforcing stimulus, such as one that satisfies a biological need (food, sex, water) - very intrinsic, biological
Secondary (Conditioned) reinforcer → a stimulus that gains its reinforcing power through its association with a primary reinforcer (stickers, money, power, etc.).
Immediate Reinforcer → A reinforcer that occurs instantly after a behaviour. A rat gets a food pellet for a bar press
Delayed Reinforcer → A reinforcer that is delayed in time for a certain behaviour. A paycheck that comes at the end of a week.
Define continuous reinforcement, list an advantage and a fault
Reinforcing the desired response every time it occurs
Great for learning, prone to fast extinction
Define partial (intermittent) reinforcement, list an advantage and a fault
Reinforcing the desired response only part of the time
Perhaps more practical in real world, slower learning, more resistant to extinction (slot machines, gambling)
List four different types of reinforcement schedules and define them
Fixed-ratio schedule: reinforcing the desired response only after a specified number of responses
Ex. Buy 10 coffee drinks, get the 11th free (Produces high rates of responding)
Variable-ratio schedule: reinforcing the desired response after an unpredictable number of responses
Ex: If the slot machine sometimes pays, I’ll pull the lever as many times as possible because it may pay this time! (Produces high, consistent rates of responding)
Fixed-interval schedule: reinforcing the desired response only after a specified time has elapsed.
Ex. Checking for snail mail, cramming for a test (Produces a choppy, stop-start pattern of responding)
Variable-interval schedule: reinforcing the desired response at unpredictable time intervals.
Ex. Checking for email, Pop quiz, If I don’t know when the pop quiz will happen, I’ll study everyday (Produces slow, steady responding)
Define punishment
An event that tends to decrease the behaviour that it follows
Explain positive and negative punishment
Positive punishment → Addition of unpleasant stimulus (getting a parking ticket)
Negative punishment → Removal of pleasant stimulus → (cutting down screen time)
In learning and conditioning, “positive” means that something is _____ and “negative” means that something is ________.
Added, taken away
How does operant conditioning differ from classical conditioning?
If the organism is learning associations between its behaviour and the resulting events, it is operant conditioning
If the organism is learning associations between events that it does not control, it is classical conditioning
Chapter 8
Explain how we measure retention (three ways) and define them
Recall (free recall, like seeing someone and trying to remember their name - most difficult)
Recognise (correctly identifying prev learned information - things might trigger something - multiple choice question)
Relearn (speed of relearning) (riding your bike again after twenty years) (it’ll be faster than when you first learned it) (how much time / effort is saved when learning material for the second time)
Explain Ebbinhaus’s memory experiment and the retention curve
Ebbinghaus studied his own verbal memory. He tried to learn (memorise) a list of nonsense syllables. The more times he rehearsed the list on day one, the less time it took to memorise the list on day two. Speed of relearning is one measure of memory retention - when relearning, it will be memorised more easily, accurately, and rapidly.
What can we learn from this experiment?
We retain more when our learning involves more time and repetition. Tests of recognition, and tests of time spent relearning, demonstrate that we remember more than we can recall - we can recognise things that we couldn’t just simply remember, and things will jog our memories( ex: solving a puzzle, remembering lyrics of a song with and without background music, name all the marvel movies you have watched).
Explain the three stages of the information processing model, and what it compares the human brain to
Compares human memory to computer operations
Involves three processes:
Encoding: the information gets into our brains in a way that allows it to be stored
Storage: the information is held in a way that allows it to later be retrieved
Retrieval: reactivating and recalling the information, producing it in a form similar to what was encoded
Explain connectionism
Focuses on multitrack, uses parallel processing
Views memories as products of interconnected neural networks
Define Atkinsons and Shiffrin’s three stage model (the original one)
External events happen, and then:
Sensory input from the environment is recorded as fleeting sensory memory.
Information is processed in short-term memory.
Information is encoded into long-term memory for later retrieval.
Give some shortcomings of the three-stage model
Cannot explain why we forget things.
Cannot explain why different people experiencing the same events remember different details and aspects of it.
Explain Atkinson-Shiffrin model’s updated concepts
Working memory:
We can’t focus on all the sensory information we receive, so we select information that is important to us and actively process it into our working memory
Includes visual and auditory rehearsal of new information
Part of the brain functions like a manager, focusing attention and pulling information from long-term memory to help make sense of new information
Considered a central executive unit :)
Automatic processing:
To address the processing of information outside of conscious awareness
Some information skips the first two stages and enters long-term memory automatically.
What part of the brain is responsible for episodic memory?
The hippocampus
Explain the differences between explicit and implicit memory
Dual-Track memory system divides our memory into conscious and unconscious tracks.
Explicit memory - conscious, explicit, declarative memories are facts and experiences that we can consciously know and declare. We encode explicit memories through conscious, explicit, sequential, effortful processing.
Implicit memory - Unconscious, implicit, nondeclarative memories are facts and experiences that are formed through automatic processes and bypass conscious encoding track – we don’t exert effort, and are not even aware that they are happening.
What information do we process automatically?
Implicit memories include automatic skills and classically conditioned associations. Information is automatically processed about:
Space: while reading a textbook, you automatically encode the place of a picture on the page
Time: we unintentionally note the events that take place in a day
Frequency: you effortlessly keep track of how often things happen to you
We are not consciously trying to remember these details, but they are automatically encoded in our memories.
With experience and practice, some explicit memories become automatic.
Examples: driving, texting, and speaking a new language (teaching nonsensical characters as a language in an experimental setting)
Explain Sperling’s Iconic Memory Experiment
Sperling flashed letters on a screen for 1/20th of a second. He asked people how many letters they recalled. Participants could recall only ½ of the letters.
Next, Sperling flashed the letters on a screen for 1/20th of a second. Immediately after the screen went blank, he sounded a tone. A high, medium, or low pitch tone signaled the row that participants were to report.
Recall for letters in a row was almost perfect. How can we explain this result? What happens when the tone sounds? When the tone sounds right after the picture is flashed, we have time to retrieve the letters from iconic memory.
What is the Briefest Form of Memory Storage
Sensory Memory The immediate, initial recording of sensory information in the memory system
Define echoic and iconic memory, and explain how long they last
Iconic Memory - visual sensory memory → Duration: less than a second
Echoic Memory - auditory sensory memory → Duration: a few seconds
What type of memories are the hippocampus and frontal lobes responsible for?
Processes explicit memories for facts and episodes
Hippocampus: Registers and temporarily holds elements of explicit memories before moving them to other brain regions for long-term storage.
Two types:
Semantic memory: meaning of words, grammar of a language, concepts, abstract ideas that we learn through school - more abstract / concepts / semantically learned -hunger, kindness, etc
Episodic memory: memory of snapshots of our life that together - movie like, form episodes
What has been noticed about the hippocampus in dementia patients
It is often smaller than average
Explain which type of memories the right and left hemispheres process
Left hemisphere → more numerical, semantics, verbal
Right → more episodic
Explain the London taxi drivers experiment
Central London Taxi Drivers spend 3-4 years learning “the knowledge.” Failure rate for exam: 50%
They found that the longer someone had been a taxi driver, the larger their rear area of hippocampus (involved in spatial ability)
Follow up study:
Assessed participants before and after training
Three groups: Ps who succeeded and passed the exam, those who had failed the exam, and a control group
Replicated findings: Those who succeeded had an increased hippocampal volume; no difference in other two groups
What part of the brain is responsible for implicit memory?
The cerebellum and the basal ganglia
Explain some features of the cerebellum, what happens if it is damaged, and if it is considered unique to humans
Plays a key role informing and storing the implicit memories created by classical conditioning.
Also big on coordinating movement, balance, attention and eye movement.
Damage to cerebellum disrupts forming conditioned reflexes.
Part of the initial brain structures (“little brain”, or “lizard brain”) that exist in other species as opposed to more advanced and high-level areas like the PFC.
Explain what functions the basal ganglia has
Deep brain structures involved in motor movement
Facilitate formation of our procedural memories for skills
What type of memory does the amygdala take care of?
Emotion-related memory formation
Overall:
Frontal lobes and hippocampus: explicit memory formation → Semantic and
episodic memory - facts and general knowledge, personally experienced events
Cerebellum and basal ganglia: implicit memory formation → Space, time, frequency, classical conditioning, motor and cognitive skills
Amygdala: emotion-related memory formation
How do external cues and priming influence memory?
Act as a Retrieval Cue:
Will activate existing memory by a stimulus and that activation often unconsciously results in activation of particular associations in memory
Give an example from class of priming that influences memory
Showing a rabbit and a bunny, and then asking us to remember how to spell hare - volunteer spelt it the less common way that was related to the priming
What is an everyday example of us using priming to help our memory without knowing?
When you lose a key, you go to the room where you last saw it, hoping that what you see triggers your memory → “this’ll jog my memory!”
Explain context-dependent memory
Our ability to recall is improved when we are in the same context that the initial experience occurred.
Encoding specificity principle: cues and contexts specific to a particular memory will be most effective in helping us recall it.
Explain why we would probably do better on our psych exams if we did them in the pool
Context dependant memory - trying to recall information in the same environment that we learned it in would help us to remember it
Explain the diver memory experiment
Recall of words was a lot stronger when the participant was in the place that they learnt the words - if a diver learnt them underwater, recall was stronger there than on the beach, and vise versa
Explain state-dependant memory
Recall is improved when encoding and retrieval of a memory happen in the same emotional or biological state.
Explain state-dependant memory’s impact on depression
It is difficult to remember happy times when depressed
Explain how memory of period pain changed when the person reporting it was in pain
Women reported remembering higher pain levels in the past compared the pain levels that were reported during painful episodes if they were experiencing pain at the time of remembering
Explain the “how much do you like this class” survey
Students were asked how much they agreed with these statements, once after receiving their midterm results, and once after they were given a chance to boost their grade with a bonus activity.
Results showed that students more strongly agreed that they had a pleasant experience in class after they had a positive experience (bonus activity) compared to after they had a negative experience (test results).
Sometimes, how we think we feel about something depends partially on how we feel about _____________ at that moment and could have less to do with the objective quality of the thing we are looking at.
Ourselves and our life
Explain Encoding Failure
When input is present too quickly, before we have enough time to process it, encoding, storing, and later retrieving the images becomes harder.
We are more likely to remember the first and the last images.
Encoding failure → retrieval failure, since we can’t remember what we have not encoded.
Explain the two serial position effects and some possible explanations for it
Our tendency to recall best the last (recency effect) and first (primacy effect) items in a list
Recency effect p-ossible explanation: The last items may be held in short-term memory.
Primacy effect possible explanation: The attention is on the first items. Short-term memory doesn’t help in this case because there is a long delay.
Define reconsolidation
A process in which previously stored memories, when retrieved, are potentially altered before being stored again
Give two sources of errors in memory (contributing to false memories)
Misinformation effect: when misleading info has corrupted one’s memory of an event
Source amnesia: failed memory for how, when, or where information was learned or imagined (unintentional plagiarism)
Watch videos - no qs yet
What was the difference in answers when people were asked if there was glass at a scene
where cars hit vs smashed?
People that were asked with the word smashed were more likely to “remember” glass at the scene, even though there wasn’t any there
Explain the effect of false memory on eyewitness testimony
Eyewitness testimony can be extremely unreliable - the way that questions are asked, suspects are presented, etc. can alter someone’s memory and can cause people to accuse with certainty the wrong person
Chapter 9
How do pictures affect our answers to true/false questions?
When given a statement and asked if it is true or false, we are more likely to say True if the statement is accompanied by a picture, even when the picture gives us no clue to the truthfulness of the statement.
Explain the difference between misinformation and disinformation
Misinformation refers to false information that is not intended to cause harm.
Disinformation refers to false information that is intended to manipulate, cause damage and guide people, organisations and countries in the wrong direction.
Explain how this could be used in media
News - disinformation + misinformation: can include suggestive words or images to influence people’s memory
Define Intuition
An effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning
Define cognition
All the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. Can include:
How we use mental images
Create concepts
Solve problems
Make decisions and form judgments
Define concepts or grouping
Mental groupings of similar objects, events, ideas or people
Why are they useful?
Concepts provide a kind of mental shorthand, economising cognitive efforts by minimising the computational load
Reduce communication time by referring to category name rather than specific name of objects in the category (ex chair instead of specifically referring by name to every chair type)
What do we form when learning concepts?
Prototypes
Define prototype
a mental image of best example that incorporates all the features we associate with a category (ex robin vs penguin - both birds, but a robin fits our prototype better)
When do prototypes fail?
Examples stretch our definitions (is a stool a chair?)
The boundary between concepts is fuzzy (categorising a colour when it is between blue and green)
Examples contradict our prototypes (is a whale a fish? is a whale a mammal? Does it mean it is not a fish?)
Explain how prototypes help and are dangerous when it comes to heart attacks
Prototypes of heart attacks may make it easier for people to recognise quickly when they are happening… but only when the heart attack matches the well known prototype. If a heart attack presents in an unusual way that doesn’t fit the prototype, it is more likely to be missed or dismissed
Explain how prototypes can relate to discrimination and the bike stealing experiment
People form prototypes of the “types of people” that they think would do certain things - people associated a black man with being likely to steal a bike and stopped him, called the police, etc. For a white man, only one couple stopped him and did something about it. For a white woman, someone offered to help her.
What cognitive strategies assist problem solving? Define them, suggest when they are most useful/unuseful and give an example
Trial and error → no slide for this one?
Algorithms → strategy that involves following a specific rule, procedure, or method that inevitably produces the correct solution - useful because they inevitably produce a result but often take a long time (ex: searching every shelf in a grocery store for something)
Heuristics → strategy that involves using a mental shortcut to reduce the number of solutions - usually speedier, but more error-prone than algorithms (make judgments and solve problems efficiently) (when looking for apple juice, you narrow your search to the beverage, natural foods, or produce sections of the supermarket (you check only the related aisles))
Insight → a sudden, often novel, realisation of a solution. The “Aha”moment. Contrasts with strategy-based solutions (when looking for apple juice, you suddenly realise you are in a type of store that wouldn’t sell apple juice. You need to head to another store).
What interferes with our problem solving abilities?
Confirmation bias
Fixation
Mental set
Imposing constraints
Define confirmation bias
a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence. Once people form a belief, they prefer belief-confirming information
Explain how confirmation bias impacted the divorce custody experiment we talked about in class (usually):
When people were asked who they would award sole custody of a child to, they focused on the positive traits, and when they were asked who they would deny sole custody to, they focused on the negative traits - usually leading to people denying and awarding custody to the same parent
Define fixation
The inability to see a problem from a fresh perspective
Sometimes you may see a pattern and continue to use that pattern, not seeing an easier solution
Kind of the opposite of out of the box thinking
Define switch cost
The cognitive effort associated with switching from one task to another.
Switch cost is ______ when switching from a difficult task to a simple task compared to switching from an easy task to a difficult task.
Higher
Define mental set
A tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past. Example of fixation.
Impose constraints (not in your book)
The tendency to assume that there are extra constraints in a task
Define Availability Heuristic and give an example
We judge things based on how quickly the information comes to mind / the tendency to estimate the frequency of an event by how readily it comes to mind
ex: Which of the following causes more deaths in the United States each year? Stomach cancer or drunk driving accidents? People who say A : 38% , people who say B : 62% BUT stomach cancer actually causes more deaths. Car accidents are reported more in the press → increased vividness
Define Framing and give an example
Framing is the way an issue is posed → how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments
Framing draws our attention to some aspects of the available information over others.
With gains, we prefer certain options and with losses, we prefer uncertain options
Ex: Imagine Canada is preparing for the outbreak of a foreign disease, expected to kill 600 people → programs were inversely favoured based on if they were framed as saving x number of people or killing x number of people
Define Anchoring and give an example
Anchoring or focalism is a cognitive bias where an individual depends too heavily on an initial piece of information offered (considered to be the "anchor") when making decisions.
Ex: Under time pressure, estimate: A. 8*7*6*5*4*3*2*1 or B. 1*2*3*4*5*6*7*8. Given A, people estimate roughly 3,000. Given B, people estimate roughly 500. They anchored to the first numbers
Define Overconfidence and give an example
Tendency to be more confident than correct – to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments
Define Belief Perseverance and give an example
clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited
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