Psych1

What might a neuroscientist argue about the mind-body problem, if taking a materialist perspective?

A neuroscientist might argue that the mind and body are both controlled by the brain. Neural processing and signaling controls behavior (body) and thoughts (mind). Our experience of consciousness arises from the non-supernatural action of ensembles of neurons.

How do the jobs of clinical psychologist, counseling psychologist, and psychiatrist differ?

A clinical psychologist has a doctoral degree, and provides therapy for people with mental disorders. A counseling psychologist also has a doctoral degree, but treats people with milder problems than a clinical psychologist. These problems usually involve academic, job, or relationship problems. A psychiatrist has a medical degree, and also provides therapy for people with mental disorders. Unlike a clinical psychologist, psychiatrists can prescribe medications or other biomedical treatment. Refer to Table 10.3 (p.454) for more information.

Sometimes what we think we know, and what is intuitive to us, may not actually be true, despite these intuitions. Describe an experimental result that exemplifies this for you, if we've talked about one. As one possible example, the intuition that instituting a new punishment for a behavior should reduce the likelihood of that behavior backfired in the "late to daycare" study.

A daycare center was frustrated that parents were late in picking up their children, so they started to charge a late fee. However, parents tended to be late more often after the fee was implemented. Researchers Gneezy & Rustichini say these results occurred because the social pressure to be on time was actually more powerful than the economic consequence. Therefore converting the social consequence into a minor monetary one (which seems to have been what happened, in parents' minds) was not successful.

Given an example of how cells in V1 (primary visual cortex) signal aspects of the scene at a more abstract level than just the color and lightness of different regions of the visual array. How is the visual array broken down into basic components?

A good example is orientation selectivity. Some V1 neurons are orientation selective, i.e. they respond strongly to lines of a certain orientation or movement in a certain direction (Hubel & Wiesel). [the same is true in the LGN.] These neurons receive inputs from multiple ganglion cells with different receptive fields. Exactly how this is put together is only partially understood [though much more is known about this than we covered in class].

1. In the Marcus 2006 reading, Pinker's selection discusses the transformation of a pidgin into a creole. What distinguishes a pidgin from a creole? What concept does the transformation demonstrate about human language capacity?

A pidgin, by definition, does not have a consistent grammar, and contains an inconsistent combination of vocabulary and structures from the two or more languages whose native speakers are attempting to communicate with one another. A pidgin can transform into a creole - which is a true language with a syntactical grammar - when first-generation speakers spontaneously and communally standardize it by introducing and imposing structure. This transformation - seen in the formation of Hawaiian Creole and the Idioma de Signos Nicaraguense (ISN), or Nicaraguan sign language - is interpreted as a sign that children are born with an "innate grammatical machinery," in large part because many of the structures that arise in creoles are shared with other unrelated languages not known to the speakers. (At least, this is the argument. There is some dispute about this in the case of the spoken pidgins.)

Define Constructivism. How does Constructivism view cognitive development in terms of the nature/nurture debate?

Constructivism: According to Piaget, children are trying to organize their experience and knowledge in a systematic way. That occurs through the maturation of the brain (schemas, "operations") and through experience. The notion that children build structure from information and knowledge is central to constructivism. (beyond that the term is admittedly rather vague.)

What is the circadian clock.

All humans (and animals in general, even bacteria) have a circadian "clock" that in humans enforces the imperative of daily sleep and its timing. The clock is sensitive to sunset and sunrise. Daylight (and bright artificial light) inhibits melatonin which tells the body when to sleep; thus, bright light at night can keep you awake, but bright light in the morning can also help you wake up.

6) Bonus (not tested on final): From Weisberg's lecture, what are Philip Kitcher's hallmarks of good science?

Auxiliary hypotheses are rigorously tested. (an auxiliary hypothesis is usually an idea that's been raised to explain away facts that are inconvenient for the main hypothesis.) Unification (a good theory can be applied to cover multiple phenomena or diverse observations) "Fecundity" (a good theory opens up new questions, rather than closing off discussion and discovery)

Can we distinguish between normal and abnormal behavior?

Big picture: Abnormality is hard to define. Many disorders do not have hard and fast "edges" that cleanly separate those who have the disorder from those who don't. Psychopathology is largely dimensional, rather than categorical. However, we have to draw the line somewhere to say that a person has a mental disorder.

What did Descartes say about the mind-body problem? On his account, what gland connected the mind to the body, and what went on in there?

Descartes argued that the mind and body are separate. He thought that that reflexes, pain, pleasure, and recall were functions of the body. Descartes believed that the function of the soul (mind) was to think, to reason. The connection between soul and body happened in the pineal gland; here, the "animal spirits" of the body and the soul interacted, mainly by pushing around a valve-like system that could effectuate behavior.

What is EEG and what is it used for?

EEG stands for electroencephalography and it is a method used to study the brain. EEG. Electrodes are placed on the scalp (it is a noninvasive procedure) and voltage changes in the brain are measured as a proxy for brain activity. ERP is a technique in which EEG signals are carefully evaluated with respect to the timing of some stimulus event, like the presentation of a word in a sentence. It's good for timing, relatively poor for localizing where in the brain activity occurred.

What is the framing effect? What is the classic study that shows this effect?

Framing effects occur when (a) the way a judgment or decision problem is phrased; or (b) the way the various response options are described influences participants' responses (i.e., their choices or judgments). In most cases, framing effects occur when different formulations of the question at hand change a salient point of reference. For example, in a classic study by Kahneman & Tversky (1981), participants were presented with the following question: Imagine that the United States is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. We have two plans. (options framed as losses) Plan A: 400 people will die Plan B: 1/3 chance no one dies; 2/3 chance all 600 die Another group of participants received the same problem with options framed in a different way. The plans were framed as gains rather than losses: Imagine that the United States is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. We have two plans. (options framed as gains) Plan A: 200 will be saved Plan B: 1/3 chance will 600 saved; 2/3 chance nobody saved Note that in both cases, Plan A and Plan B have the same outcomes. However, when options were framed as losses, most people choose Plan B; when options were framed as gains, most people choose Plan A. Kahneman & Tversky (1981) interpreted the results as indicating that people are risk-seeking (i.e., prefer risky options) when they are considering losses, and risk-averse (i.e., prefer certain options) when they are considering gains, even if the outcomes they are considering are logically or economically equivalent. (lecture, 3/22/18)

Discuss some results of healthy and poor sleep.

Healthy sleep: mentally fast and accurate, stable attention and good focus, good memory (recall and working memory), sound executive decision making, new insights and creative solutions, less risk taking behavior, emotionally steady, realistic optimism. Basically all the things you want and hope for from your brain! Poor sleep: mentally slow and inaccurate, variable attention and poor focus, unreliable memory, weak executive decision making, poor insight, high risk behaviors, emotionally unpredictable, feelings tired/stressed/exhausted, pessimism. All the things you hope you can avoid your brain doing!

What are four theories that might account for forgetting?

In Encoding Failure Theory, the information never actually gets encoded in long-term memory in the first place. In Storage Decay Theory, the assumption is that the biological mechanism responsible for the memory gradually degrades with the passage of time. In Interference Theory, new similar memories or old similar memories cause one to misremember (i.e., proactive and retroactive interference). In Cue-dependent Theory, one possesses the memory but there are insufficient contextual cues to make the memory explicit, which might account for tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. See Griggs, p. 226-230.

"Classical conditioning isn't just about [the CS and US] happening together, it's about [the CS] being informative." Describe an experimental result that support this conclusion. Be sure to explain the key findings of the experiment and how they support this conclusion.

In one experiment, rats were assigned to two different experimental groups. In Group A, rats were shocked 40% of the time after hearing a tone, but were never shocked without first hearing the tone (thus, the tone was predictive of an impending shock). In Group B, rats were also shocked 40% of the time after hearing a tone, but were sometimes shocked without first hearing the tone (thus, the tone was not particularly predictive of an impending shock, because they rats were never safe from a shock). In both experimental conditions, the tone happened together with the shock, but the tone was only informative in the second condition. The experimenters found that the rats became conditioned (showed a fear response to the tone) only in Group A, not in Group B (*this was reversed, incorrectly, on an earlier version of these answers). Thus, the CS must be informative about the US (not merely associated with the US) for classical conditioning to happen. Blocking also supports the idea that informativeness is what drives conditioning. In lecture, an example was given of pairing a tone with a shock to condition an animal to expect a shock when they hear the tone. Next, the tone and a light are paired with the shock. The animals continue to show the fear response to the tone, but not to the light, even though they were presented with just as many light-shock pairings as tone-shock pairings. However, when they were presented with the light, tone, and shock, the light did not provide any new information because they already had learned that the tone precedes a shock. Thus, it not just about the number of times that two events occur together, but whether an event provides information about another event.

When are most of the neurons in your brain made?

Most of the brain's neurons are made in the first 4 months after conception [n.b. after conception, not after birth]. During the 3rd month or so after conception, neuronal development is at its peak pace of constructing half a million neurons per minute. Neurons are generated in the germinal matrix (a structure near the ventricles) and have to migrate to their correct places in the cortex. This process eventually (about 2 months before birth) results in the 6 layers of cortical tissue that you see in the mature brain.

b) Do young persons' suicides usually have antecedents in a one or more psychological disorders, or do they usually occur in psychologically healthy individuals who, for example, suffer a serious bad experience?

Most teens who attempt or commit suicide have a psychological disorder (though remember: psychological disorders are quite common.).

What substance speeds propagation of the action potential? Describe how this substance speeds conduction of the action potential down the axon. (lecture, pg. 46 of textbook)

Myelin is a fatty substance composed of glial cells that wrap around the axons of neurons. If an axon is myelinated, ions like sodium can only move into or out of the axon at the nodes of Ranvier, which are gaps in the myelin sheath that occur along the axon. As a result, the action potential skips from node to node, allowing the action potential to move down the axon more quickly (up to 120 m/sec).

What are the "Big Five" personality traits? Describe what someone would be like who scores high on each of the dimensions

Openness - A person who scores high on this dimension had broad interests, and is receptive to new ideas. They are independent and imaginative. Lower on this dimension is a preference for more familiar things. Conscientiousness - A person who scores high on this dimension is well organized, dependable, careful and disciplined. Extraversion - A person who scores high on this dimension is very social, friendly, talkative, and adventurous; a person lower on this dimension is more solitary. Agreeableness - A person who scores high in this dimension is good-natured, sympathetic and polite. Neuroticism - A person who scores high in this dimension is emotional, insecure and nervous. (p.s. we've talked about these as "high" and "low" for simplicity, but this isn't meant to imply that, say, being introverted is "lacking" something and extroversion is having it; or that being closed to new experience is necessarily a bad thing.)

What is the difference between rods and cones?

Rods are useful primarily in the dark (low levels of light) and cannot perceive color. They saturate to the point of uselessness in bright light. Cones are involved in visual perception under normal, non-dim lighting conditions. They are responsible for color vision.

In the lecture, Dr. Raine discussed factors during pregnancy that influence fetal development and are associated with more aggressive future conduct of the child. Please describe two of these factors.

Poor nutrition: A study on the relationship between maternal nutrition and antisocial behavior was conducted in the Netherlands. During WWII, many pregnant mothers in the country had poor nutrition because the German army blocked food supplies; about 20,000 people died from consequences of starvation. They were compared to a matched group with normal nutrition consumption.Researchers followed more than 4000 mothers and evaluated their children at age 18. They found that lack of nutrition during pregnancy is associated with risk for developing antisocial personality disorder of the child (Neugebauer et al., 1999) Smoking: In a study, researchers asked pregnant mothers to report the number of cigarettes they smoke daily. Later, they collected the children's arrest histories in adulthood. Other factors including socioeconomic status were controlled. The researchers found that maternal smoking during pregnancy increases the risk for violent behavior in the child. The more cigarettes a mother smokes daily, the more aggressive behavior found in her child (e.g. Brennan et al., 1999). [There is quite a spirited debate in the literature about the causes of this relation.] Alcohol: Some individuals exposed to alcohol prenatally are diagnosed with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS). These individuals often have identifiable, distinctive facial features and suffer from brain damage of various sorts. They also have more delinquent conduct, more police contact in adulthood and are arrested more often (e.g. Streissguth et al., 1996)

Name and describe three categories of learning which are preserved in patients with anterograde amnesia (the type of amnesia H.M. had).

Procedural skills: Given practice, amnesic patients (just like the rest of us) will gradually improve on procedural tasks (such as tracing a star shape through a mirror, reading words in a mirror, or completing a maze) even if they might deny recalling having completed the task before. Priming: Amnesics (just like the rest of us) are quicker to fill in the missing letters in "ch----nk" and "o-t--us" if they have previously been shown a list of words containing "chipmunk" and "octopus"—even if they deny having seen the words during the study phase. Classical conditioning: An example was given in class of a neurologist (Claparède) who hid a sharp tack in his hand before greeting an amnesic patient. Their next appointment, the patient refused to shake the experimenter's hand, even though he did not remember having been pricked.

What do REM and slow-wave sleep do for you?

Rapid eye movement (REM) is the time during sleep when we dream, which helps procedural memory and memory consolidation. If you are working on new physical skills, you need REM sleep to make this practice useful and long-lasting ("consolidation"). It also allows us to process emotional memory, keeping the memory of the event but stripping it of the overwhelming qualities. Slow wave or non-rapid eye movement is also important for memory processing, especially of memories of what your heard or saw - declarative memories (like facts - recall that declarative memory is the same thing as explicit memory.)

What is reliability? What makes for a reliable measure of something?

Reliability is "the extent to which the scores for a test are consistent" (Griggs, p.270). For example, if you create an extraversion scale, but people's scores on your scale vary dramatically from one day to the next, you don't have a reliable scale (extraversion itself does not vary from day to day). Highly reliable scales are those that you can count on to provide highly similar results when re-testing something that shouldn't have changed in the meantime.

What were Piaget's 4 stages of development? Give a characteristic feature of each.

Sensorimotor stage (birth to about 18-24 months) - no symbolic reasoning; no distinction between self and the rest of the world; all cognition present and physical; the child has not yet achieved object permanence; at earlier ages, the child fails to reach for hidden objects (until about 8 months), and later makes the A-not-B error (about 8-12 months) Preoperational stage (about 2-7 years old) - no "operations"; fail the conservation tasks; centration (focusing on only one dimension of a problem) Concrete-operational stage (about 7-11 years old) - the child passes conservation tasks and can focus on more than one dimension of a problem, but lacks formal operations (abstract logic) Formal-operational stage (12 years old and older) - the child can reason about abstract and possible/hypothetical things

What is the Stroop effect, and why does it occur?

The Stroop effect was demonstrated during lecture when we viewed a list of color words (that were printed in various colors): it was harder to list the colors of the words when the color of the text did not match the word itself, compared to when they matched. This task is difficult to perform because reading words has become very automatic to us (we can do it without much attention), and this automatic response is in conflict with the actual goals of the task.

From the text: In the 1920s and 1930s, Edward Tolman and his students studied rats' navigation through simple mazes. In one study described in the text (pp. 187-189), some rats were reinforced for reaching the end of the maze every time; some were never reinforced; and a third group were reinforced only after 12 days. In all cases the number of "errors" (wrong turns) was measured. What happened in that third group, and what does it mean?

The rats in the third group showed error rates similar to those of the unreinforced rats over the first 12 days (which is exactly what you would expect - these rats were all getting the same treatment). After Day 12, though, the newly-reinforced rats' performance dramatically increased, with a large drop in errors. By the 13th day their performance was just as good as the continually reinforced rats'. What does it mean? It means that the rats were learning all along, even though their learning wasn't being reinforced or expressed in behavior. Reinforcement then led them to express their learning through their behavior. Tolman's work, though very highly regarded at the time and now as well (Berkeley's psych building was named Tolman Hall after him in 1963), was not typical of behaviorists' work, because Tolman insisted that rats (and others) have a lot of knowledge that is not expressed in behavior.

What is the spacing effect in memory?

This is the technique of spacing out your studying over time, rather than concentrating all of your studying at one time point (which is what happens in the case of cramming). There are hundreds of studies of this phenomenon. In one example Sobel et al. (2011) examined this studying technique in fifth graders. Half of the subjects studied new words twice on day one and were tested in five weeks. This was the "massed" exposure condition. The other half studied once on day one, one more time one week later, and then were tested five weeks after that. This was the "spaced" exposure condition. Those who were in the spaced exposure condition achieved much higher scores on the test, even though they were tested 6 weeks after first learning the words. The advantage of spaced over massed exposure is one of the strongest, most consistent results in psychology.

An fMRI study showed that brain activity in the prefrontal cortex predicted participants' responses earlier than subjects were aware of having made a decision. What does this suggest about our subjective conscious experience?

This study shows that decision-making may involve subconscious processing and that the basis of at least some of our apparently voluntary decisions may in fact be beneath our awareness.

Can infants learn before birth? (i.e., can fetuses learn?) Can you give an example?

Yes, they can. We know this from studies that show that infants' preferences are shaped by their prenatal experiences. Preferences for tastes: Pregnant women ate an increased amount of carrots during their third trimester; later, it was found that their 6-month-old babies liked carroty cereal more (they frowned less and ate more of it), compared to infants whose mothers hadn't eaten lots of carrots. (Mennella, Jagnow, & Beauchamp 2001) Preferences for sounds: Infants were found to prefer the theme music of a TV show their mothers watched frequently while pregnant, compared to the theme music of other TV shows (likewise with certain poems that were read aloud frequently during pregnancy). Newborns also prefer the sound of their own mother's voice over other women's voices.

a) What are the leading causes of death in US teenagers?

Suicide is the second leading cause of death in teenagers after accidents.

4. What is the Nature-Nurture question? Describe how this question applies to (1) individual differences among humans, (2) differentiating humans from other animals, and (3) human development? Considering "nature" and "nurture", how do these line up with "nativism" and "empiricism"?

"Nature" refers to what you are born with (e.g., genetics). "Nurture" refers to what happens to you (e.g., your environment, experiences). (1) Individual differences among humans: what combination of nature and nurture helps explain why humans are not all the same? What makes you who you are? (2) Differentiating humans from other animals: what makes humans "human"? In this line of inquiry, often "Nature" is referred to as the "Nativist" account, and "Nurture" is referred to as the "Empiricist" account. Nature/Nativists argue that what makes us human is our particular genetic makeup; we have different brain structures than other creatures, which gives us "human" capacities. Nurture/Empiricists argue that the experience of developing in a particular social/cultural context is what makes us human. (3) Human development: where does CHANGE come from? The Nature side argues that change comes from maturation over time, i.e., you are born with what you need, and that genetic programming unfolds over time. The Nurture side argues that the change we see in child development comes from learning and experiences.

What are retrieval cues?

Retrieval cues are hints or signals that help cause one to recall a memory. In a famous example, in novel by Marcel Proust (A la recherche du temps perdu, often translated as Remembrance of things past), a character is described eating a madeleine (a small cake with a distinctive shape and flavor), which triggers a memory from his childhood. In this case, the madeleine was a retrieval cue which helped the character to access memories stored in long-term memory.

d) Are there gender differences in suicide?

Yes: Women attempt suicide more often than men, but men are more likely to die from suicide -- in part because men tend to use more lethal methods (e.g., guns).

The cerebral cortex can be divided into two functionally different visual processing streams. Please describe the two streams and their functional differences.

look at desktop

From the text: Albert Bandura's "Bobo doll" studies from the early 1960s are among the most famous studies in psychology. What was the idea, and what did they discover?

In Bandura's Bobo doll studies, children watched an adult behave aggressively toward a large inflatable doll named Bobo. Then, after taking children's toys away to induce frustration, the researchers left the children alone in a room with Bobo. Lo and behold, the children imitated the specific, sometimes idiosyncratic violent behaviors that they had seen the adults carry out on Bobo. Sometimes the children even invented their own novel ways of being violent towards Bobo, beyond what they had seen the adults do. Control groups of children did not respond this way (if they had seen no adult demonstration, or if they had seen the adult interact nicely with the Bobo-doll). The Bobo experiments demonstrated that humans can learn simply by watching another person perform a behavior—a type of learning called "modeling" or "observational learning"—and do not learn only from direct experience.

3. Distinguish between the "football throwing" model of conversation vs. the conversation as a project.

In the "football-throwing" model, conversations are an exchange of messages that are fully formed before transmission to each participant. In the conversation-as-a-project view, the exchange is much more interactive and shaped by each member's responses in turn, including nuanced signals for beginning to talk, changing topics, signaling an intent to finish talking, and so on.

Psychopaths often have different amygdala activity compared to normal control groups. Please describe these differences.

Psychopaths are often cold-blooded, lack fear/conscious/shame, and may involve in more calculated aggression. These individuals tend to have reduced volume and functioning in their amygdala. [They sometimes provide similar answers to moral judgment questions, compared to non-psychopaths; they just don't sweat the decision. These findings indicate that psychopaths may know the difference from right to wrong, but their feeling of wrongness is impaired (Glenn et al., 2009). ]

4. How do Paul Grice's principles of cooperative conversation apply to the following exchange?

A: Did your landlord finally get your toilet fixed? B: It looks like I'll be staying in a hotel this weekend. Speak the truth: A can assume that B is telling the truth about the plan to stay in a hotel, so that concept should affect A's understanding of the answer. Be relevant and be informative: A can assume that B is providing this information as a way of answering the question, that is, B will be staying in a hotel because B's toilet is still broken; this is not some unrelated random fact B has chosen to share. Be clear, brief, unambiguous: This whole utterance is a brief, somewhat humorous way of communicating, "It is not certain yet whether the landlord will have it fixed by the weekend, but so far no progress has been made on my toilet, which is making it really difficult to stay at my house, because access to a functioning bathroom is basically essential." B can be reasonably confident that A will receive the intended message because both A and B are aware of these cooperative principles.

Consider the case of the man whose brain tumor caused his pedophilia. Was he responsible? Was he less responsible than another person we might imagine, who had a less conspicuous, but nonetheless biological, anomaly that caused criminal behavior? Where should we draw the line, assuming we fundamentally want to hold people accountable for their behavior?

No single right answer

Explain in what sense memory does not work like a video recording.

Memory is constructive, much like perception is. Our perceptions come from integrating what we sense with what we already know. This is also true of memory. We only remember traces of the past. When we recall a memory, we are filling in the gaps in our true memories with what we think was most likely to have happened.

Explain the "all or none" law of neuronal firing. Keeping this in mind, how might a neuron convey the intensity of a stimulus? (lecture, pg. 46 of the textbook)

The all-or-none law is the law that all action potentials have the same strength and speed regardless of the triggering stimulus. When a stimulus is strong enough to depolarize the neuronal membrane, the neuron produces an action potential, or "fires". The action potential will be the same size and will propagate at the same speed regardless of the strength of the initial stimulus. In order to convey the intensity of a stimulus, the neuron could increase or decrease its rate of firing, or more or less neurons could be involved in firing.

What do the findings from question 5 imply about the nature of human memory?

These phenomena imply the existence of an implicit memory system that is distinct from declarative (explicit) memory. That H.M. could perform these tasks implies that the hippocampus is not required for the formation of implicit memories.

Given what you have learned about recall and recognition memory, how should you go about studying for an exam?

Don't simply rely on the feeling of familiarity in recognizing material to judge how well you actually know the material, because you might have difficulty with recalling information during the exam (as we learned, recall is harder than recognition). Test yourself on how well you can recall the course material. This is why study tools like flashcards work. Good luck studying!

What is the Flynn effect?

James Flynn is an intelligence researcher who popularized this fact: among Western industrialized nations, average scores on intelligence tests have improved over the last 100 years or so. Whereas average scores on Stanford-Binet and Weschsler tests in 1918 would be about 76, today they are 100, an improvement of about 3 IQ points per decade. We don't know why this appears to be happening, but some people think it's because of environmental improvements in education and nutrition. (Griggs, p.277)

From lecture 5, Thursday] What does the "grandmother cell" theory or the distributed cell theory state regarding object recognition? How does empirical evidence speak two these theories?

"Grandmother cell" theory: different concepts are coded by different sets of neurons. E.g. a 'grandmother' cell fires when and only when a person sees (or encounters the idea of) her grandmother. In the extreme, for a given concept there would be a neuron that encodes that concept. Now, this is an extreme we mention to make the theoretical distinction clear; I don't know if there are any neuroscientists who would argue that this is correct as stated. Distributed cell theory: recognition requires a large number of cells to be simultaneously activated, and a specific concept is coded by a unique firing pattern over the cells. Studies have been conducted on monkeys and humans, where their neural activity in IT and MTL were recorded when presented with a range of different objects. A lot of neurons in IT and MTL were found to be selectively activated by different pictures of given objects or individuals. In most cases these neurons did not fire when different, other classes of objects or individuals were presented. These studies provide evidence for sparse invariant encoding of concepts in IT/MTL, and are against a completely distributive theory. However, these studies did find some cells that respond to more than one class concepts, which suggest that the extreme version of grandma cell theory is also wrong and concept recognition is neuronally distributed at least to some extent.

As people age, what are the changes in their temporal focus and emotional well-being? What explains this change?

According to Laura Carstensen and other researchers, as people age, they tend to change from "future-focused" to "present-focused." In fact, it seems that anyone with a sense of limited future time span tends to be "present-focused." Studies have found that not only older people, but HIV positive patients who do not think they will live for long, and young people who are about to move across country tend to be more "present-focused." For example, they wanted to spend time with people they are already familiar and close with rather than meeting new people. On average, people's emotional well-being appears to improve as they age. In a 10-year longitudinal study using an experience sampling method, Carstensen et al. found that positive emotional experiences improve as people age, and peak around 60-70. This might be because older people are better at managing emotions and focusing on positive experiences. For example, studies have shown that older people have better memory for emotionally positive photos than negative photos, and show stronger amygdala activation in response to positive images relative neutral ones. Younger people are more responsive to both positive and negatively valenced stimuli relative to neutral ones.

Visual illusions provide insights regarding underlying processes in visual perception. Please describe the following illusions and why they occur: Adelson's checker shadow illusion

Although square A and B are of identical brightness, B (in the shadow) appears lighter than A (not in the shadow). The brain uses the surroundings of the two squares to determine their brightness. B appears lighter because it is in a darker local context. Our brain realizes that A is in the shadow, and knows that in general things in the shadow appear darker than they otherwise would, so it adjusts the interpretation of brightness of A to be lighter. The latter explanation indicates that visual perception can be influenced by top-down processes. Note that bottom-up process is the processing of incoming sensory information as it travels up from the sensory structures to the brain, and top-down processing is the brain's use of knowledge, beliefs, and expectations to interpret sensory information. Perception involves interplay between bottom-up sensation and top-down inferences.

Reconcile the following two scenarios (A) and (B) with Paul Ekman's theory on the innateness and universality of human facial expressions: A goalkeeper performing a heroic save in a World Cup game doesn't immediately smile in response to making the save, but afterwards, beams at his teammates when he makes eye contact. An American doctor relocates to South Korea and notes that her patients there show considerably fewer expressions such as grimaces, winces, frowns, and tears in association with receiving bad medical news than she saw back home.

Although the smile (for example) is a facial response linked innately to positive feelings like joy, relief, and pride, our use of facial expressions may have evolved primarily for the social communication of emotions rather than their pure expression - or at least that's how it seems when we consider how facial expressions are used. Until the goalkeeper looks at his teammates, the need to communicate his emotion may not have asserted itself yet. Although the actual forms of facial expression appear to be universal - so smiles would not be expected in response to bad news in any culture - a cultural tendency towards stoicism or expressiveness might affect the average level of openness.

In Duckworth & Seligman's study, what did willpower predict among 8th grade students? In the Dunedin, New Zealand study, what are some life outcomes that were predicted by self-control?

Among 8th graders at Masterman (a selective Philadelphia public school), willpower (e.g., self-control) was predictive of final GPA, above and beyond IQ. In the New Zealand study, childhood self-control predicted health, SES, and income positively, and drug-use, poverty, and criminal convictions negatively at age 32. Heightened self-control led to desirable outcomes (e.g., good health, fewer criminal convictions). Additionally, this effect was not driven only by "snares" (negative events with long-term consequences) in the teenage years. When researchers removed subjects from the sample who had an event occur during their teenage years that would make their adult life harder, the relation between high self control and good life outcomes still held.

c) When people commit suicide, is it generally the culmination of a long and persistent inevitable plan?

Among individuals aged 18-34 who attempt suicide, most attempts are impulsive acts with (in one study) 40% of individuals deciding to commit suicide less than 5 minutes before their attempt and 70% making the decision less than an hour before. Notably, suicide rates depend on the availability of the means to do it. For example, in the UK, when there was a reduction in the toxicity of gas used in homes, the suicide rate dropped by 30%. Similarly, in Sri Lanka, an increase in toxic pesticides was associated with a substantial increase in suicides. When these pesticides were banned, the suicide rate dropped by 50%. Finally, in the US, although women attempt suicide more often than men, men are more likely to die from their attempts because they use more lethal means like guns. Though people do have suicidal thoughts, and of them some progress to having an actual plan to do it, it appears that the final decision is typically an impulsive one.

What is an agonist? What is an antagonist? The symptoms of both Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia are related to the neurotransmitter dopamine. Explain how dopamine level relates to the symptoms of both diseases, how treatment drugs act to alter dopamine activity (L-dopa for Parkinson's, antipsychotic drugs for schizophrenia), and whether these drugs are acting as agonists or antagonists for dopamine.

An agonist is a drug/substance that increases neurotransmitter activity, while an antagonist is a drug/substance that decreases neurotransmitter activity. The symptoms of Parkinson's occur when there is too little dopamine (in the basal ganglia). L-dopa treats Parkinson's by bringing dopamine precursors to the brain, resulting in the increased production of dopamine. L-dopa is therefore functioning as an agonist. On the other hand, symptoms of schizophrenia occur when there is an excess of dopamine. Certain types of antipsychotic drugs for schizophrenia act by blocking receptor sites for dopamine in the postsynaptic neuron; this means that even if dopamine has been released by a neuron into the synapse, the dopamine cannot bind to receptors (this has the effect of reducing overall dopamine activity). This type of antipsychotic drug is therefore functioning as an antagonist.

9. According to Chapter 10 of your textbook, what are the six major categories of mental disorders? What are the defining characteristics of each?

Anxiety disorders: excessive fear, anxiety, & related behavioral disturbances (e.g., avoidance) Obsessive-compulsive & related disorders: excessive, recurrent obsessions and/or compulsive behaviors Depressive disorders: involve the presence of sad, empty, or irritable mood; somatic and cognitive changes that significantly affect one's ability to function. Bipolar & related disorders: mood (often dramatically) swings between depression and (hypo)mania Schizophrenia spectrum/psychotic disorders: loss of contact with reality Personality disorders: inflexible, longstanding personality traits that lead to behavior that impairs social functioning and deviates from cultural norms.

According to Jean Piaget, all cognitive development depends on the processes of assimilation and accommodation. Define these two terms and give examples of each.

Assimilation is the process of putting new experiences into existing knowledge and existing theory (theory being what Piaget would call children's "schemas"). Assimilation is taking a particular instance and interpreting it using existing mental structures. The child drawing a trangle but assimilating it to a generic rectangle "shape" schema is a good example. Accommodation is the process of changing existing schemas to fit new experiences. This is learning - changing knowledge in response to new knowledge. For example, a child looks at how a fan works and builds a theory, which is that the fan (the moving thing) creates the wind. When this child goes out and sees a tree being blown by the wind, he will engage in the process of "assimilation," that is, he will think that the tree (moving branches) is the cause of the wind, just like the fan is the cause of the wind. The child is assimilating this outdoor experience to his or her schema of wind. If the child somehow finds out that the tree is not the cause of the wind, the child will engage in the process of "accommodation" to modify his theory on where wind comes from in order to fit this new experience. (Lecture; Textbook p. 300)

5) From Weisberg's lecture, what did Popper believe should be a criterion for a theory being scientific?

Popper believed that in order for something to be scientific, it had to be falsifiable. This means that for any hypothesis to have credence, it must be disprovable before it can be accepted as a scientific hypothesis or theory. In a sense, an unfalsifiable theory is neither right nor wrong, which is a bad place for a theory to live! Weisberg described his own view that this isn't necessarily a fair criterion for psychology because given the complex nature of the brain, theories and hypotheses may not be as black or white as in other domains, like some areas of physics. Predictions will be more probabilistic and not necessarily falsifiable. Testable, but not absolutely falsifiable.

Contrary to Piaget's theories, modern developmental researchers have found that infants do have certain sophisticated intuitions about the world around them. Describe one study that tested Piaget's theory of object permanence, as well as one study that examined infant intuitions about probability.

Baillargeon (1987): in this study, infants were shown a rigid sheet moving back and forth (like the motion of a laptop opening and closing), until the infants habituated. A box was then placed out of sight behind the rigid sheet, and the infants were shown either (1) a possible event, i.e., the rigid sheet stopped moving when it hit the box, or (2) an impossible event, i.e., the rigid sheet appeared to move straight through the box. The study found that the infants looked longer (were surprised) at the impossible event, suggesting that they have certain intuitions about the physics of the situation, even though they could not see the box. This is not what Piaget would have predicted, since he believed that infants of this age lack object permanence, and therefore would not be able to reason about objects they cannot see. Xu & Garcia (2008), Xu & Denison (2009): in this study, infants were shown 2 boxes that contained different proportions of colored balls (i.e., one box contained mostly pink balls, the other box contained mostly yellow balls). The experimenter would randomly take out 5 balls from a box. Infants would look longer at improbable outcomes (such as drawing 5 balls from the box with mostly pink balls, but getting mostly yellow balls). This suggests that even young infants have some form of "rational" thought, as well as some basic intuitions about probability.

How is bipolar disorder different from unipolar depression?

Bipolar disorder includes either mania (most prototypically) or hypomania (i.e., less severe mania), neither of which is present in depression. The depressive episodes seen in bipolar disorder are similar to those seen in unipolar depression. Bipolar disorder has a stronger genetic component (as evidenced by metrics like higher heritability) and more genetic overlap with disorders like schizophrenia than with depression. Bipolar disorder also carries a higher risk of suicide than unipolar depression. Bipolar disorder is seen as a life-long disorder (someone can be in remission from bipolar disorder), while depression can either be chronic/recurrent or single-episode.

What is active constructive responding? How does it differ from passive constructive, passive destructive, and active destructive? Give examples of each in a context in which a husband is responding to news that his wife has received a promotion.

CA: Active constructive responding involves asking positively-oriented follow-up questions that allows one to relive the positive experience with the loved one. (e.g., That's wonderful! How did it happen? When did it happen? Were you delighted, or how did it make you feel when you found out? Did you see it coming?) CP:Passive constructive responding involves a brief positive comment that is not engaging with the person's experience. (e.g., Well done.) DA: Active destructive responding involves asking or making negatively oriented follow-up questions/comments that draw attention to what might be negative about the positive event. (e.g., Do you think you got the job because you're the only woman in the department? Either way, I'm glad you can start to pull more of your weight around here.) DP: Passive destructive responding involves a brief negative comment that is uninterested in the wife's experience. (e.g., Ok honey, that's nice. Did you take out the trash?)

What is change blindness? Describe an example from lecture that demonstrates this phenomenon.

Change blindness refers to the failure to notice large changes in a visual stimulus, and it is thought that this phenomenon reflects attention-related processes. In lecture, we watched a video of people moving around and passing balls - when we are directed to attend to particular parts of the video (e.g., count the number of times the players in white jerseys pass the ball), it becomes more likely that we will fail to notice the gorilla that appears partway through. Similarly, we also watched a video showing that, during the process of signing forms, participants in a study failed to notice that their experimenter was replaced with another person midway through. The message of these demonstrations is that how noticeable something is doesn't only depend on the magnitude of the perceptual change. What you're paying attention to (usually a function of your goals) matters a lot.

What is chunking? What does it have to do with some people's ability to recall extremely long lists of digits? What does it have to do with the ability of chess masters to recall the arrangement of pieces on a chess board?

Chunking is the process of reorganizing materials in working memory by grouping a number of items into a single, larger unit. For example, someone might chunk "3, 4, 9, 2" into "3 minutes and 49 point 2 seconds, near world-record mile time." People who can remember extremely long lists of digits often accomplish this by chunking groups of digits into meaningful units (e.g., running times, for the participant in Ericsson et al.'s study). Similarly, chess masters can recall the arrangement of pieces on a chess board because they chunk the pieces into meaningful groups of pieces based on the rules and structures of chess. If they can't use these chunking strategies (e.g., because the list of numbers can't be turned into running times, or because the chess pieces are arranged randomly rather than according to the rules of chess), they can no longer hold so much information in working memory.

Describe post-traumatic growth and how it differs from post-traumatic stress disorder?

Post-traumatic stress disorder is well-known as a common response to experiencing trauma. Post-traumatic growth, however, results after trauma just as—if not considerably more—often than post-traumatic stress disorder. Among other symptoms, those with post-traumatic growth exhibit future-minded thinking with a sense of possibility, altered priorities, an appreciation of one's own strength, greater appreciation of life, and more intimacy in their relationships.

5. Classical conditioning and operant/instrumental conditioning are rather different phenomena but they are often confused with each other. Explain how classical and operant conditioning are different from each other. Be sure to include at least 2 specific differences in your answer.

Classical conditioning involves learning an association between an unconditioned stimulus and a conditioned stimulus, such that the conditioned stimulus triggers an automatic response. In contrast, operant conditioning involves learning to associate a behavior with a reward, and therefore performing rewarded behaviors more frequently. Specifically, two key differences are: -Operant conditioning involves novel behaviors; classical conditioning involves automatic responses -Operant condition involves learning about the association between response and a stimulus (a behavior and a reward); classical conditioning involves learning about the relationship between two stimuli

Discuss the classical theory of categorization please. What does the theory say and why does it fail to capture some aspects of human behavior? Next, discuss Ludwig Wittgenstein's modification to the classical theory.

Classical theory of categorization states that a category is defined by their necessary and sufficient features. 'Necessary' means that an item has to have all the required features to belong to a category. 'Sufficient' means that all items that have these required features are members of that category. Therefore the classical theory suggest that, for any item, we should have clear-cut answer regarding whether it belongs to a certain category. Likewise, for any category, we should have clear-cut answer regarding its set of members. However, these are not true according to our experiences. People sometimes do not agree on whether an item belong to a category (e.g. carpet belong to furniture?). Moreover, categorization judgment of a single person can vary across different situations/time. These phenomena suggest that there are gray areas in object classification. Ludwig Wittgenstein believed that the meaning of a word depends on its use in the language, and the use of a word is diverse and flexible. He suggests that category members don't have to share a single set of common features, instead, they are organized by 'family resemblance'. In other words, members in a category have shared features among them, but the way these features are shared are not clear-cut: Some members may be similar on some features and other members may be similar on other features (they are organized in "a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing", Philosophical investigations 66). Some objects may have almost all the features typically associated with a certain category, whereas some objects may have fewer (e.g. chair have more furniture feature than carpet). Therefore, category boundaries are graded and fuzzy.

What is confirmation bias? How might the confirmation bias have a negative impact on reasoning?

Confirmation bias is the tendency to favor information that supports one's existing beliefs (and to disregard information that is contrary to their existing beliefs), regardless of whether that information is true or diagnostic. As a result of confirmation bias, people will often spend more time gathering favorable or confirmatory information than unfavorable/diconfimratory information when forming judgments or opinions (e.g., watching only liberal or conservative news when forming opinions about divisive political issues); may recall favorable information selectively; and may interpret ambiguous information as evidence in favor of their existing position. While we might debate whether it is okay to be biased in interpreting information, the confirmation bias can have a negative impact on reasoning because it often drives people to draw (perhaps incorrect) inductive inferences from skewed or biased samples of information. In addition, the confirmation bias can undermine critical thinking by allowing individuals to interpret neutral, ambiguous, or false information as evidence in support of their existing (and perhaps unsubstantiated) beliefs (Griggs, pp.259-260).

Below are two possible strategies for encouraging people to stop littering in a national park. Considering conformity as a motivator, what do you predict would happen with each strategy? Gather all the litter in the park and display it in giant plastic bins to create an installation piece to draw attention to the size of the litter problem. Remove as much litter as possible and post signage with statistics highlighting how frequently guests in the park make use of the provided trash cans and recycling bins.

Conformity as a motivator might actually work counterproductively in response to this strategy: rather than seeing valuing the environment as the norm or recognizing litter as as a dramatic problem that must be stopped, visitors to the park may be more inclined to be careless with litter, since 'everyone else is doing it'. This is akin to the strategy hotels use of reminding visitors that "the majority of our guests reuse their towels," and would likely meet with success: people would see proper trash disposal as the norm and conform to it.

Explain the results of Festinger's experiment on paying subjects to lie about enjoying a boring task in terms of cognitive dissonance.

Control participants, who completed and later rated the enjoyability of a boring task, rated it as extremely boring; these subjects had performed no action to conflict with their beliefs. Participants who were offered $20 to lie to someone they believed was a fellow subject about how fun the task was also suffered no conflict between their actions and beliefs, although they personally rated the task as boring. In this case, the monetary incentive was sufficient to justify to themselves why they had misled others about the task. However, participants who were offered $1 to mislead another person about the task later reported that they perceived it as somewhat fun. According to cognitive dissonance theory, for this group, the conflict between their actions (saying the task was interesting in return for a pitiful incentive) and their beliefs (that the task was boring, and that they are not inherently untruthful) would have been so uncomfortable that it caused them to change their belief about the task and decide it wasn't that boring after all.

What is Dunbar's correlation? Give two possible causal explanations for Dunbar's correlation.

Dunbar's correlation is an observed positive correlation between social group size and the percentage of the brain accounted for by the neocortex, among primates. In essence, it means that species with larger social groups tend to have more of their brain dedicated to "higher" or more complex thinking processes. Possible explanations: Greater amounts of neocortex (which presumably evolved for some other reason) cause species to live in larger groups because the neocortex allows the animal to keep track of complex social relations. Neocortex causing larger social groups. Living in larger groups (which presumably conferred some survival advantage) causes species to evolve larger neocortices, presumably because living in larger groups requires the cognitive ability to keep track of complex social relations. (Note the subtle but important difference between a and b. This is the problem of reverse causation). Larger social groups causing larger neocortex. Both group size and the neocortex grow together for some unrelated third reason. One possibility might be hunting. Perhaps primates that would benefit from hunting in groups also would benefit from "hunting smarter" and so these two traits (group size, relatively large neocortex) go together without one really causing the other. (This is the third variable problem. If any of these methods terms are unfamiliar to you, you should review your notes from the first few recitations.)

How do hallucinations differ from delusions in schizophrenia?

Delusions are types of beliefs—specifically, impossible false beliefs (e.g., "I am Alexander the Great," "squirrels are plotting against me"). Hallucinations are not beliefs, but rather sensory experiences that are false. Hallucinations can occur in any sensory domain (e.g., seeing, hearing), but most often they take an auditory form (i.e., hearing someone talking). Both delusions and hallucinations are types of positive symptoms in schizophrenia.

Describe how an action potential is transmitted down the axon. Also, why does the action potential move down the axon in only one direction?

Depolarization at one location of the axon causes nearby sodium channels to open, triggering sodium ions to rush into the axon at that neighboring location. In this way, depolarization propagates down the axon, moving in a domino-like sequence. The action potential only propagates in one direction because of the refractory period - since a given patch of membrane becomes temporarily unresponsive after experiencing an action potential, the action potential thus can only move down the axon in one direction, from the cell body to the axon terminals.

Describe some ways that human progress has advanced over the last 200 years? What major indicator of human progress has NOT changed? What might that mean?

Despite improvements in violence reduction, longevity, infant mortality reduction, disease prevention, democracy, human rights, and a host of other indicators, Seligman argues that it does not appear that people are appreciably happier or less depressed today than they were, say, 200 years ago. This development suggests a number of things, one of which is that the alleviation of material human suffering, no matter how successful, will not necessarily lead to great leaps in societal wellbeing and happiness.

What is dual-process theory? What is the difference between system 1 and system 2?

Dual-process theory is the proposal that judgment involves two types of thinking: a fast, efficient, but sometimes faulty set of strategies (i.e. system 1), and a slower, more laborious, but less risky set of strategies (i.e. system 2). [this nomenclature and division of things comes from Daniel Kahneman. Not all researchers in this domain like this way of characterizing it.] System 1 is automatic thinking. A lot of heuristics we have such as the availability heuristic and the representativeness heuristic result from system 1 thinking. Many aspects of perception would fall under System 1 as well. System 2 is effortful thinking. Evidence shows that people are more likely to use system 2 thinking when the problem is easily quantified. For example, some argue that people tend to be relatively sophisticated when thinking about sporting events. In such cases, each player's performance is easily assessed via the game's score or a race's outcome, and each contest is immediately understood as a "sample" that may or may not be a good indicator of a player's (or team's) overall quality. (textbook pp.352-354)

Describe and explain Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve for long-term memory.

Hermann Ebbinghaus devised a series of experiments he conducted on himself in order to understand how he learned random information and how well he retained it over time. As replicated numerous times by later studies (e.g., Bahrick, 1984), the forgetting curve he identified shows how humans forget things over time. Instead of a slow decline, the memory curve starts high on day 1 (we retain what happens most recently the best), drops precipitously, and then levels off in a slow decline by day 3. This suggests that the recall rate for information gathered 3 days ago vs. 30 days ago is quite similar, while the recall rate of 3 days ago vs. 1 day ago is dramatically different (see the graph on Griggs, p. 226).

3. What is the significance of the quotation, language "makes infinite use of finite means"? What role does the use of syntax and phrases play in enabling or constraining that?

Each human language makes meaningful distictions among a limited number of sounds and words, but almost any number of novel - yet intelligible - combinations of those units are possible. Syntax allows speakers of English, for example, to recognize the difference between "Dracula hates the wolfman" and "The wolfman hates Dracula," even though the 'ingredients' of those sentences are identical. Categories of words or phrases are the usual targets of syntactic rules which dictate how they may be formed and arranged to alter the meaning. However, some arrangements of phrases are forbidden within the grammar of a given langauge, even if they are interpretable ("What does John like the girl who wears?"). Some phrases are ambiguous in what is connected to what, or what has scope over what (in "old men and women," does "old" have scope over "men" or over the conjoined "men and women"?); this is hard to avoid when taking a hierarchy and expressing it as a linear sequence, just as it's hard to display the earth on a 2-D surface. These ambiguities are typically resolved by listeners effortlessly and without special attention, by using context and probability. Sometimes phrase structures make cognitive demands such as requiring that you remember the subject of a sentence that may be quite distant from its verb because lots of words (and embedded phrases) intervene.

Is one's episodic memory of September 11th, 2001 likely to be any more factually correct than your memory of what happened to you on September 10th, 2001, a more ordinary news day? Why or why not, and how do we know?

Even though "flashbulb memories" of shocking or emotional events may seem more vivid and realistic than other types of memories, research suggests that they are no more factually accurate in their details. Talarico & Rubin (2009) demonstrated this in their study of Duke students' memories of what they were doing on September 11th and on the preceding days. When they asked the same students to recall these details again at a later date, the researchers found no differences in the number or consistency of details reported, even though participants felt much more certain of their memories from September 11th. "Flashbulb memories" may seem especially long-lasting because we tend to recall and rehearse them (for example, recounting where you were and what you were doing at the time) more frequently than other types of memories—but this doesn't ensure that our recollections are correct. To be clear, one would expect that semantic memory of important dates would have more information than for unimportant dates, for the perfectly ordinary reason that you hear about facts of important dates more often. It's just that the episodic, "I-can-feel-myself-reliving-this" aspect is not ordinarily more accurate.

What are the different types of memory?

Explicit (declarative) memory - Memories that you can state or describe. What we normally think of when we think of memory. There are two subtypes: Semantic memory - general knowledge about the world that is not tied to a specific occurrence or event, a memory of facts. Ex. Zebras have stripes. Episodic memory - your memories of specific events, your ability to place yourself in a situation in your past and live that event in your mind again. Unclear if this type of memory is unique to humans or not. Implicit (procedural) memory - memories that influence behavior, but do not require conscious awareness during learning (though attention does help). It is hard to verbalize the content of implicit memories. There are three subtypes: Skills - abilities you have learned that you perform without deliberate conscious effort. Ex. Driving a car, riding a bike, typing on a keyboard, throwing a ball Priming - when an earlier stimulus influences the response of a later stimulus. Ex. Quicker to identify that 'flower' is a word and not just a string of letters after previously identifying the word 'plant'. Conditioning - classical conditioning, just as we've described it

What are extinction and spontaneous recovery and what do they tell us about the learning mechanisms involved in classical conditioning?

Extinction is the undoing of a previously learned response (CR upon presentation of a CS) so that the response (CR) is no longer produced when the CS is presented. Spontaneous recovery is the reappearance of an extinguished response (CR) after a period in which no further conditioning trials have been presented. The existence of spontaneous recovery suggests that the associations formed during classical conditioning are not destroyed by extinction, but instead that what probably occurs is that new relationships (that the CS does not lead to the unconditioned response) are formed that inhibit the CS-CR relationship that was established through classical conditioning. See pg 171-174.

10. How does speed of mental processing change developmentally?

From infancy to early adulthood: In a study on brain functioning, participants were asked to do simple tasks such as a digit-symbol code translation task, circling 2 same digits in a string of numbers, touching the light that is lit, etc. The results show that performance on such simple tasks gets faster and faster from infancy to early adulthood and peaks around 20 years old. From early adulthood on: As people age, speed of processing, working memory, and long-term memory tend to deteriorate and world knowledge tends to stay stable or even improve.

2. Describe habituation. What are some examples of these phenomena from your everyday life? How could an experimenter use habituation to explore the perceptual capabilities of an animal or human?

Habituation is the decline in an organism's response to a stimulus once the stimulus has become familiar (like when you no longer hear the faucet dripping after sitting in your kitchen for a while). In class, the professor made a loud noise in the microphone, and many people were startled. When he made the noise a second time, people were less startled. Thus, habituation is adaptive because it helps us respond to changes in our environment. Habituation can be used by psychologists to test whether an organism detects a change in stimuli. For example, in order to see whether infants can discriminate between speech sounds (like "p" and "b"), experimenters will repeatedly present infants with one sound (e.g., "p") and then once the infant has habituated to that sound they will randomly present a different sound (e.g., "b"). If the infant all of a sudden responds to the new sound with heightened arousal or attention, it is evidence that they have perceived the difference. Thus, the infant habituates to the "p" sound, and then responds (dishabituates) when the "b" sound is presented.

Can understand biological causes of predisposition to violence help in treatment? Raine gave an example involving omega-3 fatty acids. Say a bit about this study.

Homicide mortality rate is negatively correlated with seafood consumption across countries (Hibbeln, 2010), suggesting (weakly, it's just a correlation) that something in fish might dampen violent behavior. Raine has found that omega 3 fatty acids can be useful in reducing the antisocial and aggressive behavior. Children between age 8-16 years were assigned to a treatment condition and a control condition. For a period of 6 months, they received a fruit drink each day. In the treatment condition, omega-3 was added to the drink. The control group received placebo drinks. Only children who took omega-3 displayed reductions in their antisocial and aggressive behavior after the treatment period, indicating the effectiveness of omega-3 (Raine, 2015).

Describe the Flynn Effect.

IQ has increased over recent generations. On average, people score 15 IQ points higher than they used to. Researchers are not sure why. (Dr Seligman did not point out that there is some evidence that the Flynn Effect may have been driven in part by fewer low-scoring outliers in the general population. Also, the Flynn Effect seems to be slowing down in recent years in certain developed nations. Either way, though, Dr. Seligman's main point was that it is worth wondering or evaluating whether there has been a similar change in moral attitudes.)

You have a child who is wetting the bed. Explain how you would stop this behavior using a) the principles of classical conditioning, and b) the principles of operant conditioning.

If I was using classical conditioning to address a child's bed-wetting habit, I would create an association between bed-wetting and waking up. As discussed in lecture, you can buy mattress pads that make a noise when they get wet. Thus, every time the child wets the bed, he would hear the noise and wake up. Over time, he would learn this association and wake up in order to use the bathroom. If I were using operant conditioning to address his bed-wetting, I would reward him for nights in which he did not wet the bed. Over time, this rewarded behavior would become more frequent. This solution has problems, though: operant conditioning typically works over the behaviors of individuals in a position to implement them readily, and sleeping children might not be so.

4. Explain how the arbitrariness of sounds to word meanings is useful.

If words that sound similar mean the same thing, then there are more opportunities for confusion, as related words are more likely to be discussed in the same context. However, if related concepts have more distinct sounds, then less precise perceptual knowledge is necessary for the listener to correctly interpret the intention of the speaker. (A relevant example in class was about two similar-sounding words for the right and left sides of a ship - in a storm, "starboard" and "port" are easier to distinguish than "starboard" and "larboard".)

Describe the Latané and Darley "smoke filled room" study.

In Latané & Darley's "smoke filled room" study, subjects entered a room and started filling out a questionnaire. After several minutes, smoke began pouring into the room from an air vent, and began to fill the room. If the subject was alone, s/he usually exited and started making inquiries. If there were two confederates with the subject (confederates who noticed the smoke and expressed no concern), subjects ignored the smoke. If there were two other subjects, most often none of the three got up to report the smoke. They just sat there letting it billow around them until they could hardly see in front of them. The presence of other people had an inhibiting effect on action.

Most studies in the field of neurocriminology are correlational, meaning that we know antisocial individuals have different brain functions but we don't know the causal direction. Please describe a study where we can make better causal inferences.

In a study conducted in Mauritius, researchers measured electrodermal fear conditioning in children at age 3. Poor fear conditioning implies poor amygdala functioning. Later, the researchers ascertained their criminal record at age 23. After controlling for gender, ethnicity and social adversity, they found that criminals had worse fear conditioning than non-criminals. This study implies that poorer fear conditioning (poor amygdala functioning) at age 3 predisposes to more crime in adulthood (Gao, Raine, et al., 2010). In such a case the criminal behavior cannot be causing the fear conditioning difference because they occur in the opposite order in time.

B) Describe one study result that supports the claim that practice and cognitive ability both matter for extraordinary performance in a particular domain.

In a study with skilled piano players, researchers found that sight reading performance correlated with both lifetime hours of practice (a measure of deliberate practice) and working memory (a measure of general cognitive ability that is thought to be fairly stable over time). The effects of practice were stronger, but both measures showed a substantial correlation with sight reading performance.

9. Why do teenagers tend to engage in risky and destructive behaviors? What are the potential explanations from neuroscience?

In general, teenagers' tendency to engage in risky and destructive behaviors isn't explained by arguing that they are misinformed or incapable of logical reasoning. Teenagers do not yet have fully developed frontal lobes, which are critical for cognitive control. Frontal lobe development permits more cognitive control, less leaping-to-conclusions, and more reasoned behavior. They also show increased sensitivity to dopamine, and therefore may be more sensitive to rewarding stimuli.

When do people make dispositional vs. situational attributions about themselves? Could we call this a bias as well? What's a prominent exception to the general trend?

In general, we tend to attribute good things that happen to our disposition (e.g., if I pass an exam: I am smart and worked hard) while blaming bad things on situational factors such as the world or other people (e.g., if I fail: the professor wrote an unfair exam). This is sometimes called the self-serving bias, as people tend to interpret events in a systematically biased way that serves their own self-image. (We didn't talk about this in class, but the argument has been defended that self-serving biases are actually good for us. Also, self-serving biases may be smaller in depressed persons. For a review (FYI), you might have a look at Mezulis, Abramson, Hyde, Hankin, Psy. Bulletin, 2004.) Another example: when people are successful in business, this bias would lead such a person to focus primarily on the things he or she did that were necessary for his or her success, and not on the situational conditions that also made that success possible (e.g., having gone to good schools from elementary school onward, having had access to a workforce with a decent public education, the presence of public goods like roads, fire departments, etc.). One exception is the way people sometimes respond to catastrophes. For example, if you're having lunch with a friend and he steps outside and get hit by a taxi, you may start to blame yourself over things you could not control (e.g., "If only I had made him get another cup of coffee"). In light of really terrible things, people sometimes seem to search for a way to take blame for those events.

How do we perceive depth?

In part due to binocular retinal disparity: as the distance of an object from us decreases, the disparity (difference) between the two retinal images decreases. Note that although for both eyes, inputs from the same half of the visual world went to the same hemisphere on the opposite side, within each hemisphere there are neurons whose function is to compare how different the right-eye and left-eye images are at a given part of the visual array. There are also monocular cues that don't rely on retinal disparity. For example, linear perspective: parallel lines tend to converge as they recede away Interposition: objects partially blocks the view of others are closer Objects that are farther away also tend to be a bit more hazy, and we use this too

What is the difference between inductive inference and deductive inference?

Inductive inference occurs when a reasoner attempts to draw general (or generalizable) conclusions from a limited sample of observations. For example, humans tend to make inductive inferences about the future based on their experience in the past. As a general rule, inductive inference is not logically sound, as it does not lead to valid conclusions with certainty (however, this does not mean that one cannot be confident in the validity of such conclusions). For example, just because the bus has arrived at 7:15 for the past year does not mean that the bus will arrive at 7:15 tomorrow. In practice, of course, this does not mean that the prediction that the bus will arrive at 7:15 tomorrow is useless (especially since the future often does resemble the past), but it does mean that it should be viewed with some degree of skepticism. Another example of an inductive inference is, "I've always enjoyed spending time with Edna. Edna is coming over today. Therefore, I will enjoy spending time with Edna today." In this example, you draw a general conclusion ("I typically enjoy spending time with Edna today") based on your previous experiences with Edna ("I have enjoyed spending time with Edna in the past"), and apply this conclusion to an unknown future context ("therefore I will enjoy spending time with Edna today"). This is an extrapolation. There is no guarantee that you will enjoy spending time with Edna. Alas. Deductive inference, by contrast, occurs when a reasoner derives new premises (conclusions, assertions, etc.) from premises already in place. There is no uncertainty. Assuming you don't make logical errors, deductive inference guarantees that you will come to a valid conclusion. One example of deductive inference is, "if it's raining, then today's picnic will be canceled," AND "it is raining," then you know "today's picnic will be canceled." Here you can be sure about the conclusion you draw based on the premises. (lecture, 3/22/18)

What are insomnia and sleep apnea?

Insomnia is in the inability to sleep. It can include difficulty falling asleep (onset) or staying asleep (maintenance). It is often related to stress and lifestyle. According to Dr. Dinges, it can be successfully treated with Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Sleep Apnea is the failure of an airway to stay open when asleep. The brain awakens the person when it is alerted to possible oxygen deprivation, preventing good sleep.

What do we know about the individual and public burden of mental health disease?

It is large, in part because mental illness is common, often starts early in life, and can be chronic and recurrent in course. OCD & BPD serve as potent examples of how large the impact of a mental illness can be. Individuals with severe OCD spend, on average, 8 hours a day experiencing obsessions and 16 hours a day ritualizing; 80% report severe impairment in at least one major life area (home, work, relationships, social functioning). Borderline PD is among the most severe of all mental disorders. It's associated with a greater use of mental health services than all other forms of mental disorder other than schizophrenia. People with borderline PD experience severe psychosocial impairment, and up to 10% of patients with the disorder commit suicide.

What are the four kinds of potential cause of mental disorders, and what do they tell us about the nature of mental illness?

It is usually too simplistic to say that a given mental disorder has one singular cause (E.g., "chemical imbalance"); rather, many influences can determine whether an individual develops a disorder, and these factors interact with one another in complex ways. Examples include: biological factors (genetic, neurobiological), social factors (interpersonal, cultural), psychological factors (behavioral, cognitive, and emotional), and developmental factors. These factors help explain why different people put in the same situation or experience can have different outcomes, and show that mental illness doesn't have one single cause. (Here is an example. Read it - but you don't have to be able to reproduce it.) Crowell & colleagues have proposed a biosocial model of borderline personality disorder (BPD) that suggests that genes and family environment interact to contribute to the emergence of BPD. The model begins with a child whose genetic makeup and associated neurobiological deficits increase her vulnerability to BPD. At the same time, the emotional sensitivity and poor impulse control that the child inherits make her more challenging to parent, especially by caregivers who are themselves more likely to suffer from psychopathology. These parents often reject the child's expressions of emotion and do not teach the child how to modulate emotional arousal, understand her emotions, or cope with distress. Furthermore, in an invalidating environment, extreme emotional displays are often needed to generate helpful responses from caregivers. Thus, the family haphazardly punishes communication of negative emotions while intermittently reinforcing extreme emotional outbursts and actions. The child learns that highly aversive behaviors and labile expressions of emotions are effective in obtaining desired ends, which is both a risk factor for, and characteristic of, BPD.

What is one way to resolve the discrepancy between what infants supposedly know (based on new techniques used by infancy researchers) and how they act (as described by Piaget)?

It's possible that children know more than they demonstrate because they have a hard time inhibiting their typical response. We saw an example of this in the card-sorting task - even though children understand that the rule of the card game has changed, they can't stop themselves from sorting the cards according to the first rule. This inability to inhibit behaviors is thought to be a result of children's underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, the brain area that normally provides us with cognitive control. In fact, adults with damage to the prefrontal cortex often fail a version of the card-sorting task, like children. Children's difficulty inhibiting their typical responses could help explain why they make the A-not-B error, where they continue searching for an object in location A even after the experimenter changes the hiding spot to location B. Even though they sometimes look in the right direction (location B), demonstrating that they actually know where the object is hidden, their behavior doesn't reflect their knowledge. Difficulty inhibiting the typical response would also explain why children fail the water conservation task - they're used to paying attention to the most obvious, familiar cue about water (if it's higher, there's more water), so they have trouble considering a second cue, like the width of the glass.

What is the learned helplessness phenomenon? What are some symptoms that Dr. Seligman mentioned of both human depression as well as learned helplessness in animals? What area of the brain is particularly involved?

Learned helplessness is a common response of many animals (including humans) to unpleasant stimuli they has been previously unsuccessfully avoided. In the learned helplessness response, the organism stops trying to avoid the unpleasant stimuli. It results in certain cognitions (i.e., beliefs) that cause one to give up and is thought to play a role in depression. Dr. Seligman described the instigator as being unpleasant stimulation that you cannot control, i.e. where your actions are of no use. Symptoms of both human depression and learned helplessness in animals includes frequent mood change, weight loss, sleep disturbance, fatigue, and a decline in psychomotor skills. Humans also report losing one's sense of humor, a sense of worthlessness, beliefs that nothing they do matters, and thoughts of death and suicide. The Dorsal Raphe Nucleus plays a critical role in the development of learned helplessness. (Steve Maier has found in rats that the default role of this circuit is essentially to tell the organism to give up, but this default is suppressed by the organism's determination as to whether or not the stressor is within one's control. Dr. Seligman believes that the progress of Maier and others suggests that a cure for depression is possible.)

What are Maslow's hierarchy of needs (where hierarchy means a priority order)?

Maslow believed that a hierarchy of needs motivate human behavior. In order, these are physiological, safety, belongingness and love, esteem, and self-actualization needs. Physiological refers to satisfying hunger and thirst, safety refers to the need to feel safe, secure, and stable, belongingness and love refers to the need to love and be loved, esteem refers to the need for self-esteem and achievement, and self-actualization refers to the need to live up to one's fullest unique potential.

You're like your parents in some ways. Is this because of the way they raised you? Discuss.

Maybe. But it's hard to tell. Intelligence, values on the "Big 5", and other features are strongly genetically determined (people dispute the exact amounts, but saying 50% of the variation isn't a nutty estimate). So part of the reason you resemble your parents and siblings in your personality is genetic. That said, probably not all of it. Parent behaviors can matter. This has been shown in some intervention studies: parents who got training in various childrearing skills wound up with children who were less likely to get into trouble later (Forgach et al study). Also, various things we consider as Personality but that aren't as in-grained as the Big 5 also have environmental sources. If your parents constantly encouraged certain activities, say, like using public transportation, eating together as a family, going to see shows, spending weekends in the house lazing about, maintaining holiday traditions, or whatever - some of these family norms or habits stick with you and give you your sense of what is normal. These sorts of preferences are less commonly measured than basic traits. [we didn't bring this up in class, so this is FYI/just for thinking about.]

What does melatonin cause to happen in your blood vessels? Why? What else does melatonin do? And what does cortisol do in your sleep cycle?

Melatonin is a vasodilator (more blood flow because of larger vessels) which is flooded through the body at night, widening blood vessels near the surface and "dumping heat" making you feel colder at night than during the day. Melatonin (which is released by the pineal gland) helps synchronize the various circadian clocks in your body. Cortisol is a hormone that peaks in the morning and increases alertness making you feel more awake. It's also relevant in the stress response.

What do we know about the lifetime prevalence of mental disorders in the US? Is there anything surprising about these numbers?

Mental disorders are common. The restricted list of disorders we reviewed in class indicated that the numbers are very high - cumulative lifetime prevalence (# of US adults who have ever had any disorder on list) is 46.4%. That means half the US population will have, at some point in their life, at least one diagnosable disorder from that list, and the 1-year prevalence of 25% suggests that in a 1-year span a quarter of the US population has a diagnosable disorder. These numbers are underestimates of the overall rates of mental illness because: the list does not include all mental disorders (e.g., insomnia, sexual dysfunction), and this survey missed many subpopulations with higher rates of mental illness (e.g., homeless people, prisoners, illegal immigrants, individuals in institutions).

Define and give an example of the following schedules of reinforcement: fixed ratio, fixed interval, variable ratio, variable interval. Which schedule of reinforcement produces the greatest number and most consistent responding?

On a fixed ratio schedule of reinforcement, reinforcement is delivered after a set number of responses (e.g., the rat is rewarded after pressing the bar 20 times). On a fixed interval schedule of reinforcement, reinforcement is delivered after a set amount of time (e.g., the rat is rewarded after 30 seconds). On variable schedules of reinforcement, the reward is delivered after a variable number of responses (variable ratio) or a variable amount of time (variable interval) An example of variable ratio schedules of reinforcement in slot machines (the reward is produced after a variable number of responses). This schedule of reinforcement produces the greatest frequency and consistency of responding. Table 4.3 on pg 178 provides a helpful summary.

What are some different kinds of category? What does essentialism mean?

Natural kinds: If a kind is natural, then we are basically saying that the categorization is based on some structure that exists in the natural world. In this case, theory of some scientific domain might govern what objects are categorized together. Plants are similar to one another, and share correlated features; these facts come from the common biological history and function of plants. There might be some truth out there in the natural world that make objects with a certain set of attributes members of a category, although one may not know what the rules are. This type of belief is called essentialism: that there is some physical essence that makes a thing what it is, and that is causally responsible for its properties. For biological kinds, we understand this essence to have to do with DNA and inheritance. Artificial kinds: Artificial kinds are not theory driven. They are defined by human and can be more clear-cut. They are also less likely to have a rich correlated structure. Uncles, for example, are not all that similar to one another, and don't have much in common beyond being brothers or brothers-in-law of indiduals with children.

The motion aftereffect (e.g., the waterfall illusion from class) occurs due to two key features of how neurons fire. What are those two features, and how do they create the motion aftereffect? (lecture)

Neurons have a baseline rate of firing action potentials, even when they are not being activated by neurotransmission from another neuron. After high periods of activity (i.e., high intensity firing of action potentials), neurons become "fatigued" and fire less frequently than their baseline rate (this is technically called "neuronal adaptation"; it might not really be fatigue per se, but an adaptive, useful design feature). After looking at an image for a long time that has a single predominant motion (for example, upward motion), the neurons that represent that upward motion become fatigued (or adapt). When you then look at a static, non-moving image, the fatigued neurons representing upward motion will temporarily be firing at a rate lower than their baseline rate. However, the neurons representing the opposite motion (i.e., downward) will still be firing at their normal baseline rate. Since the "downward" neurons are no longer being counteracted by the usual baseline rate of the "upward" neurons, this gives the overall illusion of downward motion (the moving waterfall effect we saw in class).

Piaget found that children younger than 7 years old fail the "3-mountain" task, in which they are shown a diorama of a mountain scene, from one side, and are asked to report what a doll (sitting on the other side) sees. Piaget interpreted this finding to mean that children are egocentric (they cannot put themselves in another person's shoes). Should we agree with Piaget's conclusion? Why or why not? In your justification, describe the findings of a more recent study that uses a simpler version of the "3-mountain" task.

No, we should not agree. The 3-mountain task is difficult because it requires the ability to imagine another's point of view, but ALSO because it is taxing on working memory. It requires the ability to perform mental rotation of objects (difficult). So it could be the case that children fail the 3-mountain task not because of their fundamental egocentricity, but because they are not good at doing many lower-level tasks at once. Research that supports this comes from a study that also tests egocentricity, but is much simpler. Children are presented with cards, and are shown that the card has two different images, one on each side (e.g., a cat on one side and a dog on the other). The child is seated facing a doll, with the card between them, so the child sees one side of the card and the doll sees the other. When a 3-year-old is asked what the doll sees, she reliably reports the correct image. So in this situation (where the task demands are low), the child is able to show her ability to take another's point of view, showing that children are not fundamentally egocentric. That being said, children are more egocentric (in Piaget's sense) than adults. It's a matter of degree. They don't lack the cognitive machinery for computing someone else's perspective. They're just not very good at it, and tend to give up on the effort when things get hard for other reasons.

In a famous study, London taxicab drivers were found to have a larger posterior hippocampus compared to age-matched controls. Can we claim that driving a taxicab in London causes the posterior hippocampus to grow? Why or why not?

No. This is a correlational study, and we know that correlation does not imply causation. (Of course, it doesn't rule out causation either.) Like other correlational results, this result is subject to uncertainty about the directionality of cause-effect, as well as the third-variable problem. Maybe people with a larger posterior hippocampus are more likely to become cab drivers. Maybe a third variable (persistence on memory tasks?) makes people more likely to have a large posterior hippocampus and to become cab drivers. Or to remain cab drivers for longer. In order to make claims about causality, we would instead need to perform an experiment (like the juggling intervention study, where people learned to juggle during the study, and showed gray matter differences after the learning period).

Define and give an example of the following schedules of reinforcement: fixed ratio, fixed interval, variable ratio, variable interval. Which schedule of reinforcement produces the greatest number and most consistent responding?

On a fixed ratio schedule of reinforcement, reinforcement is delivered after a set number of responses (e.g., the rat is rewarded after pressing the bar 20 times). On a fixed interval schedule of reinforcement, reinforcement is delivered after a set amount of time (e.g., the rat is rewarded after 30 seconds). On variable schedules of reinforcement, the reward is delivered after a variable number of responses (variable ratio) or a variable amount of time (variable interval). An example of variable ratio schedules of reinforcement in slot machines (the reward is produced after a variable number of responses). This schedule of reinforcement produces the greatest frequency and consistency of responding. The figures on page 245-246 provide a helpful summary.

2) What differences do we see in jealousy between the sexes?

On average, women are somewhat more jealous of emotional infidelity then men, and men more jealous of sexual infidelity than women. This makes evolutionary sense if you think back to parental investment and sexual selection theory. Women are more jealous of emotional infidelity because it shows that their partner is investing in another woman and thus taking valuable resources away from her and her offspring or potential offspring. Men are jealous of sexual infidelity because they don't want to be cuckolded into investing in an offspring that doesn't share their genes. Of course, both sexes feel both sorts of jealousy strongly; the effects we described in class came from a choice procedure in which participants had to pick which was worse. They're both bad, for most people.

Learned helplessness involves interpreting negative beliefs in a certain light. Dr. Seligman described three different dimensions on which humans can explain negative events (often called explanatory style). What are they?

One can explain a negative event by causes that are either permanent or temporary (a time dimension), global or local (a pervasiveness dimension), and controllable or uncontrollable (a malleability dimension). Seeing negative events as caused primarily by temporary, local, and controllable events are conducive to resiliency and wellbeing. Seeing the negative events as caused by permanent, global, and uncontrollable events lead to learned helplessness and depression. For example, one can attribute a poor performance on a math midterm to being hung over (a more temporary, local, and controllable cause) or because they are bad at math (a more permanent, global, and uncontrollable cause). Chronically explaining negative events with more permanent, global, and uncontrollable causes can lead to pessimism and learned helplessness. This can lead in turn to depression as well as numerous others negative life outcomes. For example, Dr. Seligman mentioned that pessimism is a major risk factor for heart disease.

When it comes to people with extraordinary abilities, there are intriguing questions about how much can be attributed to genetic predispositions vs. motivation and deliberate practice. In the case of intelligence, the threshold hypothesis suggests that there is a correlation between IQ and success, but only up to a point- that having additional IQ points beyond this threshold doesn't contribute much to success. (A) Describe the results of a study that does NOT support this hypothesis.

One study examined people who scored in the top 1% on the SAT math section at the age of 13. Within this top 1% of participants, the researchers compared the later-life outcomes of children who were in the top ¼ vs. children who were in the bottom ¼. The threshold hypothesis would predict that the outcomes of these two groups would be similar, since both groups scored extremely well on the SAT math section. Contrary to this prediction, people who were in the top ¼ were much more likely to have obtained various achievements as adults (e.g., having a doctorate, peer-reviewed publications, patents, etc.) than people who were in the bottom ¼ of the top 1%. Thus, this study suggests that in the case of intelligence, certain innate predispositions may be playing a role.

Describe two pieces of evidence that show we tend to view ourselves in a positive light (that we view ourselves as better than average, for example)?

One study that surveyed incoming business school students asked them what decile they expected to fall in by the end of the year (Thaler & Sunstein, 2009). In other words, how would their performance compare to their classmates?' Less than 5% of those surveyed thought they would be in the bottom half of the class, and more than half of those surveyed thought they would be in the top 20% of the class. In sum, a large proportion of these students were overly optimistic about their abilities (given that this outcome is mathematically impossible). About 50% of new businesses fail. A group of entrepreneurs were asked what the chances were of their businesses surviving. Even though the entrepreneurs were aware of the 50% failure rate in businesses in the same category as theirs, 90% of them believed their businesses would succeed. In other words, most entrepreneurs felt that their business was better than the average business. (Examples a and b come from Thaler & Sunstein). Another example concerns a survey of automobile drivers, in which a substantial majority considered themselves way above average in skill and safety.

Why does everything start to look gray at dusk?

Our retina contains two types of sensory cells: rods and cones. The rods are sensitive to lightness (how much illumination there is), and the cones are sensitive to color of light (how much illumination at a given hue). When light hits these cells, it turns into neural information (i.e., action potentials) that is transmitted to the ganglion cells. 100+ rods will transfer information to just one ganglion cell. This enables us to pick up even the smallest amounts of light. Conversely, only about six cones converge to one ganglion cell, making our cells that detect color less sensitive to light (and cones are, in general, less sensitive to begin with). This is why when there is less light, things start to look grayer. Our sensitivity to color (via our cone cells) has lessened in the dark.

10. According to Chapter 10 of your textbook, what are the 4 major types of psychotherapy used to treat mental illness? What are the main characteristics of each?

Psychoanalysis: The therapist helps the client gain insight into the unconscious sources of his/her problems. The therapist's main task is to interpret several sources of input in order to identify unconscious conflicts, including: free associations, resistances, dreams, and transferences. Although, in its traditional form, psychoanalysis has little empirical evidence backing its efficacy, its more contemporary form ("psychodynamic" therapy) has been shown to successfully treat several (though not all) forms of mental illness. Client-centered (Humanist) therapy: The therapist uses unconditional positive regard, genuineness, and empathy/active listening to help the client gain insight into his/her true feelings and self-concept, with the ultimate goal of helping the client to self-actualize. To achieve this goal, the therapist is nondirective (i.e., does not attempt to steer the conversation in a certain direction) and works to foster a supportive environment. This therapy is not typically intended for those with mental disorders, but rather for those individuals who are motivated toward greater personal awareness and growth. Behavior therapy: The therapist uses principles of classical and operant conditioning to change the person's maladaptive behavior. This approach assumes that behavioral symptoms are the problem and must be "unlearned." As an example of a technique based in classical conditioning, systematic desensitization entails replacing a fear response to an event with a relaxation response in a series of progressively increasing fear-arousing steps (i.e., a fear hierarchy). For operant conditioning-based techniques, desired behaviors are reinforced while undesired behaviors are extinguished (e.g., through a token economy). This type of therapy is particularly effective for anxiety disorders. Cognitive therapy: The goal of cognitive therapy is to change the client's maladaptive thinking and beliefs. The therapist first identifies irrational thoughts and unrealistic belies, and then helps the person change this thinking. Rational-emotional therapy is a type of cognitive therapy that emphasizes maladaptive beliefs around extreme-thinking (e.g., "musts," "always," "every") and can be very directive; Beck's cognitive therapy is perhaps a bit warmer, while helping the client to evaluate the objective evidence behind his/her beliefs. Cognitive therapy is particularly helpful for mood/depressive disorders.

Describe two examples that illustrate children's failures to conserve quantity and number (think about the video we watched in lecture of the child being asked about conservation tasks). How did Piaget explain these failures of conservation?

Quantity: The experimenter pours equal amounts of water into two identical cups and asks the child which one has more. The child understands that the two cups contain the same amount of water. The experimenter then pours the water from one of the cups into a taller, thinner cup, and asks the child which of the cups has more water in it. The child points to the taller cup. Number: The experimenter lines up two rows of 10 pennies and asks the child which one has more. The child understands that both rows contain the same number of coins. The experimenter then slides the coins in the top row slightly apart from one another and asks the child which row has more coins in it. The child points to the top row. According to Piaget, children in the preoperational period are only able to focus on one dimension of the situation. For example, they may only pay attention to the height of the water in the cups, instead of also paying attention to the width of the cup. Children are only able to integrate mental representations once they reach the concrete operational period. (Lecture; Textbook p. 302-304). Piaget also attributed failures of conservation to the lack of mental logical operations that would make clear to the child that the amounts have not actually changed - a "logical necessity" given the only superficial changes that are made to the objects (flattening some clay, putting a liquid in a different container).

What are some of the potential consequences of restricting the definitions of mental disorders to more severe diagnoses?

Research suggests that mild disorders are associated with important later life negative outcomes: including hospitalization, suicide attempts, work-disability, and the development of more serious disorders. Making definitions more restrictive would miss people these people with milder disorders, who are also at risk for developing more serious problems, and wouldn't allow for preventative treatment (given current insurance environment - to get treatment you must have something diagnosable).

Describe the positive, negative, and cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder characterized by at least some of the following symptoms: marked disturbance of thought, withdrawal, inappropriate or flat emotions, delusions, and hallucinations. Schizophrenia is characterized by positive, negative, and cognitive symptoms. Positive symptoms are behaviors that are not evident in healthy people including delusions, hallucinations, and disorganized behavior. Negative symptoms reflect an absence of behaviors that are usually evident in healthy people. These may include flattened affect, catatonic behavior, and social withdrawal. Finally, cognitive symptoms reflect impairments in executive functions. These cognitive difficulties include impairments in early sensory processing, episodic memory, working memory and attentional control.

Define and give an example of sensory memory, versus short-term memory

Sensory memory is the very brief storage of relatively unprocessed sensory input. For example, the sound of your roommate talking to you is stored briefly in sensory memory even if you are not actively attending to it. (I didn't mention this in class, but you do process unattended ended speech to some degree, which is why you perk up and start listening if you're at a party and your name comes up in another conversation somewhere in the room.) Working memory (or short-term memory, the same thing) is the place you hold information while you're attending to it and "working on" it. For example, if you're holding a phone number in mind while you prepare to dial it, it would be stored in your working memory.

A circus trainer trains his monkey to ride a bike. Explain how he might have used the operant principle of shaping to accomplish this.

Shaping is the process of eliciting a desired response by rewarding behaviors that are increasingly similar to that response. In this case, the trainer might have initially rewarded his monkey (e.g., given him a treat) for approaching the bike. Once the monkey learns to approach the bike, the trainer would then only reward him for touching the bike, then for sitting on the bike, then for pedaling, until he eventually learns to ride the bike.

A circus trainer trains his monkey to ride a bike. Explain how he might have used the operant principle of shaping to accomplish this.

Shaping is the process of eliciting a desired response by rewarding behaviors that are increasingly similar to that response. In this case, the trainer might have initially rewarded his monkey (e.g., given him a treat) for approaching the bike. Once the monkey learns to approach the bike, the trainer would then only reward him for touching the bike, then for sitting on the bike, then for peddling, until he eventually learns to ride the bike.

Describe how Noam Chomsky and Skinner differed on language behavior and what it meant for behaviorism.

Skinner, as a behaviorist, said that language is a learned behavior so that we use words (and sentences) because they have been reinforced. Furthermore, he argued that considering language as the product of the speaker's history of reinforcement for saying certain words is a good way to understand how the human language capacity works. Chomsky argued that this idea is (a) methodologically empty - you aren't discovering anything or allowing for new predictions by retroactively stating that an utterance must have come about because of some unspecified prior experience; and (b) not only empty as a research strategy, but also wrong, because the idea doesn't account for the new combinations of words and sentences that people can create and the fact that when we do so, we can understand each other's meaning. For us to make and understand sentences, we need a grammar, and a grammar is necessarily a cognitive abstraction that we each create (typically as children) when learning a language. This abstraction can be seen as a complex set of rules we use to manipulate language. Because it is internal and not a behavior per se, it can't be addressed using the behaviorist paradigm. This argument, and similar ones, helped lead to the decline of the dominant position behaviorism had held in the United States.

What is fMRI and how does it work?

a. fMRI stands for functional magnetic resonance imaging. This technique allows scientists to study brain activity (with more spatial resolution than EEG: you get more detail about where things happen in the brain). fMRI measures the amount of blood oxygen flow in the brain; areas with more neural activity demand greater blood flow. Oxygenated blood can be detected because of the way its hemoglobin responds to the magnetic fields in MRI.

What questions can we ask of a person's condition that are relevant in deciding whether his or her behavior indicates a mental illness?

Some questions relevant to this determination are: Does the person show an extreme version of a normal behavior? Is the person suffering? Is the behavior bothering others or does it make others uncomfortable? Does it bother the person? Is the behavior maladaptive? Does it interfere with the person's wellbeing in a significant way? Is the behavior statistically deviant or rare? Does the behavior violate societal standards? No one element or definition separates all cases of abnormality from all cases of normality. Many things that are common are abnormal (e.g. common cold), and many things that are rare are not considered abnormal (e.g. perfect pitch).

The somatosensory and motor cortices share common organizational properties in how they represent different parts of the body. In the context of these brain regions, define the concepts of specificity, the "neural map" or "topographic map", and proportional representation. (lecture, pgs. 72-73 of the textbook)

Specificity: Specific areas of these cortices neurally represent specific parts of the body. Put another way, the representation for a part of the body is not distributed all across the cortices, but rather it is localized to a particular area. Neural Map/Topographic Map: Body parts are represented in a roughly orderly manner in the brain (e.g., parts of the cortices representing the fingers are near parts representing the palm of your hand, representations for lips are near the representations for your tongue, etc.) Proportional Representation: The amount of somatosensory and motor cortex dedicated to different parts of the body depends on the sensitivity and complexity of the body part. For example, the fingers must be sensitive and able to make fine discriminations; because of this, more space is allocated to the fingers in the somatosensory and motor cortices compared to other body parts, like the torso, which does not need to make such fine discriminations. Thus, space in these cortices is not allocated based on proportional size of different body parts, but rather relates to how much information the brain needs about different body parts.

What have researchers learned from so-called split-brain patients, who have had their corpus callosum severed? (lecture, pgs. 82-86 of textbook)

Split-brain patients still have functioning hemispheres, but the information from both hemispheres is not coordinated. The corpus callosum, which normally connects the left and right hemispheres, allows the hemispheres to communicate with one another. The left hemisphere largely controls the right side of the body and the right hemisphere largely controls the left side of the body. In terms of vision, information from the left visual field goes to the right hemisphere, and vice versa (note: it's not that information from the whole left EYE goes to the right hemisphere). Research from split-brain patients demonstrated that for most people, the left hemisphere is more involved with language function and the right hemisphere is more involved with spatial processing. For example, if a split-brain patient was shown an object in their left visual field, they would not be able to say aloud what they had seen, since the information would have gone to their right hemisphere - which is not as specialized for language as the left hemisphere.

Visual illusions provide insights regarding underlying processes in visual perception. Please describe the following illusions and why they occur: Color afterimages

Stare at a color for some time and then look at a neutral background, you will see an afterimage of the original color's complementary color. To explain this illusion, the opponent-process theory was proposed. According to the theory (and related lab evidence), there exist three opponent-process cell systems after cone processing. The pair of colors within each system are red-green, yellow-blue and white-black, and they oppose each other. After staring at red, cells responsive to red become less sensitive compared to the non-red ones, and the red-green system gets out of balance. Therefore, we see a green afterimage after red. The same theory also provides an explanation of why we cannot see reddish-green or yellowish-blue.

What are the two general steps of problem solving described in the textbook? What kinds of negative impact can our past experiences have on our ability to solve current problems?

Step 1: interpreting the problem. We tend to interpret the current problem based on our previous experiences, which may lead to misinterpretation of the current problem. This inability to create a new interpretation of a problem is called fixation. Moreover, we often associate objects with their typical functions, and thus fail to recognize their other functions. This type of functional fixedness stops us from solving problems by using objects in creative ways. Step 2: solving the problem. We tend to rely on past successful solutions when encountering new problems. This type of tendency to use previous successful strategies, ignoring other suitable strategies, is called mental set. The effect of mental set is stronger if the memory of the successful solutions is more vivid (e.g. happened more recently) In many situations, past experience are in fact very useful in terms of helping us find good solutions quickly. However, in some case, it can also hurt us in the ways described above. When old solutions fail, try 'thinking out of boxes' by changing interpretations of the problem, using the object in creative ways, or proposing new strategies.

Some might argue that the obedience behavior Milgram observed in the 1960s is no longer prevalent today. Is that true? What is a contemporary study that demonstrates that people still engage in this type of obedience?

Studies have shown that rates of obedience in Milgram-like studies has not meaningfully declined since the time Milgram did the original study. Nowadays it is hard to replicate the original study due to ethical concerns about (among other things) participants experiencing the ordinary human failure to do what is generally considered "morally right." However, there are several cases where more modern variations of the original Milgram study have been carried out. One example is a study (a demonstration, really) conducted in 2010 that used a celebrity environment rather than a labcoat-wearing scientist as the authority figure. In this case, the learners answered questions as part of a game show. The participants were told to shock the learner if they answered the questions wrong. (The shocks weren't real.) 80% of participants complied completely and shocked the learner all the way up using the maximum voltage. A replication more similar to the original study was completed by Berger (2009). In that report, Berger highlights the similarity between Milgram's results and his new results.

In an experiment described in lecture, subjects were asked to recall words after performing 1 of 3 tasks with them: judging whether they were upper or lower case, judging whether they rhymed with "train," or judging whether they made sense in a sentence. In which condition did subjects recall the most words? Why?

Subjects recalled the most words in the condition where they judged whether the words made sense in a sentence. This condition required more depth of processing: subjects had to actively engage with the material in order to make this judgment, which led to better learning. Word recall after making rhyming judgments in turn was significantly better than when individuals were required to judge whether words were upper or lower case.

Describe an experiment that demonstrates neurobiological evidence for humans' capacity for empathy. Do we provide empathy indiscriminately?

Tania Singer and colleagues brought heterosexual couples into the lab, and asked the woman to go into a MRI scanner. Over a series of trials they applied shocks to the woman, and also to the male partner. They mapped out the women's brain activity and found that there were some brain areas that got activated in the woman when she was shocked and also when her bf was shocked: the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the insula. This result, coupled with the finding that the degree of activation in the ACC was correlated with the women's scores on the "empathetic concern scale," suggest that when women feel empathy for someone, part of the pain network in their brain is being activated. In other words, they "feel someone else's pain." Not much neurosci work has been done on the question of whether we feel equal levels of empathy for everyone. However, the existing body of evidence suggests that we do not. In another study, Singer and colleagues had subjects play an economic game with two confederates - one confederate played fairly and the other played unfairly. Female subjects as well as male subjects were later scanned while they observed the fair players and unfair players being shocked. Women exhibited slightly less activation in the insula when unfair players were being shocked as compared to when fair players were being shocked, suggesting slightly weaker feelings of empathy for the unfair players. Men, on the other hand, exhibited drastically less activation in the insula for unfair players as compared to fair players, and may have even experienced a sense of pleasure from the unfair player's pain, as evidenced by activation in the nucleus accumbens. In sum, it appears that we do not provide equal levels of empathy for everyone - and that it likely depends on the quality of our relationship with that person.

What is the fundamental attribution error? Does its extent vary across cultures?

The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) is the tendency to attribute people's behavior to their disposition (i.e., to stable aspects of "who they are") while discounting situational or environmental factors that may have led to that behavior. For example, someone cuts you off in traffic and you immediately conclude that he or she is a mean, self-centered jerk. In doing so, however, you may be overlooking (or ignoring) some of the situational factors that could have led to their behavior. For example, the other driver may have been rushing their friend with serious bleeding to the nearest hospital. Or they might be late to a wedding. Or their behavior could be driven by a million other situational factors that regularly lead us to do things we don't normally do. There is some evidence that the FAE may be stronger in Western cultures like ours (with our relatively strong emphasis on individual identities) compared to some Eastern cultures (with a relative emphasis on group identities). For example, in one study (not discussed explicitly in lecture), Hindu Indians and European Americans were both given vignettes about people's actions. Consistent with the FAE, Americans provided twice as many dispositional attributions as situational attributions. However, the Indians showed just the opposite trend, giving twice as many situational attributions as dispositional ones.

How does language affect our thoughts? What's the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in weaker forms and in strong forms?

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the proposal that the language one speaks determines or heavily influences the thoughts one can think or the saliency of different categories of thought. Evidence suggests this is wrong in general, though it is hard to completely rule out. Certainly it is not the case that all thinking is done within the medium of our language. (face recognition, other visual or mental-model reasoning. Infants thinking. Helen Keller thinking.) The weaker form of this hypothesis states that the language we know can affect how we think. For example, the idea that people who speak languages with "intimate" and "formal" address have a different conception of social relationships than people who do not speak a language that has such feature. The weaker form of the hypothesis is still being debated. So far, evidence suggests that if there are effects of particular language on cognition, they are small.

What is the availability heuristic?

The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut by which individuals use the ease with which they can recall a particular piece of information as a cue for how likely that piece of information is to be true (or, in some cases, how likely an event is to occur). This is often a good heuristic: things that are more available in memory usually do occur more frequently in the world. However, this heuristic sometimes leads us astray. For example, horses hurt more Americans than sharks do (horses: about 12000 hospital admissions per year and about 100 deaths; sharks: fewer than 100 attacks p.a. and <5 deaths per year). However, people appear to think the opposite, because it is much easier to recall examples of dangerous sharks (e.g., news reports of Australian Great White attacks) than examples of dangerous horses. In keeping with the availability heuristic, this is largely true because horse-related injuries are not frequently reported on the news (and thus, are less likely to be "available" in memory), unless the rider is famous. (Griggs, pp.256-258)

Is the bystander effect likely to occur in all emergency situations? Why or why not?

The bystander effect is most likely to occur in situations where there is ambiguity about whether bystander intervention is required (i.e., in situations where it's not clear whether a person is truly in need, or experiencing an emergency). Two of the main causes of the bystander effect, audience inhibition and social influence on interpretation, arise when an individual isn't sure about whether the situation really requires action. Audience inhibition is when people are afraid that if they act, it will turn out that it wasn't an emergency, and they will look silly for having overreacted. Social influence on interpretation is when people refer to the reactions of others around them to help them gauge whether or not it's an emergency (e.g., "well that guy doesn't seem concerned, so I guess I shouldn't either"). If the situation is clearly an emergency with no hint of ambiguity, audience inhibition and social influence would likely have very little impact. A third cause of inaction is diffusion of responsibility - why should I act when those others should?

Reduced functioning or injury in the frontal lobe is associated with more impulsive and violent behaviors. Please describe one or two pieces of evidence for this.

The case of Phineas Gage: As discussed in class earlier, a rod was driven through his head in an accident, which severely damaged his frontal lobe. Gage displayed significant changes in his personality and became much more impulsive and disinhibited after the accident (Harlow, 1869). Brain imaging studies: In a meta-analysis on the relationship between structural and functional deficits in frontal cortex and antisocial behavior, Yang and Raine (2009) show that antisocial individuals tend to have structural and functional impairments in the frontal lobe. The effect size is quite large (comparable to that of the relationship between attention scores and Attention Deficit Disorder). [Note that reduced frontal lobe functioning is often found in impulsive murderers. Murderers that plan the crime carefully often have normal frontal functioning]

You see a child having a tantrum in a grocery store because he wants a piece of candy. After about 10 minutes of the child screaming, the parent gives the child the candy, and the child stops screaming and is happy. The parent can now shop in peace. Explain this process in terms of operant conditioning. What type of reinforcement or punishment (positive or negative) did the child and the parent experience? In other words, based on what you know about operant conditioning, what are the parent and child more likely to do next time in a similar situation?

The child experienced positive reinforcement, because he was rewarded with a candy (appetitive stimulus). Next time the child wants candy, child is more likely to tantrum and scream, because it was met with a reward. The parent experienced negative reinforcement, because an aversive stimulus (the child's screaming) was removed. Thus, next time the child tantrums for candy, the parent is more likely to give the child candy because the parent knows that will remove the unpleasant stimulus of the child's screaming. See page 166 on Positive and Negative Reinforcement and Punishment.

What is the compatibility principle, and why do we care?

The compatibility principle states that the context during the encoding of a memory influences its retrieval. A similar context during encoding and retrieval will facilitate recall. An example of this comes from the Godden & Baddeley (1975) study described during lecture. Participants were asked to memorize and recall a list of words. Each memorization and recall event could happen either on land, or underwater (in scuba gear), in a fully crossed 2x2 design. The authors found that when participants were asked to memorize and recall the list of words under the same conditions ({dry,underwater}) they were able to remember more of the words than if they memorized the list and had to recall it under the other conditions. The compatibility principle shows that retrieval cues can be quite broad—extending even to our emotional state or situational context.

How do psychophysicists study the detection question and the different question? (from textbook) [this is really several questions in one. We're asking here about thresholds, JNDs, and Weber's law.]

The detection question asks what is the minimum amount of energy necessary for a neural or behavioral response. This can be quantified using the absolute threshold, which is the amount of energy that has 50% probability of being detected or not detected. The detection question can be studied using signal detection theory. The difference question asks what is the minimum amount of difference in physical energy that enables people to perceive a difference in intensity between two stimuli. This can be quantified using the difference threshold (or the just noticeable difference), which is the amount of difference between two stimuli that has 50% probability of being noticed or not noticed. The two stimuli used to measure the difference threshold are called standard stimulus and comparison stimulus. To measure the difference threshold of a certain sensory modality, we can use different standard stimulus values, and the results will vary. More specifically, the measured difference threshold follows Weber's law, which states that for a certain type of sensory judgement the difference threshold is proportional to the standard stimulus value used to measure it.)

What is PERMA? What is one brief exercise Dr. Seligman mentioned that can lead to increases in PERMA? (We're not going to require that you be able to recall all five parts. But if you can recognize them, that's good.)

The elements of PERMA are positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. These are five elements of wellbeing that Dr. Seligman has identified and organized for clinical, wellbeing, and research purposes. One exercise that has been shown to increase PERMA is the three blessings exercise. It involves writing down three things each day that went well before going to bed.

What are the empiricist and nativist perspectives of language learning?

The empiricist perspective of language learning claims that children learn language in essentially the same way that they learn other things, using capacities for learning, generalization, and analogy that are the same capacities that are needed for learning outside the language domain. Also, children are smart and sociable and therefore have a strong motivation to learn. The nativist perspective of language learning claims that aspects of grammar are innate, and therefore children are born with some level of grammatical knowledge. This is not to say that children are born with specific languages, but rather that they are born with a universal grammar that then limits the possibilities (i.e. grammatical descriptions) the children consider while learning their language. In the nativist perspective, this innate grammar evolved like any other biological system, and is shared by all humans. The nativist perspective was given its modern form and has been defended most strongly by Noam Chomsky.

Culture can influence your personality. Explain the study (Cohen, Nisbett, et al.) involving subjects from the North and South, specifically how their biological and behavioral reactions differed.

The experimental group had someone bump into and insult the subject while the control group had no one bump into the subject. Depending on where the subject grew up, biological and behavioral reactions differed in the experimental group. Subjects who grew up in the south were more likely to show more anger and have higher cortisol and testosterone levels than subjects that grew up in the north. When controlling for other possible variables (genetics, family income, parent education, etc.), these effects were still significant. Overall, Northern subjects were less affected by the conflict event than Southern subjects were. The authors argued that these differences came about because of historical differences in the way the North and South were settled (farming/industry, denser population centers, stronger government and policing, versus herding, sparser population distribution, weaker government and policing).

Three arguments for the nativist perspective of language involve unrelated language similarity, poverty of the stimulus, and animal communication. Summarize each of these arguments.

The fact that unrelated languages share similar grammatical frameworks suggests that there is a common, universal grammar shared between languages. This in turn suggests that syntax (i.e., grammar) is not something that is learned through human interaction, but is something innate that all humans share. The poverty of the stimulus argument refers to the fact that children receive linguistic input that does not carry enough information to definitively specify the correct grammar for any given language. Given the linguistic input, there are an infinite number of possible grammatical descriptions. Yet children are really good at learning the correct grammar for their language. This suggests that children already have a restricted set of possible grammars due to an innate universal grammar. Animals communicate with each other, but none exhibit anything that resembles human language in its complexity and combinatorial properties. This suggests that language is not something that is learned environmentally, but something that has evolved specifically in humans.

What is the difference between the false consensus effect and the false uniqueness effect?

The false consensus effect is a bias towards thinking that other people share our opinions and our failures. Griggs uses the example of classical music. If you like it, you tend to overestimate the percentage of other people that like it. If you dislike it, you tend to overestimate the percentage of people that dislike it. The false uniqueness bias, on the other hand, is the tendency to underestimate the percentage of people that share our abilities (rather than opinions) and successful behaviors (rather than failures).

What does "pruning" refer to in brain development?

The fetus and infant produce far more neurons and synapses than needed by the mature person. Pruning is the process of eliminating the synaptic connections that are not used frequently, which is thought to reflect learning. The time course of pruning throughout development varies by brain region. For example, the frontal lobe reaches its maximum amount of neurons by the time humans are around 12 months old, and this plateaus until about 6 years of age. Then the pruning process begins- humans reach about 65% of their initial amount of frontal lobe neurons by their mid/late teens. Pruning in the frontal lobe occurs relatively late in development compared to other brain regions (like the occipital lobe, where pruning starts and finishes earlier on). Overall, there is a decrease in gray matter that starts in childhood and continues through to early adulthood; there is also an increase in white matter over the course of development (due to increased myelination of axons).

What is the just-world hypothesis, and why is it sometimes used to blame victims?

The just-world hypothesis, or BJW (belief in a just world) holds that the world is a place where people get what they deserve and deserve what they get. Griggs notes that those who have a higher belief in a just world are more likely to blame victims. Belief in a just world has been tied to prejudice against the poor, the sick, the elderly, rape victims, and other disenfranchised groups. The underlying logic of this behavior is that, if the world has punished you, you probably deserved it. However, Griggs fails to note that a preponderance of evidence connects BJW to positive life outcomes. Those who see the world as just are more likely to work harder, trust their employers, be more resilient in the face of economic hardship, and be kinder towards others.

Siegel reading: After a difficult surgery, a patient has been taking opioid medications to manage the pain while recovering at the hospital for the last two months. At long last, the patient returns home and takes the same dose of opioids once more. This time, he overdoses. Explain this event in terms of classical conditioning.

The key here is that contexts may become conditioned stimuli (CS) associated with the drug (US). An opioid produces a pain-relieving response in the body that does not need to be learned, making the drug an unconditioned stimulus (US) and the body's response an unconditioned response (UR). In this patient's case, the hospital context was a previously neutral stimulus that was repeatedly paired with the US (the drug) over the two-month recovery, as this context was always present when the drug was administered. As such, the hospital became a conditioned stimulus (CS) associated with the US (the drug). Over time and with repeated pairings, the hospital setting alone (CS) was therefore able to trigger the body's compensatory response to the drug (the conditioned response, CR), ensuring that the body would be ready to tolerate the drug's effects once the drug was actually administered (i.e., drug tolerance). However, when the patient went home and the hospital context (CS) was removed, context cues were no longer available to prepare the body for the drug. Even though the patient took the same dose as he has taken in the hospital, in a novel context his body was not prepared for this dose, and the body's unconditioned response was more potent, leading to overdose.

2. Explain the difference between the concepts of discrete / "digital" and gradient / "analog" as relates to communication. Give an example illustrating each.

The notion of discrete or digital describes "building blocks", units that are categorical, as opposed to continuous. For example, cat and bat have categorically distinct starting sounds and also refer to different things. In this sense words are more like toys made of lego bricks than like, say, recipes where you might stir in arbitrarily varying amounts of the ingredients. On the other hand, the volume of a dog's bark - even if the 'shape' of the bark is the same - might change its meaning from a friendly greeting to a warning. The waggle dance of the honeybee, which uses physical angles to communicate in a gradiated way about continuous physical space, is another example of an analog communication system. Human language is typically "digital," even to the point that we interpret as categorical things that are not actually acoustically distinct by perceptually "undoing" the effects of context on different sounds (as in the examples of complicated coarticulation) and recognizing the meaning of phonetically reduced utterances as identical to their clearly enunciated counterparts. The *ideal* realization of a word involves discrete units (consonants and vowels) that we're trying to uncover; the actual realization, because it's made by a mouth of flesh and blood and therefore has to obey physical constraints, is an analog mush, from which we need to recover the intended discrete components.

4) From Weisberg's lecture, what can the scientific community do to promote objectivity?

The scientific community can make as much public as possible: publish based on review by peers, not by some other metric (like author's prestige); publicly pre-register an experiment or trial (say, publicly, what you will do and how you will analyze the results); disseminate knowledge as openly as feasible and with attribution.

Describe the Karpicke & Roediger (2008) study in which subjects had to learn English translations for Swahili words. What do its results tell us?

The task was to learn 40 Swahili words: there were 4 groups of subjects, each using a different study strategy during the training period. All groups started by learning the words in a short training session. Then later, the first group (Group 1) studied all 40 words, and then were tested on all 40 words. The second group (Group 2) only studied the words they had previously gotten wrong, and then were tested on all 40 words. The third group (Group 3) studied all 40 words, but were only tested on prior wrong answers. The fourth group (Group 4) studied only prior wrong answers, and were only tested on prior wrong answers. A week after this training, the groups were given a final test on the words. Groups 1 and 2 showed similarly good performance on the test (about 80% correct). On the other hand, Groups 3 and 4 performed poorly on the test. These results demonstrate the importance of testing yourself: both Groups 3 and 4 were only tested on prior wrong answers during the training period, while Groups 1 and 2 were tested on all 40 words during the training period. These results also suggest that it is possible to study efficiently in certain ways, i.e., it is okay to save some time by only studying prior wrong answers (focus on the things you don't know yet), as long as you continue to test yourself on all of the material. This was the study strategy used by Group 2, which performed just as well as Group 1, even though Group 1 spent time studying all 40 words and were tested on all 40 words.

What are the two types of problem solving strategies described in the textbook? What are the differences between the two strategies?

The two types of solution strategies are called algorithmic and heuristic. An algorithm guarantees a correct answer, if we follow the step-by-step procedure. However some problems have no algorithm solutions, or the algorithm solutions take too much time to carry out. In these cases, we need heuristics, which are problem solving strategies that do not guarantee correct answers but sometimes can act as shortcuts to answers. In a sense, the use of the solutions are based on a trade-off between how much cognitive resource one hope to use and how accurate the answer needs to be. People sometimes use heuristics to solve problems. Please discuss some examples of good heuristics that help people solve problems. Working backward: we usually solve a problem by working from the giving information towards the final answer. However, sometimes it could be easier if we work from the final answer back to the start. Think about solving a maze, instead of going from the entrance to the exit, it might be easier if we walk backwards from the exit to the entrance. Means-end analysis: This is a good heuristic when we want to solve the problem using a forward thinking. Instead of solving a big problem as a whole, we can break it down into subgoals and achieve these subgoals step by step. This heuristic changes a complicated problem into a set of clear-defined solvable small problems. One thing to note is that although some heuristics may bring biases into decision/judgment outcomes (e.g. anchoring and adjustment heuristics leads to insufficient update from an initial estimate, representation heuristics contribute to the conjunction fallacy and the gambler's fallacy, etc), many heuristics can be very useful for generating quick and robust solutions to problems.

In an episode of The Office, Jim gives Dwight a mint every time his computer restarts (making a chime noise). After this happens multiple times, Dwight hears the chime of the computer restarting and comments that his mouth tastes funny. Explain how this prank is an example of classical conditioning. In your answer, be sure to identify the unconditioned stimulus (US), unconditioned response (UR), conditioned stimulus (CS) & conditioned response (CR).

The unconditioned stimulus (US) is the taste of a mint. For Dwight, this stimulus leads to the unconditioned response (UR) of salivating. The conditioned stimulus (CS) is the chime of the computer restarting. In Jim's prank, the US was repeatedly paired with the CS. After repeated pairings, the CS starts eliciting the conditioned response (CR) of Dwight salivating.

1) Explain why men and women might, in principle, have different motivations in initiating sexual relationships.

The underlying cause for differing male/female mating stratagems, across the animal kingdom (including in humans) is the disparity between male and female potential lifetime reproductive success. In principle, males could impregnate many females, whereas a single copulation event for a female could result in nine months of pregnancy, the threat of death in childbirth, and the costs of feeding the infant. Males are not forced to make any investment in an offspring beyond the time required for achieving the sexual act itself (though of course many males do invest in the offspring, in humans and otherwise). The investing sex (females in humans) can be viewed as a limiting resource for the opposite sex. Males must compete for access to the limiting resource, which will result in pressure for some males monopolizing multiple females and other males being left out the mating game entirely. Females are not at high risk of being left out the mating game because there is lower cost and high benefit for any copulatory interaction by a male. Females benefit from being selective in their mate choice as they face the high cost of investing in any offspring. That's the idea, anyway. When we come to human psychology, we have the question of how much of our desire, motivation, and behavior come from these evolutionarily-given impulses, and how much from being guided by experience in society over our lives. These are very much open questions.

Theoretically, how could fMRI be used for communication by a paralyzed patient who cannot speak but can understand language?

Theoretically, if someone could make distinct brain regions "light up" on an fMRI scan (i.e. perhaps the motor cortex would "light up" when imagining kicking a soccer ball, and the parahippocampal gyrus would "light up" when imagining walking within one's house), they could associate these things with a "yes" or "no" answer and use these thoughts to communicate when asked yes or no questions. This has actually been done, on a limited scale, in one patient.

What about the people who can perform genius-like tasks, like amazing feats of mathematical calculation? What explanation can we offer for their ability?

There are many examples of people with amazing talents. One woman could multiply two 13-digit numbers in her head, for example. Although it might seem that she holds special, innate skills, the reality is that she built her skills through practice. Her IQ was normal and she was not particularly special when it came to any other cognitive tasks outside of the math domain. Rather, she had the motivation to put incredible effort into practicing and improving at these mathematical feats. This appears to be typical of many people who do extreme math calculations or huge short-term memory feats. (This being said, this characterization is not necessarily appropriate for other extreme talents.)

What are the three theories for why smells are effective in triggering memories?

There are three different (and non-exclusive) theories that may explain this. The first is due to anatomy in that the olfactory bulb is located directly above the nasal passages and does not have to pass through the thalamus. Conceivably, this may lead to more direct transmission from the olfactory bulb to the hippocampus (which is implicated in memory) and to the amygdala (which is implicated in emotion). The second theory, which does not conflict with the first, is that we evolved this trait as it helped us to remember which foods were edible and which were not. (This may be part of why food-based aversive conditioning is so strong!). The third theory is that smells are simply harder to reproduce and rehearse so that they stick with us longer in only the context in which we first encountered them. It may be easier to recall things associated with, for example, the smell of your grandmother's cooking because you are unlikely to have encountered that smell again either in your daily life or (and this is the argument) in your imagination (try imagining a smell—it's almost certainly much less vivid to you than imagining a face or the sound of someone's voice).

In lecture, we learned about a study (Brady..., Oliva, 2008) where participants were shown 2500 images of objects, and were quite accurate at identifying which objects they had seen, when tested 5 days later. At the same time, most of us are unable to accurately describe the appearance of a penny, even though we've seen many thousands of pennies during our lives. How can we understand these seemingly discrepant observations?

There are two key differences between these situations. First, attention matters- during the Brady et al. study, participants were paying attention to the images, but we generally don't pay attention to the appearance of pennies. Mere exposure, even in great quantities, does not guarantee expertise. Second, the task performed by the study participants was a recognition test, while the task of "describing a penny" from memory is a recall test. Recall tasks tend to be harder than recognition tasks, because in recognition the stimulus is its own cue (e.g., the visual features of a presented image are immediately available to you). By contrast, in recall, the cue is often more abstract and lacks detail (e.g., trying to imagine a penny).

Our experience of visual perception is constructed step-by-step through multiple components in the visual system, which includes retina (photoreceptors, bipolar cells, and ganglion cells, etc), LGN in the visual thalamus, and visual cortical areas (V1, V2, V3, V4, IT, etc). Together they enable us to process features from visual scenes. Please explain: How do ganglion cells help us see a sharp contour of light objects presented on a dark background?

There are two types of ganglion cells: on-center cells and off-center cells. An on-center cell fires the most when only the center of its receptive field is illuminated. An off-center cell fires the most when only the surround of its receptive field is illuminated. Both types of ganglion cell have weak responses for uniformly light areas in the light object (or in the background), because influences on centers and surrounds of receptive fields 'cancel' each other out. However, the responses are strong for areas of the scene where the black-white contrast is large. Therefore, the center-surround property of ganglion cells emphasizes edge contours of light objects presented on a dark background, or dark objects on a lighter background. This turns out to be adaptive because, for many objects, lightness is more uniform within the object or with the background than at the boundary between the two.

1. In class, Professor Swingley talked about research that used eye-tracking to record where participants' eyes went when they heard the beginning of a statement like, "I wanted a tur..." He also gave some examples of hallucinatory word-finding in backwards musical recordings. What important feature of language processing do these examples demonstrate in common?

These examples both demonstrate top-down processing; participants in the eye-tracking study began looking at objects whose names begin with the initial sound even before the utterance was complete, showing anticipatory inference of how the sentence will end. In the case of the hallucinatory word-finding, without the guide of the suggested words being provided, few people could hear discernible words in the garbled backwards song - indicating that bottom-up processing wasn't sufficient to form a meaningful interpretation. However, once some words were suggested, most of the class was able to impose that preconception on the sounds and 'hear' that message.

There are instances when we don't appear to behave rationally; describe the experiment involving people paying for photos, specifically paying what you want and charity conditions

They found that far more people bought photos in the pay what you want (PWYW) condition (no charity) than in any other condition. In the charity condition, fewer people bought photos in the PWYW condition but the amount of money per donation increased. The rationale essentially is once we engage in giving to charity, we should do it correctly, or not at all. This seems irrational, in the sense that surely a charity is better off with a small amount of money than none. Of course, it's only actually *irrational* if our goal of doing good in the world is more important than our other goal of finding a way to feel good about ourselves. If our main goal is to feel good about ourselves, blaming our own failure to donate on our lack of interest in a photo, and knowing deep down that we would feel bad about only giving a tiny bit to a charity, isn't irrational.

Little Albert was conditioned by pairing a loud noise with a white rabbit, but he later shows fear to a number of stimuli (e.g., other animals, a fur mask). What does this demonstrate about classical conditioning?

This demonstrates the principles of stimulus generalization: when organisms are classically conditioned, they respond to a range of stimuli that are similar to the original CS. Because the other animals (and even fur mask!) are similar enough to the original white rabbit, Little Albert generalizes to these stimuli, and elicits the same (or similar) fear response to them that he would show to the white rabbit.

What did the study by Sperling (with the matrix of letters and the tones) demonstrate about the capacity of our sensory memory, and how did it demonstrate this? Be sure to explain the logic of the study in your answer.

This study demonstrated that the capacity of visual sensory memory is larger than people can report using traditional methods of reporting (e.g., listing all the items they remember). In this study, subjects viewed a matrix of letters for a brief period. After the matrix disappeared, subjects were cued by a tone indicating which row of letters they should report. We can then extrapolate from the number of letters in the row that they were able to report, to estimate the number of letters in the whole matrix that were in their sensory memory (e.g., if a subject viewed a matrix with 3 rows, and reports 3 letters in the row that was cued, then we can assume that he could have reported 3 letters in any of the 3 rows, and thus has a sensory memory capacity of 9 letters). This is because the cue to the relevant row was presented after viewing the matrix of letters, suggesting that any given row of letters was (temporarily) available to the viewer for recall prior to the cue. Thus, this "partial report" procedure allows us to estimate the capacity of sensory memory without it being constrained by the time it takes to report all items in sensory memory.

What are the two main treatments for major depression, and how do they work?

Treatment #1: Cognitive Therapy, which uses rational discussion and reflection to challenge unrealistically pessimistic beliefs about one's life and the world. Treatment #2: Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI), which cause there to be greater amounts of serotonin in the synapse.

Give an example of an experiment detailed in class that demonstrates the relationship between social proximity and compliance.

Two experimental manipulations of creating 'minimal groups' were discussed in class - in one, you could get increased cooperative / helpful behavior from a subject if you had the to-be-helped confederate indicate they had the same birthday as the subject, and in the other, the experimenter informing both subjects they were in the same 'rare fingerprint category' would elicit the same effect. Even tenuous and arbitrary commonalities like these can augment compliance well above baseline.

3) Explain the ultimatum game and prisoner's dilemma.

Ultimatum game- an economic experiment where player 1 is given a lump sum of money and told to divide however they want with player 2. Player 2 then gets to accept or reject the offer. If Player 2 rejects the offer, neither play gets any money. Thus it would be rational for Player 2 to accept any offer because some money is better than none, but this is not what is observed. Prisoners' Dilemma- a situation in which the outcome for 2 players depends on the cooperation or defection of the other player. If both players cooperate, the punishment/cost is eliminated (may even get a reward). If one player cooperates and the other defects, the players who cooperates gets a hefty cost and the defector gets off scot-free. If both players defect, they both receive a lesser cost. For example, both cooperate and receive $10. One cooperates and the other defects, cooperator loses $10, defector gains $5. Both defect, both lose $5. Various versions manipulate the rewards or costs; in class, this was set up as being about punishment.

. Describe the history and current status of treatment for borderline personality disorder (BPD) as reviewed in lecture.

Until about 15-20 years ago, the treatment situation for BPD was grim. Individuals with BPD did not respond well to psychoanalysis, leading to the view that BPD was "untreatable." CBT therapists were reluctant to take BPD patients on for this reason, and because these patients were seen as less likely to be compliant. Fortunately, in the last 15 years or so, new treatments have been introduced that have challenged the idea that this disorder is untreatable. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) has shown particular success. DBT is a variation of CBT that is based on a model suggesting that people with BPD struggle with two kinds of deficits: (1) They lack important skills for interpersonal effectiveness, self-regulation, and distress tolerance; and (2) Personal and environmental factors sometimes inhibit use of behavioral skills that patients do have, and at times reinforce dysfunctional behaviors. DBT targets both of these deficits. First, it teaches specific skills to regulate emotions, to tolerate emotional distress, and to be more effective in interpersonal conflicts. Second, it improves motivation to change through the use of behavioral principles. DBT is an intensive treatment that provides a great deal of support to both patients and therapists as they work to build and reinforce skillful behaviors by patients. This trajectory demonstrates that research may be our best hope towards alleviating suffering once thought to be "untreatable."

What is validity? What makes for a valid measure of something?

Validity "is the extent to which a test measures what it is supposed to measure or predicts what it is supposed to predict" (Griggs, p. 255). In other words, a valid test allows you to draw conclusions about the thing you are intending to measure/observe/study rather than something else. Validity requires a precise definition of the variable you are aiming to measure. For example, an AP American History exam on reconstruction efforts after the Civil War would require exam questions to not only be on topic (right time period, right place, right people, right events), it also must be aimed at the right level of knowledge. For example, "After the assassination of Lincoln, who became president?" might be too easy and "Which General was placed in charge of Fourth Military District of Arkansas and Mississippi?" might be too hard. Tests with too many easy questions or too many hard ones will not be a valid measure of high school student proficiency. (Griggs, p.270)

How do different types of cones help us identify colors?

Visible light with different colors varies in the wavelength (i.e., colors vary). Human have three types of cone photoreceptors that activated best by short, medium, or long wavelengths of light. The specific wavelength of a light changes the absolute responses of the three cone types, and hence leads to a unique ratio of cone responses from one cone to the next. In this way, a given pattern of cone firing among the three cones can provide a unique signature for a color/intensity combination.

Explain one study that shows that we believe that other people notice and understand us more than they actually do. How does it show this?

We discussed three such studies in class: Newton & Ross: participants selected a song from a list of 25 and tapped out the rhythm on a table. They expected that their partners would guess the song correctly about 50% of the time, whereas the actual rate of correct guesses was about 2.5%. The participants tapping the rhythm thought that what they were doing was far more transparent than did their partners. Gilovich et al.: Participants drank three identical-looking glasses of liquid. Two contained fruit punch and one contained a dyed pickle/vinegar brine. They were instructed to hide their reactions to each one. They expected that observers would still be able to tell which was the vinegar brine (i.e., they thought their displeasure at the drink would "leak out" in their behavior), but in reality, the observers only guessed correctly at chance levels (i.e., about one third of the time). The famous t-shirt study: Participants were told to wear an embarrassing t-shirt featuring a large, prominent picture of singer Barry Manilow, and then were sent down the hall where a group of people were filling out surveys. After leaving the room, they predicted how many people in the room had noticed their shirt. They predicted that about half of them had, whereas in reality, only about a quarter had. This demonstrates that we think people are paying much more attention to us than really are.

What things do our definitions of abnormality influence? Why does how we define abnormality matter in the real world?

What is defined as abnormal can have a huge influence in a variety of settings. Definitions of abnormality are to a certain degree based on social norms and can influence what and who is treated: it can guide people to seek treatment (knowledge that you have a disorder can influence treatment seeking), to be eligible for treatment (insurance coverage), and it can shape what treatments are available (it's hard to have a treatment for something that isn't defined). It can guide research funding, and thus can influence what treatments are available, what we know about the disorder, and can lead to the improvement and development of existing and new treatments. It can influence public policy, as public funding for disorders is often linked to how prevalent and impactful a disorder is in a society: if only .05% of a population suffers from a disorder, it will likely receive less attention and funding than a disorder that exists in 20% of the population. To make these estimates you have to be able to count the number of people who are suffering from each disorder.

Describe the events that constitute an action potential. (Gleitman reading)

When a neuron is at rest, the inside of the neuron is negatively charged relative to the outside of the neuron (i.e., the neuron has a resting potential of about -70 millivolts). Also, at rest, there are relatively more sodium ions outside the neuron (sodium ions are positively charged). This concentration difference in sodium is maintained by various mechanisms, like ion pumps, which actively move ions across the membrane. When the neuron receives a stimulus, this can cause the neuron's membrane to depolarize (meaning that its voltage becomes closer to zero). When the neuron's membrane voltage reaches a certain excitation threshold (of about -55 millivolts), this is when an action potential is triggered: sodium ions rapidly flood into the neuron, resulting in an upward swing in the membrane voltage from negative to positive. Eventually, ion pumps move the sodium ions back to the outside of the neuron, and the inside of the neuron becomes increasingly negative (a process known as repolarization). This is followed by a refractory period, where the neuron is unable to initiate a new action potential, and then finally the neuron returns to its resting potential.

Describe two errors children usually make in Piaget's sensorimotor stage and the reasons Piaget provided for these behaviors.

When children are in the sensorimotor stage, they don't search for objects once they are out of sight. Piaget explained this behavior as a lack of object permanence -- the child believes that the object only exists in relation to her own perceptual experience; once the object is out of sight, it no longer exists. Children also make the A-not-B error during the sensorimotor stage (after they have started reaching for hidden objects). In the A-not-B error, they continue to reach for a toy in an initial hiding place (A) after the hiding place changes to another location (B) on a new trial, even though they watched the adult change the hiding place. Piaget explained this behavior as the child being unable to separate the world from his own actions and movements. The child's reaching behavior defines his experience of the object, so he continues to reach toward the same hiding place to access it. The child can't conceptualize the object apart from his experience reaching for it. These explanations come from Piaget's belief that in the sensorimotor stage, cognition is purely physical (based on movements and sensory information). In this stage, Piaget believed that children cannot think about the past or future, cannot differentiate between themselves and the world (they believe that the world is a product of their own movements and perceptions), and lack object permanence. (Note though that Piaget's explanations for these very real behavioral phenomena are no longer believed by most psychologists.)

What are the primacy and recency effects? For each effect, list a proposed cause of the effect and an experimental result that supports this proposed cause.

When people hear a list of words and are asked to freely recall words from the list, they tend to better recall words from the beginning (primacy effect) and the end (recency effect) of the list than from the middle. The primary effect may be caused by the fact that people devote more attention and rehearsal to early words than words occurring later in the list, and because the context of appearing first makes the word somewhat more distinctive. The rehearsal part of the explanation is supported by the result that if words are presented more slowly (so participants have time to devote more attention to each word), the primacy effect becomes stronger, but the recency effect does not change. The recency effect may be caused by the fact that items from the end of the list are still in working memory when people report the word list. This is supported by the fact that adding a delay at the end of reading the list, before participants report the words that they can recall, eliminates the recency effect but does not change the primacy effect.

What is the anchoring effect? What is a study that shows the effect?

When people make judgments under uncertainty (i.e., when the correct answer is unknown—either to them, or in general), they often start by identifying an anchor (initial, rough estimates that might come from salient dates or facts) and then adjust away from that anchor. Because adjusting requires conscious effort, they tend to under-adjust, which results in estimates that are systematically too close to (biased towards) the anchor itself. Rather bizarrely, we even tend to rely on anchors when we know they have no bearing on the question we are trying to answer (e.g., when we can see that they were generated at random). In a study by Daniel Kahneman, participants were asked questions such as "what proportion of the African nations are members of the UN?" Before participants provided their estimates, they were given a random benchmark (the anchor)— say 10%-- and were asked if they thought the true proportion of African nations in the UN was higher or lower. Afterwards, participants were asked to give their own estimates. People who started with an anchor of 10% gave much lower estimates (on average) than people who started with an anchor of 65%. Critically, participants knew that the anchors they were given were random and should not affect the answer to the question. However, the results of this study show that people tended to use the study's random benchmark as an anchor, and under-adjusted their later estimates, resulting in a systematic bias. (lecture, 3/22/18; Griggs pp.248-249)

How can the principles of classical conditioning be used to treat patients with phobias? Make sure to clearly explain how the treatment relies on the principles of classical conditioning.

When somebody has a phobia, their feared object (e.g., a snake) is like a conditioned stimulus that elicits the conditioned response of fear. Systematic desensitization works by creating a new association with the feared object. The person with a snake phobia would be repeatedly exposed to snake stimuli (gradually increasing in intensity) in a safe situation. For example, first a picture of a cartoon snake, followed by a picture of a garden snake, a video of a snake, looking at a snake in a cage from across the room, and finally holding a trained snake. Thus, the stimulus of "snake" has not been paired with a CR of fear, but instead with tolerating the fear in a safe environment. Over time, this leads to extinction of the fear response.

2. How does the concept from question number 1 relate to the practice of "incremental parsing"?

When we hear a phrase like, "The fat people eat..." we begin to parse the sentence grammatically before we have all of the pieces, assuming that fat is an adjective modifying people, which we think is the subject, and eat is the verb. These are all inferences that are informed in a top-down way based on our statistical knowledge of the language; when we hear the unexpected end of the sentence ("...accumulates on their thighs") we must re-parse it to reflect a grammatically valid role for all of the words.

Give an example in which the language that someone speaks has an influence on how he or she performs in a task.

Winawer and colleagues (2007) tested English and Russian native speakers in a task in which participants had to judge which of two color blocks matched a third one in its precise hue. The two color blocks would on some trials come from hues that would be given different names in Russian. On other trials, the hues would be given the same name in Russian. Russians were faster when the hues would have different names in Russian, even though participants were not asked to name them. Sounds Whorfian, right? But ... this effect goes away if the Russians are also keeping number lists in their head using verbal rehearsal. So if you keep the language system busy, Russians aren't using it to differentiate colors. This seems less like a Whorfian effect, then, and more like implicit use of language as a memory boost in doing this specific task. (there are other opinions on this finding)

Does learning change your brain? In what sense? Describe two experimental results discussed in lecture (one in animals, one in humans) that suggest that learning relates to measurable neuroanatomical changes in the brain.

Yes! Learning happens in the brain. Therefore the brain changes when we learn. Exactly what the mechanism is, we don't really know. In some cases, though, we can measure anatomical changes that are a consequence of learning: Animal study: Jenkins & Merzenich (1990) trained owl monkeys to touch their fingertips to a rotating disk for long periods of time over about 3 months. Before and after this training, the experimenters mapped out how much of somatosensory cortex corresponded to different parts of the monkeys' hands. They found that after the training period, the amount of somatosensory cortex dedicated to the fingertips involved in touching the rotating disk had increased (e.g., see slide 30, especially fingertip 2). This demonstrates the impact of repeated sensory experience on measurable anatomical changes in the brain. Human study: Draganski et al. (2006) used anatomical MRI to measure gray matter volume in medical students before and after a medical exam (specifically, 3 months before the exam, 1 day after, and 3 months after). After the exam, they found increased gray matter in areas like posterior parietal cortex and the hippocampus. It may be that these gray matter increases are related to the intensive studying that was done by the medical students to prepare for the exam. A similar study evaluated students learning to juggle, and found similar results.

Zimbardo studied why ordinary people are capable of doing evil things on a large scale, and summarized the factors that encourage such behaviors. What are some of the factors? Can you think of a real-world example?

Zimbardo's factors are as follow: start with an ideology start with small, insignificant-seeming steps person in charge appears just (or does at first) rules vague; words used in new ways highlight models of compliance allow some verbal dissent, but enforce behavioral compliance make it hard to exit In Zimbardo's analysis of evil behavior, the first step is to hook people into your cause by using ideology. One example is that of Jonestown. The leader of Jonestown, Jim Jones, advocated communism and egalitarianism, which gained support from influential political figures at the time. So the group had a reasonable ideology to fight for that seemed worthwhile. In the Jonestown example, Jim Jones hooked followers by using religion, espousing egalitarianism ideals, and participating in community service - thereby convincing people he had benevolent motivations and worthwhile cause. Slowly but surely he integrated extremist views on socialism and capitalism, but by then he had already developed a substantial following. At the beginning, people in the group were only asked to do small things such as going to the Church, making small donations, helpful social projects etc. The leader gradually increased the magnitude of the requests. The group relocated to Guyana. This relocation, among other things, isolated people and made it hard for them to exit the group.

Describe the first line treatments for OCD described in lecture.

a) Exposure and response prevention (EXRP) is a cognitive behavioral treatment in which individuals with OCD are exposed to the stimulus they fear and are then prevented from engaging in the compulsive behavior that neutralizes the obsession or intrusive thought. For example, if an individual with OCD is obsessed with contamination and frequently washes to prevent contamination, EXRP would involve having this individual touch a dirty surface and then not allow him/her to engage in the washing ritual. The idea is that then the patient will gradually come to recognize that the "contamination" does not have any consequence. b) Another treatment for OCD is medication affecting serotonin. Medications used to treat OCD work primarily by affecting serotonin levels and taking the "edge" off obsessions so that they are more tolerable. Studies that have compared EXRP to combined treatment (EXRP plus medication) have found no difference in outcomes between groups. Thus, there seems to be no added benefit of medication over and above EXRP, though for those who cannot initiate EXRP the medication can sometimes enable patients to do so.

What are the three main claims of behaviorism? Explain each (do not just reiterate them). Try to think of a reason why each one is at least partially inaccurate.

a. All that a person or animal is, psychologically, comes from learning and experience, i.e., nothing is "innate" or "unlearned." - This claim is too strong, because we know that many aspects of our psychology (and that of other animals) is not dependent on experience. For instance, an eyeblink occurs reflexively after a puff of air. The eyeblink occurs as an adaptive, defensive response to the air puff (see this example in Section 4.1, pg 153); this is not something that humans have to learn. Even in classical conditioning experiments, many of the unconditioned responses are truly "unconditioned," for instance, salivation in response to the taste of meat in Pavlov's dogs. These responses are not learned, and therefore this claim overreaches. b. Psychology should study behaviors, not mental states such as thoughts, feelings, or desires. Such states cannot be observed and may not even exist as legitimate objects of study. - Psychology is the science of the mind, and there is more to the mind than behavior. And, in fact, studies of latent learning have shown that mental states (specifically, knowledge) must exist even if they are not expressed in behavior. Moreover, these studies show that there are scientific ways of demonstrating such mental states. For example, studies of food-deprived rats show that, although these rates had knowledge of a maze, they did not show that knowledge in their behavior until they were offered a food reward (see Section 4.3 on Latent Learning, pg 187). c. All animals learn according to the same principles (and content does not matter). Anything can be learned in essentially the same way. - While habituation, classical conditioning, operant conditioning and observational learning seem to be quite general across species (though there is less evidence for observational learning in non-primates), many species show additional forms of learning that are quite specialized and fulfill an adaptive function. For instance, the study (Wilcoxon, Dragoin, & Kral, 1971) in the Taste Aversion section of the book shows that birds and rats learned different associations more easily based on characteristics that are more important to their survival (pg 186). Closer to home, humans are the only species that can learn language. Additionally, content does matter, as certain associations (e.g., taste aversion) are much easier to learn than others, due to biological constraints (see Biological Preparedness in Learning in Section 4.3, pg 184+.)

What is the Rorschach test? How has it been misused?

is a projective test in which patients are asked to describe a series of ambiguous images. It was developed as a way to differentiate schizophrenic patients from individuals without schizophrenia, since schizophrenics have unusual problems with perception of whole objects and tend to separate figure and ground differently from healthy people. Since its development, it has become a popular tool for evaluating personality among typical people. However, the system for evaluating personality based on descriptions of the images is based on slim evidence and has little validity. This is a problem because many people (and courts) sometimes believe in its results and use it in important determinations, including deciding child custody cases and in hiring decisions.