Psych 1001 - Exam 2

base rate effect example

- people are buying houses (right now oct. 2020) that are way more expensive than they are actually worth --> more people buying than there are houses - they are using current specific information, not considering the base rate information - house worth: $150K; sold at: $200K

episodic memory

- personal experience and events - e.g., who was your first grade teacher - usually most impacted with TBI or any kind of head trauma

denotative vs connotative mening

- pig - definition: the animal - connotative: a cop or someone who is a slob - emotional attachment applied to the word/implied meaning

preparation

- prepare, background information on what the problem is - immersing yourself in the area of interest

fixed interval example

- rat has to wait 2 minutes before it gets the pellet; no matter how many times it hits the lever - set amount of time between when the rat gets the pellet

Osgood's Semantic Differential

- rating scale that helps you learn the connotative meaning of a word - helps to tap into the meaning behind the word - tap into the emotional or implied definition of the word

mental images

- recreating mental images is called reverse vision - visual information comes in through the eyes and goes to the back of the brain for processing - thinking about a memory (temporal lobe is stimulated), then information is sent to the visual cortex and processed just like it would be if you were looking at an image

availability heuristic example

- saw a shark attack on the news and then you went to the beach the next day - you are much more likely to think that you will be in a shark attack because that information Is readily available based on the news you saw

fixed interval

- set amount of time subject has to wait before they gets the reward

divergent thinking

- single problem, trying to come up with multiple solutions for the problem

procedural memory

- skills/how to - brushing teeth, riding a bike - things you do repeatedly - most likely to be intact after a brain injury or some sort of head trauma

gambling

- slots: variable ratio has the highest rate of addition - this is what casinos use especially with slots --> you do not know when you will get the reward but you know it's coming - may have to hit the lever 30 times before they get a reward, but if they get it then it's worth it

morpheme

- smallest unit of meaning

phoneme

- smallest unit of sound

variable interval

- some amount of time has to last, sometimes 1 minute, sometimes 15 (varied amount of time) - subject does not know when it will get the reward but knows it will have to wait a set amount of time before they get reward

secondary reinforcers

- sometimes called "acquired" reinforcers - rewards that we learn to like - often gain value through an association with a primary reinforcer - on their own the value is not automatic - ex. the value of cash on its own is not enough; if your mom gives you cash but says you can't leave the house then it is of little value

implicit memory

- subconscious - information that you're not actively attempting to learn

incubation

- subconscious process where information from preparation comes together and begins to integrate itself into your subconscious - not actively engaging in research process - waiting period where information is churning behind the scenes

variable ratio

- subject knows it has to exhibit a set number of behaviors, but doesn't know how many times it will have to do it to get the reward - higher rate of response when variable exists - more upsetting to the subject but more responses for observer - varied number of repsonses

decay theory

- synapses that maintain circuitry for a particular event decay and die away - usually you engage in the most forgetting an hour after you learned the information - with repetition and rehearsal you will be more likely to remember it

reverse vision

- taking a visual memory and recreating it and it is then processed in the occipital lobe

negative reinforcement

- taking away an adverse stimulus or event to increase behavior - ex., if you clean your room I will take two days off your punishment - ex., have a rat push a lever 3 times to stop the floor from being electrified

negative punishment

- taking something positive away to decrease behavior - ex., child (16+ yrs) goes out and drives recklessly with parents car; parent takes away car privileges for a month - take away a positive thing (car) to reduce the behavior (driving recklessly)

verification

- testing your idea to make sure it works; did I actually answer the problem?

fixed ratio

- the schedule of reinforcement is the same - delivery of reinforcement is always delivered the same

working memory (WM)

- type of STM - more active process than STM - takes a lot of cognitive memory - both STM and LTM can be moved into LTM - manipulating information and being able to hold on to what is necessary: WM

retrograde amnesia

- unable to remember events that occurred before a traumatic event --> can't remember old information

base rate effect

- we give more weight to specific current information rather than considering base rate information - the original probability of something happening is ignored

encoding error

- we never successfully process the information in the first place to put it into LTM - you're not encoding it so you're not going to remember it - often due to misplaced attention - attention error, not memory error

cue-dependent forgetting

- we tend to remember information better when we are in the same context in which we learned it - if cues that were present when you were learning something are not there when you need to recall it, you'll have a much harder time recalling it

semantics

- word and sentence meaning - denotative vs connotative meaning

availability heuristic

- you believe that an event is more likely to happen to you if you have memories of that event occurring easily available to you

representative heuristics example

- your neighbor has dreadlocks, lots of tattoos and wears mostly black - people will assume she is a tattoo artist, smokes weed, etc. because of her appearance - neighbor is actually a doctor and does not smoke weed, but people often do not think that because she is not what they think of when they think of what a doctor looks like

love

- concept because it doesn't have a concrete, finite, universally accepted definition of what the word means - there are different meanings - definition can change depending on who or what you are talking about

concept formation

- concept: abstract idea, category of object(s) or events that share a common attribute - concepts can differ depending on who is thinking about them (they can be personal or cultural) --> not the same for everyone

explicit memory

- conscious effort to remember something

long term memory (LTM)

- continue to rehearse information/memory for a minute or longer and you are able to elaborate on the behavior - using more synapses, making more information with the information you have

proactive interference example

- e.g., you buy a new house and on your way home you unconsciously begin taking the route to your old house - old information about where you used to live interfered with information in your memory about where to get to your new house

working memory example

- ex. Mark is 37 y/o and John is 22 y/o what is the difference between Mark and John - have to do mental math to get the answer to the above problem

declarative memory

- facts and events - broken down into two types of memory 1. semantic memory 2. episodic memory

convergent thinking

- finding a single answer to a problem out of lots of possible solutions - breaking down the information into a single answer in a problem

anterograde amnesia

- forgetting events that occurred after a traumatic event --> memory loss for new information - inability to form new memories that occur after TBI

semantic memory

- general fund of knowledge - e.g., who was the 44th president of the US

variable ratio issues

- hardest type to extinguish - higher rate of extinction burst because subject learns that the reward will come at some point

serial position effect

- how likely we are to remember information based on when we heard it - our tendency is to recall best things we heard first in a list and last in a list

relational concepts

- how object or features relate to one another or belong to a particular category - a coffee cup and a dinner plate = concept of dished - food and gasoline = types of fuel

prototype concepts

- ideal examples of a concept (e.g., an apple is a prototype of fruit) - personally based (what is a prototype for one person may not be for someone else) - prototypes can be associated with prejudice - dog: four legs, short hair, long tail (the concept of a dog is different for everyone [I.e., what you think of when you think of a dog])

orientation

- identifying a problem (orient yourself to what the issue is)

recall error

- information is in LTM, but you cannot recall the information because of some outside reason - e.g., test anxiety --> too stressed out to remember a memory

interference theory

- information that we learned interferes with other information and inhibits our ability to remember information later on - two types of inference

representative heuristic

- judgement as to whether or not someone or something belongs to a certain class - if you are not what people think of when they think of a certain category then you will most likely be overlooked

operant conditioning

- learning based on the positive or negative consequences of responding - an individual makes an association between a particular behavior and a consequence - consequences are not always bad - more control from the participant (I.e., participant is more involved)

cognitive heuristics

- mental shortcuts to help us solve problems - may not always been accurate or may be based on false information

general memory

- most likely to remember the beginning and tail end of a list of numbers (STM) - ever more likely to remember the last few things on the list because they are still in STM - you remember the first few things because you have rehearsed them (usually) --> forget what was in the middle because it gets lapsed over by the newer information

schedule of reinforcement mindfulness

- need to be mindful of how we are reinforcing behaviors - we can determine how addicting behaviors are - companies that make addicting apps use these because they can control how addicting the behavior is

retrograde interference

- newly presented information interferes with our ability to remember old information - information learned from chapter 7 interferes with our ability to remember information from chapter 6

proactive interference

- old information interferes with remembering new information - information learned in chapter 6 interferes with our ability to remember information from chapter 7

Pavlov's experiment

- one stimulus that produces no response (bell) is repeatedly paired with a stimulus (food) - brings food to dog and rings a bell (no response to the bell) but salivates because of the food; eventually the dog hears just the bell and begins salivating

sensory memory

- only lasts for a little bit of time - information is processed by the brain in half a second - if your brain decides it wasn't important then the brain gets rid of it in half a second

stages of creative thought

- orientation - preparation - incubation - illumination - verification

punishment

- part of operant conditioning - a punishment (negative or positive) will always decrease behavior

reinforcer

- part of operant conditioning - a reinforcer will always increase behavior (whether it is positive or negative it will always increase behavior)

schedule of reinforcement

A timetable for when and how often reinforcement for a particular behavior occurs

stimulus generalization (example)

Ex. present Albert with a white rat; then, present Albert with a white rat and hit a gong; Albert cries; remove gong when presenting rat; present just rat and Albert begins to cry; Albert then cries at anything similar to the rat (small, white, furry - fluffy white pillow, white dog, white guinea pig, etc) - Albert generalized his fear of the white rat onto similar things

Pavlov's experiment (classical conditioning terms)

NS: the bell US: the food UR: dog salivating CS: the bell triggers the salivating CR: dog salivating at the sound of the bell

spontaneous recovery

a reemergence of a previously extinguished behavior

neutral stimulus (NS)

a stimulus that originally produces no response aside from focusing attention

unconditioned stimulus (US)

a stimulus that produces a particular response every time it is presented without past training

stimulus discrimination

ability to distinguish between one stimulus and similar stimuli - opposite of stimulus generalization ex., Albert would only be afraid of the white rat not a similar looking white guinea pig

extinction burst

an acute increase in unwanted behavior when the extinction method is applied

conditioned response (CR)

an automatic learned response elicited by the conditioned stimulus

unconditioned response (UR)

an unlearned response that occurs naturally in reaction to the unconditioned stimulus

connotative meaning

emotional or personal or implied meaning

counter conditioning

(a technique employed in animal training and in treatment of phobias and similar conditions in humans) -- behavior incompatible with a habitual undesirable pattern is reduced - continually provide the conditioned stimulus without the unconditioned stimulus

illumination

- "ah-ha" moment when you decide what you are going to do (e.g., draw, paint, research, giving a survey, etc.) - tends to happen when there is low stimulus activity (I.e., when you are not actively thinking about the problem [e.g., when you are sleeping, watching tv, etc.])

disjunctive concepts

- "either/or" concepts - objects have at least one of several possible features to belong to a category - can have this feature, that feature or that feature to belong to a category - dogs: can have a long tail or short tail, floppy ears or pointy ears, long hair or short hair, long snout or short snout, 4 legs or less

cognition/thought

- (1) mental images - (2) concepts - (3) language - these small bits all work together to create thought

types of concepts

- (1) relational concepts - (2) disjunctive concepts - (3) prototypes - (4) faulty concepts

7 +/- 2

- 7 plus or minus 2 - people can hold on to 5-9 pieces of information before they lose it (this is why phone numbers are 7 digits long) - some people can hold on to 10-12 pieces of information, some can only do 2-4, very rare

Skinner Box (B.F. Skinner)

- Teach rat to do certain behaviors - Taught rats to push lever and every time the rat would get a piece of food - increase the rats behavior (lever pushing) because they are getting a positive reward (food pellet) - can teach the rat to push the lever 5 times to get the food (no reward if they push 4 or 6 times)

positive reinforcement

- applied reinforcer that is given to participant - ex., praise, sticker, food pellet, treats, etc.) - given as an attempt to increase behavior

positive punishment

- applying an adverse stimulus to decrease behavior - ex., hitting a child to stop a tantrum (doing something the child doesn't like to reduce a behavior

chunking

- chunk information into meaningful units so they become their own - e.g., 1-7-6-2 to 1762 (like the year)

types of learning

- classical conditioning - operant conditioning

kinesthetic imagery

- cognitive recreation of physical/muscle movement - muscle memory - focusing on how to do a cartwheel, thinking of the muscles you need to execute that movement, even if you are not exactly moving - what would your body look like (how would it move) if you were doing an action

stimulus generalization

a conditioned response to one object that is exhibited in the presence of similar stimuli

classical conditioning

a form of learning in which reflex (innate) responses are associated with new stimulus

conditioned stimulus (CS)

a previously neutral stimulus that becomes associated with the unconditioned stimulus and eventually triggers the unconditioned response

counter-conditioning (example)

if someone has a phobia of bridges a form of treatment would be having them look at bridges and go over bridges to face their fears (stop avoiding the fear and face it)

short term memory (STM)

if you pay attention to the information, the brain then stores the memory in under one minute (typically several minutes) - rehearsal helps with STM - hear a phone number, say it a few times, put the number into the phone and then lose the memory/ability to recall the number - holding on to necessary information: STM

faulty concepts

inaccurate examples of concepts that can muddle thinking (e.g., all-or-nothing thinking of use of stereotypes)

reflex

innate, automatic response to a stimulus

ratio

number of responses/behaviors

primary reinforcers

provide comfort, end discomfort, or satisfy a basic biological need - tend to be instinctively rewarding rather than being learned or acquired over time - they can activate the pleasure centers or pleasure pathways of the brain

variable ratio example

rat hits 1 time, pellet rat hits 5 times, pellet rat hits 8 times, pellet - varied number of responses

extinction

the gradual decrease in the response rate of a behavior learned via reinforcement

denotative meaning

the literal or dictionary meaning of a word or phrase

fixed ratio example

the rat gets a pellet of food after every set number of times that it hits the level - every 5 times the rat hits the lever it will get a reward (set number of behaviors before reward) you have to do the dishes 3 times a week to get the reward (ice cream or money) - set number or responses/behaviors

interval

time the lapse in behavior occurs

choice overload

too many options, freezing of decisiveness (indecisive) - ex. where do you want to eat? (so many choices that you can't decide and feel overloaded with Information)