PSYC 2150 Midterm #1 (Willingham)

quantitative measure of mental process

Ebbinghaus' savings method to measure forgetting

application of cc: bedwetting

US(alarm)->UR(waking) CS(full bladder)+US(alarm) CS(full bladder)->(waking)

application of cc: advertising

US(model)->UR(pos.eval.) CS(product)+US(model) CS(product)->CR(pos.eval.)

basic effect of classical conditioning

US->UR CS+US CS->CR

savings

[original time to learn] - [time to relearn list after delay] - longer delays-> smaller savings (measure of forgetting)

stimulus substitution theory (S-R)

a theory of classical conditioning that proposes that the CS acts as a substitute for the US to elicit a response US - UR => CS - CR (association b/w CS + CR)

how to read effectively

connection (context) and building meaning across sentences (bridging)

partial access in studying

focusing on all the details (bottom of hierarchy) & not knowing the key conclusions

craving for drug is an attempt to

get back to homeostasis

method to measure introspectionism

introspection (following your own thoughts, e.g listen to a metronome)

serial self-terminating search

items are examined one after another until target is found or until all items are checked

how does the opponent process effect overdose?

more likely in unfamiliar setting bc body isn't getting the conditioned cues (rehab should occur in typical drug-using setting)

behaviorism's success

produce interesting results

familiarity in studying

rereading (shallow processing)

evolutionary constraints prefer

simplicity

goal of cognitive psychology

to identify processes and representations (i.e. abstract constructs) that support thought and behavior

father of behaviorism

watson

habit learning

when the stimulus begins to elicit the response directly

thorndike's law of effect

"if a response in the presence of a stimulus is followed by a satisfying event, the association between S + R is strengthened" (& vice versa) - pos/satisfying effect = likely to repeated in the future

fixed-interval schedule (schedule of reinforcement)

- 1st response after a specific amount of time since the last reinforcement - little response until just before reinforcement: then rapid response - fairly easy to extinguish - EX: annual sales (working harder at bonus time)

variable interval (schedule of reinforcement)

- 1st response after some amount of time since the last reinforcement: amount of time can vary, locally - steady response - hard to extinguish (doing more work doesn't lead to more reward) - EX: ferberizing (let the child cry until they sleep-worst thing to do is go in at variable interval)

instrumental conditioning in biofeedback

- IC of the automatic nervous system - can actually operantly condition ppl to decrease blood pressure

two theories of STM

- STM as extra representation: duplication of LTM - STM as state: temporary connection of representations in LTM

abstract construct

- a mental process OR representation OR a set of processes & representations that you use as part of your explanation for data (EX: a theory) - stuff that's not observable

critical period

- a time when the animal is able to learn particular info rapidly & with little exposure - if the time window is missed, the animal learns with greater effort or not at all - EX: for human language-> learning ability associated with age of arrival only BEFORE puberty (also ducks imprinting-> lorenz as mom)

S-S theory

- an association between the CS + US is learned - never link b/w CS + CR, it's all mediated through the US that's in the mind - important phenom: higher-order conditioning

preparedness

- an organism's evolutionary history can make it easy to learn a particular association - a sorting tendency (more likely to associate image of snake with shock than flower) - aka belongingness

blocking effect

- animal learns nothing about a stimulus if the stimulus provides no new predictive information (only get learning if you make a bad prediction) - conditioned response only occurs during the presentation of stimulus A, bc the earlier conditioning of A "blocks" the conditioning of B when B is added to A. - can lead to loss in associative strength despite repeated pairings (recorla-wagner model)

reinforcer devaluation effect

- animal will stop performing an instrumental response that once led to a reinforcer if the reinforcer is separately made aversive or undesirable.

inspo from outside psych

- artificial intelligence (symbolic logic- thinking patterns) - neuroscience (greater usefulness of brain data - stroke patient using representations bc knows what she wants to say but can't find words)

why did the idea of abstract constructs drive behaviorist nuts?

- bc it's unobservable - taking behavior & putting it in the head of a person & pretended to have explained something

why does FAP pose a problem for behaviorists?

- bc its complex behavior, governed by stimulus control but it didn't go through the process of shaping

problems with taking notes while reading (2)

- beginners don't know what's important - highlighting is a bad for capturing chapter organization (too linear vs hierarchical) - want notes you can change & rearrange and that break down material

watson used classical conditioning to argue that:

- behavior can be analyzed without any reference to the mind - central tenet: psych was properly studied by measuring observable behavior & invisible mental processes were not valid topics for psych study - little albert experiment)

interdisciplinary conferences at dartmouth & MIT

- birth of cognitive science - AI, logic theory, the magic 7 +/- 2

difference between cc & oc

- cc: stimulus-stimulus (requires a UR that in unavoidable/involuntary) - oc: stimulus- voluntary response-consequence (not based on a UR, animal does something 1st)

fixed action pattern

- complex behavior that emerges, full-blown, with little opportunity for practice or reward. - a sequence of unlearned acts directly linked to a simple stimulus (born with complex repertoire, not shaped) - emerges in the right context & is functional - EX: stickleback threat display (to red belly), flirting (eyebrow flash, acting coy, hair flicking)

artificial intelligence

- computer science is a whole field based on abstract constructs with no loss of rigor - EX: newell & simon's logic theorist - not just a cool program, but also worked in the same way people solve problems (most efficient)

instinctive drift

- concept related to preparedness where animals have strong instinctual behaviors that get into "behavioral stream" even though they weren't reinforced - tendency for animals to return to innate behaviors following repeated reinforcement - EX: raccoon ad - not adaptive/useful like FAP

cognitive psychology & the mind

- concerned with the scientific study of the mind - the mind creates & controls mental capacities (perception, attention, memory/cognition) and creates representations of the world that enable us to function & achieve our goals

fixed-ratio (schedule of reinforcement)

- consistent ratio of # of responses and # of reinforcers - steady response (fairly rapidly) - easy to extinguish (learning disappears quickly) - EX: factory piece work

discriminative stimulus

- controls the operant response (signals whether the response will be reinforced) - "sets the occasion" - EX: red light in the rat experiment - EX: sound of can opener

conditioned compensatory responses

- cues can elicit responses that "compensate" for the upcoming effect - EX: for drugs, this can decrease the impact of the drug (bc the body has become more sensitive to pain)

extinction (conditioning)

- decrease the strength of a learned behavior (extinguishing the response) - CC: present CS repeatedly without US (used in fear conditioning) - OC: behavior is no longer reinforced

goal of introspectionism

- description of the contents of consciousness - find irreducible "elements of consciousness"

opponent process model of drug tolerance

- drug->hypothermia - body reacts to return to homeostasis (raise body temp by hyperthermia) - habituating the drug means hyperthermia kicks in b4 drug US(opiate)->UR(hyper) CS(sight of drug)+US(opiate) CS(sight of drug)->CR(hyper) - environmental cues help the body try to prepare->greater withdrawal (tolerance, addiction & dependence grow)

quantitative law of effect

- effectiveness of a reinforcer on behavior depends crucially on the amount of reinforcement earned for all alternative behaviors. - less effective if there are many alternative reinforcers in the environment f - EX: optimal to hit VR almost exclusively & occasionally hit the VI (but common response is to equalize ratios of work/reward)

how to commit things to memory?

- encoding--retrieval (interaction b/w how you think about something when you experience it then how that gets remembered) - memory = residue of thought - REPETITION of the deep thinking (not all created equal) - SPACED PRACTICE - INTERLEAVING (helps to distinguish similar concepts, blocking only helpful in practice not testing)

why do critical periods pose a problem for the behaviorists?

- explain behavior in terms of maturation, or the life stage of the organism NOT in terms of stimuli and reinforcers. - appears that at certain times, an animal of a given species has a strong capability to learn certain behaviors, which it does not have later

self-explanation

- explain why you would take a step to solve problem (stopping to verbalize material for better understanding) - best application to math & science reading

why is feeling-of-knowing unreliable? (2)

- familiarity - partial access

familiarity vs. recollection

- familiarity: vague sense of emotional content - knowing you've seen stimulus b4 but little other info (does not equate to knowing) - recollection: richer association with the target

chomsky & language

- generative - inborn biological program that holds across cultures - virtually everything you say & hear is novel so it can't be the behaviorists case that you understand it bc of reinforcement if you've never heard it before - product of the way the mind is constructed (not result of reinforcement)

renewal effect

- if the CS is tested in a new context, such as a different location, the CR can also return - shows extinction doesn't necessarily destroy the original learning - learned behaviors are inhibited rather than erased

choking under pressure (beilock & carr)

- illustrates how research progresses from 1 Q? to the next & how results of behavioral experiments can be used to infer what is happening in the mind - HWM subjects > LWM on low-load condition BUT that advantage vanished under high-load condition - when pressure increased HWM more likely to use short-cut strategy too → performance drops to level of LWM

how does classical conditioning work? (2 predictions)

- importance of one stimulus being conditional on the other (learning about the environment) - prediction 1: if you present CS + US randomly, you shouldn't get learning (contingency) - prediction 2: animals should ignore stimuli that don't have predictive value

problem with behaviorism

- inability to account for all animal & human behaviors - apparent need for abstract constructs - critical period - fixed action pattern

bandura's social learning theory (4)

- individuals can learn novel responses via observation of key others' behaviors - attention - retention - initiation (must execute the learned behavior) - motivation (to engage) - does not require reinforcement, but hinges on the presence of others & social models - EX: bobo doll experiment

shaping behavior

- initially reinforce the behaviors that are very generally like what you want, then progress in graduated steps closer to the end goal using reinforcement

broadbent's filter model of attention

- input enters a filter which selects the message to which the person is attending for further processing by a detector & then storage in memory

goal-directed behavior

- instrumental behavior that is influenced by the animal's knowledge of the association between the behavior and its consequence and the current value of the consequence. - sensitive to the reinforcer devaluation effect - can become habit despite aversive effects

partial access

- knowing some things about a topic makes you conclude that you know everything - many-ex. categories = high FOK - few-ex. categories = low FOK

representation

- knowledge you have in your memory - EX: "this" signals a noun phrase

quantity & quality of reinforcer

- learn quicker for the reinforcers you like more & get more of

instrumental conditioning in edu

- make sure student doesn't make mistakes; guide behavior. - immediate feedback - review frequently. - not successful (little enthusiasm bc students bored)

tolman cognitive map

- mental layout of one's environment - EX: conception within the rats mind of the maze's layout (knew to turn left instead of right when placed on opposite side of the maze)

william james & the 1st psych textbook "principle of psych"

- nature of attention conclusions based on studying his own mind - pay attn. to 1 thing involves withdrawing from other things

3 approaches to discovering abstract constructs

- neural constraints (looking at what brain is doing) - evolutionary constraints (how do simple processes evolve & build upon complex LT system) - efficiency (theory that wins is NOT the overall most efficient BUT the one that is most like humans

what else might the animal do

- not as simple as the animal maximizes good things, minimizes bad things (not simple like law of effect)

tenets of behaviorism (3)

- observable only (goal isn't consciousness but behavior) - theory must be parsimonious (simple) - break behavior down into irreducible concepts

higher-order conditioning

- occurs when a strong CS is paired with a neutral stimulus, causing the neutral stimulus to become a 2nd CS - compatible w/ S-S theory

problems with introspectionism (3)

- only cover conscious processing (nothing preverbal or animal - no thoughts outside of awareness or imageless) - poor reliability between subjects (unchallengeable/no way to settle disputes) - watching a mental process changes it (atypical thoughts)

structuralism

- overall experience is determined by combining basic elements of experience called sensations

process

- people employ a strategy bc they think it will help them remember - EX: subjects hear mixed list, but report back in categories

EX: classical conditioning

- pickles: sour foods (in the environment) cause salivation (naturally to prep for brine) - pavlov: food->salivate, food+bell->salivate, bell->salivate (1st to measure experimentally) - taste aversion US (xray)->UR (nausea) CS(taste: hotdog)+US(xray) CS(hotdog)->CR(nausea)

elaborative interrogation

- posing ??? to yourself (especially when the author explicitly states a fact) - EX: "why would this be true of this [x], but not some other [x]? - improves comprehension in the context of high & low knowledge

what makes effective CS & US

- preparedness: certain classes of stimulus that are easy to associate (CS-taste > CS-sight) (fear conditioning to snakes vs flowers) - novelty of CS or US (EX: present bell alone every hour for days then try to train bell->food, learning will be slower bc associated w/ background/no food - accustomed to it) - cc strongest when CS & US are intense, salient & novel

overlearning effect

- protects against misjudgments of your preparedness - keep studying after you know 100% (less likely to forget)

structural model

- representation of a physical structure in the brain & how they are involved in specific functions & how they are connected - EX: diagrams, plastic model of brain

process model

- represents the processes involved in cognitive mechanisms (illustrates how a process operates) . - EX: broadbent's filter model of attention.

types of searches/scans in short-term memory (EX: list of letters to remember)

- serial, self-terminating (A→then eval, K→then eval...) - serial, exhaustive (A then K then Y... →eval) - parallel (A, K, Y simultaneously→eval)

variable ratio (schedule of reinforcement)

- set ratio of # of responses and #of reinforcers, but can vary locally - rapid response - hard to extinguish (bc used to the fact that a lot of times you don't get reward) - EX: slot machine (excitement of unknown), woodpecker (work matters not time)

skinner & language is

- shaped - child utters sounds at random & is reinforced for utterances that are close to appropriate - argues for operant conditioning & imitation

1st cognitive psych experiment: reaction time (donders)

- simple reaction time vs. choice reaction time - concluded decision-making process took 1/10th of a sec (length of choice-reaction time) - tells us mental responses cannot be measured directly, but inferred from behavior

conclusions of the "forgetting curve for nonsense syllables study" (ebbinghaus)

- smaller savings-> more forgetting - memory drops rapidly in the first 2 days after initial learning (then levels off) - demonstrates that memory quantified & functions could be used to describe a property of the mind (ability to retain info)

CC associates with ________ & behaviors are elicited by ________ vs. IC associates with ________ & are elicited ________

- stimulus / stimulus - behavior / voluntarily (must actively partipate & perform vs. cc where you don't choose, its natural)

instrumental conditioning in animal training

- temporal contingency - exclusive use of positive reinforcement - complexity of behaviors when rules are followed

what makes instrumental conditioning effective (4)

- temporal contingency - preparedness - quality & quantity of reinforcer - what else the animal might do

prediction error

- the chance that a conditioned stimulus won't lead to the expected outcome (must be present to learn something through cc) - as learning occurs over repeated conditioning trials, the CS increasingly predicts the US & prediction error declines. - conditioning works to correct/reduce prediction error

introspectionism

- the first attempt to apply scientific method to thought (wundt & titchener) - seeking a "periodic table" of mind to explain complexity

fear conditioning

- the process of classically conditioning animals to fear neutral objects - creates many anxiety disorders in humans (phobia + panic)

spontaneous recovery

- the reappearance of a learned response after extinction has occurred - shows extinction does not necessarily destroy the original learning

in sum: committing to memory (3)

- think about meaning (context) - distributed practice + deep thinking repetition - testing effect (even better w/ a friend)

temporal contingency

- time between response & reward - animal behavior continues on, so won't know that a specific behavior time ago was significant - delay-> difficulty learning-> unsure of what's being rewarded

efficiency

- time to complete a task - how easy to get theory to produce behaviors - not equal to most efficient theory; some theories are complex - better theory matches what humans do (if humans slow & clunky, theory should be too) - EX: sternbergs theory

purpose of models

- to simplify and help us to visualize each component - to make connections - starting point for research

cherry's attention experiment

- unimportant information is dropped and relevant information is encoded - when people focused on the attendant message they could hear the sounds of the unattended message BUT were unaware of the contents of that message -the first flow chart of the mind

stimulus control

- when an operant behavior is controlled by a stimulus that preceded it - EX: lever pressing can be reinforced only when a light is turned on → rat learns to discriminate between light-on & -off conditioning - EX: cat comes to kitchen to eat only with sound of can opener, gets food

the first laboratory of scientific psychology

- wundt's analytic introspection = trained subjects described their experiences & thought processes in response to stimuli