Psychology Unit 3 Test

False

A behaviorally oriented person would say positive reinforcement involves a situation where a response produces something good, and therefore the response is more likely later.

True

A bliss point shows the ideal amount of two behaviors, as determined in a free baseline assessment.

False

A commonly used discrete trials is the puzzle box.

False

A imperfect correlation between a response and a consequence promotes the most rapid acquisition of an instrumental response.

True

A schedule of reinforcement is a rule that specifies the time and / or the number of responses required to produce a reinforcer.

True

A sudden decrease in instrumental performance following a decrease in incentive magnitude is called negative behavioral contrast.

True

A sudden increase in instrumental performance following an increase in incentive magnitude is called positive behavioral contrast.

False

According to Hull, in order to predict aspects of instrumental responding, habit, drive, and Incentive, should be added to yield excitatory potential.

False

According to Premack, a contingent behavior, like pressing a bar, provides access to an instrumental behavior, like eating food pellets.

True

According to Premack, if you determine the probabilities of different activities during a free baseline assessment, you can predict which contingencies will produce an increase in an instrumental response, and which will not.

True

According to Premack, sometimes a particular activity can be reinforced and sometimes it can be a reinforcer, even within the same individual.

False

According to Premack, the reinforcing potential of a particular activity will be similar from person to person.

True

According to Skinner, the three important terms in operant conditioning are discriminative stimulus, operant response, and consequence.

True

According to Thorndike the three important events in instrumental conditioning are a stimulus (situation), a response, and a consequence (effect).

True

According to the Matching Law, the relative rate of making an instrumental response is proportional to the relative rate of reinforcement for that response.

False

According to the minimum deviation model, when confronted with a schedule constraint, an animal will respond until it obtains its baseline level of the contingent response.

True

Acquisition occurs because the animal learns some relation among a discriminative stimulus, a response, and a consequence.

True

As delay between the response and the consequence increased, it took more trials to learn the correct instrumental response.

False

An example of a Variable interval schedule is checking to see if the pizza has finished baking.

False

An example of a Variable ratio schedule is "piece work".

True

An operant conditioning station has devices for the discriminative stimuli, operant response, and consequence.

True

Both magnitude of reward and delay to reward follow a matching law.

False

Classically conditioned responses involve glandular secretions and reflexes, whereas instrumentally conditioned responses involve the skeletal muscles.

False

Constraints are uncommon.

True

Constraints challenge behavioral regulation, because they often require us to spend more or less time engaged in behaviors than we would prefer.

True

Drive is related to how deprived of something the organism is.

True

Drive, habit, and incentive are independent variables.

True

Each simple schedule of reinforcement is defined by 1) whether the major requirement to produce a reinforcer involves number of responses (ratio) or the passage of time (interval) and 2) whether the requirement does not change from occasion to occasion (fixed) or does change (variable).

True

Grice depicted % correct responses, every 25 trials, for the different delay groups.

True

Grice manipulated response-consequence contiguity by varying the amount of time groups had to remain in a delay compartment.

True

Habit is related to how many opportunities the organism has had to make the instrumental response.

True

Hull believed that the effect a reward has that makes it a reinforcer, is that it reduces a drive.

True

In Crespi's study on the effects of incentive shifts, groups were shifted from the same pre-shift incentive magnitude to different post-shift incentive magnitudes.

True

In Crespi's study on the effects of incentive shifts, rats were run in a runway.

True

In Premack's study with Chicko, during a free baseleine session, all possible contingencies were arranged between pairs of activities.

True

In Premack's study with Chicko, during contingency sessions, some activities were freely available.

True

In Premack's study with Chicko, the probability of an activity was defined as the amount of time engaged in the activity divided by the total assessment time.

False

In Skinner's superstition experiment, grain availability was response-dependent.

False

In a complex schedule, the organism can make one of two instrumental responses, and each response is reinforced under independent schedules that are in effect simultaneously.

True

In a discrete trials procedure the start of a trial and the end of a trail can be easily identified, and the investigator may intervene to reinitiate trials.

True

In a schedule constraint, if you engage in a certain amount of an instrumental behavior, then you can engage in a certain amount of a contingent behavior.

False

In both classical conditioning and instrumental conditioning critical events are response independent.

False

In free operant procedures, the measure that is used is choice.

True

In his study with Chicko, Premack defined a reinforcement effect as an increase in the instrumental response above its free baseline level.

True

In instrumental conditioning, amount of practice is the number of occasions upon which the animal has experienced the response-consequence relation.

True

In instrumental conditioning, the more the practice, the better the performance becomes, up to an asymptote

True

In instrumental conditioning, we are generally concerned with the degree of correlation between the response and the consequence.

True

In operant conditioning the response can be made in an ongoing manner and without the intervention of the investigator.

True

In operant conditioning, extinction involves no longer providing the consequence for the response.

False

In the Grice study, rats were run in a runway.

True

In the hypothetical study, the animal is deprived of the contingent activity.

True

In the hypothetical study, the instrumental behavior is "reinforced".

True

In the straight alley, learning can be demonstrated by measuring running time, running speed, and response latency.

False

In the study illustrating the effect of practice, rats were run in a T-maze.

False

In the study illustrating the effect of reinforcer quality, the measure was latency to respond.

True

Incentive is related to the magnitude of the reward the animal gets for making the instrumental response.

True

Instrumental conditioning and operant conditioning differ in terms of the apparatus, procedures, and measures that they typically use in the investigation of voluntary behavior.

False

Instrumental conditioning and operant conditioning use different kinds of events to account for the learning of voluntary behavior.

True

Instrumental conditioning paradigms are defined in terms of 1) whether the response adds (positive) or removes (negative) the consequence and 2) whether the future likelihood of the response increases (reinforcement) or decreases (punishment).

False

Intermittent reinforcement undermines maintenance.

True

Intervening variables can be inferred from manipulations the experimenter performs and from the effects those manipulation have on aspects of behavior.

True

It is now widely acknowledged that animals bring with them to the experimental situation stimulus sensitivities and response predispositions that can facilitate or impede the acquisition of instrumental behavior.

False

Maintenance variables affect performance while learnig is taking place.

True

Maintenance variables can affect the level at which the instrumental behavior takes place, the pattern of instrumental behavior across time, or how the animal distributes its behavior among different instrumental response alternatives.

True

Modern ways to study instrumental conditioning can be divided into two types: the runway and the T maze.

False

None of the factors that affect the acquisition of instrumental behavior have to do with events considered individually.

True

One possible goal of a theory is to account for why certain outcomes are obtained.

True

One possible goal of a theory is to describe how factors should be combined, to predict outcomes.

True

One way to reduce the response-consequence correlation is to reinforce some, but not all responses (intermittent reinforcement).

False

Operant responses are identified by their form or topography.

True

Premack does not view reinforcers as a limited group of response-strengthening stimuli, but as an almost limitless group of activities.

True

Probability differential theory says a "reinforcement" effect occurs when engaging in a lower probability behavior will enable you to engage in a higher probability behavior.

False

Quantitative laws like the extended matching law are not useful because they try to make predictions under circumstances where multiple factors can vary.

False

Response deprivation theory assumes we readily give up our preferred amounts of our different behaviors when circumstances make achieving these preferences difficult.

False

Response deprivation theory makes the same predictions as probability differential theory.

True

Response-independent "reinforcers" can impair acquisition and maintenance of instrumental behavior.

False

S-R connectionism doesn't appear to take place in the nervous systems of mammals.

True

Simple schedules having response requirements produce higher rates of responding than comparable schedules having interval requirements.

True

Skinner suggested that the development of unique and identifiable responses just prior to food receipt was due to adventitious or unintended reinforcement.

False

Some of the factors that affect the acquisition of instrumental behavior have to do with the relation between events, especially between the discriminative stimulus and the response.

True

State Space diagrams show the amounts of two behaviors that occur under various conditions.

True

The Brelands described a series of instances where it was very difficult to get animals to make certain responses to procure certain consequences.

True

The T-maze can yield a measure of choice.

False

The effect a particular incentive magnitude has on instrumental behavior does not depend on the incentive magnitudes the individual has experienced previously.

True

The extended matching law predicts the proportion of "a" and "b" responses that will be made, given information about the rate, magnitude, and delay to reinforcement associated with each instrumental response.

True

The impact instrumental response 2 will have on instrumental response 1 will depend on the rates of reward associated with the two responses.

True

The rate and pattern of an instrumental response depends on the schedule of reinforcement on which it is maintained.

True

The results of the hypothetical study suggest that a "reinforcement" effect occurs because a constraint requires an animal to exceed its baseline level of the instrumental behavior (Press bar) in order to approach its baseline level of the contingent behavior (Eat pellet).

True

The slope of a cumulative curve reflects the rate of responding.

False

The standard behavioral definition of positive reinforcement explains what makes a reinforcer reinforcing.

True

Thorndike, Skinner, and other instrumental conditioners account for voluntary behavior in terms of the same three fundamental events.

False

To insure that an animal will persist in making the instrumental response when some or even many responses are not reinforced, the animal should be trained on CRF.

True

To maximize reinforcers earned on a concurrent VI schedule, an animal should at least occasionally switch between the two instrumental responses.

True

Typically, as the quality of the reinforcer increases, learning and performance increase.

True

When confronted with a schedule constraint, sometimes an animal responds until it exceeds the ideal level of the instrumental response, but falls short of the ideal level of the contingent response.

True

When placed on a concurrent VI schedule, the strategy the pigeon uses reflects sensitivity to rates of reward but does not maximize reinforcers earned.

True

When there is close contiguity between a response we make and an important outcome, we sometimes come to act as though that response produced the outcome, even when it did not.

False

When we consider temporal contiguity in instrumental conditioning we are concerned about the closeness in time between the discriminative stimulus and the response.

False

•As excitatory potential increases, instrumental response amplitude, speed, and resistance to extinction decrease.

True

•\Simple schedules having variable requirements do not produce a post-reinforcement pause, whereas schedules having fixed requirements do.