Learning and Memory Actual Questions from Test

I've been doing a study on General Psychology students where I pair a blue light (CS1) and a loud noise (US) to get a conditioned startle response. After pairing these two stimuli for several days, my students startle whenever they see the blue light. Then I add a second CS, a bright red light, to the arrangement such that the students first see the blue light (CS1), then they see the bright red light (CS2), then they hear the loud noise (US). After presenting these three stimuli for several days, I test with just the bright red light. Will I get a startle response?

No

When Thorndike attempted to study observational learning in his cats in a puzzle box, what did he find?

Observer cats did not learn from demonstrator cats.

What does long-term potentiation prove about learning?

That learning can happen at individual synapses

Philosophers have been discussing the nature of associations between things for centuries. Aristotle described a law of contiguity for forming associations. Which of the following is the best explanation of Aristotle's law of contiguity?

Things that occur at about the same time will become associated

All of Albert's initial conditioning was carried out upon a table supplied with a mattress, located in a small room. To test whether Albert's fears would transfer to a novel environment, Watson and Rayner tested Albert in:

a large, well-lighted lecture room

Which of the following situations includes an example of a negative reinforcer?

a man opens his umbrella to stay dry during a rain storm

Imagine that we have set up an experiment in which pressing a lever gets the animal some food, but only when a light in the cage is on. In the experiment described above, the food is _____________.

a positive reinforcer

Which of the following is likely to give you the greatest habituation?

a quiet tone repeated once a second

In some areas of England, blue tits learned to peck through milk bottle tops to get to milk, but blue tits in other areas did not learn this trick. The key part of the stimulus enhancement explanation of this phenomenon is:

blue tits who had figured out this trick drew attention to the milk bottles by hanging around them

Imagine that you are a participant in a psychological study. You are told to listen to a series of numbers and then every time you hear the number 7, you are to write down the last two numbers that you heard before the 7. This test requires you to use your:

both the phonological loop and the central executive

Examples of latent learning show that __________ is not necessary for learning to occur.

reinforcement

Which memory process involves getting information out of the brain?

retrieval

First, I pair a tone and a light several times (tone first, then light 1 second later). Later I pair the light and food several times (light first, then food 2 seconds later). When I test with the tone alone, I get a conditioned response. This is an example of:

sensory preconditioning

The Tower of Hanoi test is used to test which of the following functions of the central executive?

setting goals and planning

In 1981, Leight and Ellis did a study where they made their participants either happy, sad, or neutral and then had them learn a list of nonsense syllables. What were the results of this study?

the neutral participants learned the list better than any other participants

Telemarketers get paid for each sale that they make, but it usually takes lots of phone calls to make a sale. What schedule of reinforcement are telemarketers on?

variable ratio

Which schedule of reinforcement is used for most slot machines?

variable ratio

The delayed non-match to sample task is a task that tests the _____________ component of working memory.

central executive

Information with emotional content is ___________ to remember than information without emotional content.

easier

Aristotle was a __________ist who believed that all ideas are the result of experience.

empiricist

Imagine that a group of children watch a video of an adult opening a wooden box by pulling the pins out of the hinges. Later, the children are given their own wooden box and many of the kids open the box by pushing the pins out of the hinges. This scenario is a good example of:

emulation

Abby is a patient in your neurology clinic. As part of your normal neurological exam, you ask Abby to raise her right hand and wave. As Abby begins to do this, you raise your own right hand and make a fist. Instead of waving, Abby also makes a fist. Where is the damage in her brain?

frontal lobe

As you should know, rats will work very hard for electrical stimulation of the central reward pathway. What is one thing you can do to make a rat stop working for this stimulation?

give the rat a dopamine antagonist

A tone has been presented 10 times and in the graph above the amount of startle to the tone for each of the ten trials is shown (decreases) This graph shows an example of:

habituation

Ingestional neophobia is the fear of novel-tasting foods. The fact that we can eventually come to like those same foods is probably an example of _________.

habituation

Testing a rat in a maze, where the experimenter controls the number of times the rat runs in the maze is a good example of ____________ conditioning.

instrumental

Imagine that you are recording from a single mirror neuron in the frontal lobe of a monkey. You have determined that this neuron is very active when the monkey raises its right hand above its head. What other movement is likely to also make the neuron very active?

when the monkey watches another monkey raise its right hand above its head

Carol Barnes did a lot of research that showed that place cells in the hippocampus of old rats were ____________ those in young rats.

less stable than

In a very elegant experiment demonstrating cognitive influences on behavior, a sheep is trained to lift its leg off a metal screen when a tone sounds in order to avoid a shock. When the sheep is placed upside down with its head on the metal screen, what does the sheep do when it hears the tone?

lifts his head off the metal screen

A long lasting increase in the strength of the connection between two neurons is called:

long-term potentiation

Which volume of tone is most likely to lead to sensitization?

loud

In proactive interference, ____________________.

old information interferes with new learning

Imagine that we have set up an experiment in which pressing a lever gets the animal some food, but only when a light in the cage is on. In this experiment we would label the lever pressing as a(n) ____________ behavior.

operant

One of the findings of the Bandura, Ross, & Ross (1961) article was that:

overall, boys were more physically aggressive than girls

The __________ memory is usually the first to show age-related decline.

working

Which of the following is a good example of contagion?

yawning

Which of the following is an example of discrimination training?

21b

The phonological loop is probably located in the ____________.

left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex

Denver Bronco quarterback Paxton Lynch is trained to take a five-step drop (5 quick backward steps) whenever he takes the ball from the center unless the defense is in a blitz formation. If the defense is in a blitz formation, Lynch is supposed to take a three-step drop. However, if you watched the Broncos game last week, you saw that Paxton Lynch also took a three-step drop when the defense was in formations that looked like blitz formations but weren't actually blitz formations. The situation described above is a real world example of:

22a

One explanation of generalization is that organisms are trying to identify SD's that will likely lead to similar outcomes. Specifically, organisms assume that similar SD's are likely to lead to similar consequences. This explanation is the explanation put forward by:

23c

Which of the following is a real world example of stimulus generalization?

24a

Imagine that we have 2 pigeons. Pigeon A has been trained to peck a key that is 2 cm in diameter. Pigeon B has also been trained to peck a key that is 2 cm in diameter and has also been trained NOT to peck a key that is 1.5 cm in diameter and NOT to peck a key that is 2.5 cm in diameter. If we tested both these pigeons with keys that range in size from 0.5 cm to 4.5 cm would you expect any differences in their generalization curves?

25c

We have trained a rat to press a bar for a food reward whenever a 1,000 Hz tone is played and we shock the rat if it presses the bar when a 1,200 Hz tone is played. Once the rat has learned this discrimination, we test the rat by playing tones of 600 Hz, 800 Hz, 1,000 Hz, 1,200 Hz and 1,400 Hz. Which of the tones below will give us the most bar pressing behavior?

800 Hz- Practice me!

In aplysia long lasting long-term potentiation is due to an increase in the number of synapses. Briefly describe the cellular processes (the processes that occur within the cells) that are required for an increase in the number of synapses.

???? Look me up.

Abby is 15 years old and she has a very extroverted, outgoing personality. Which of the following explanations is consistent with a social learning theory perspective on how Abby's personality developed?

Abby has often seen other people get rewarded for being extroverted

Bandura has stated that there are four variables that affect observational learning. What are those four variables?

Attention, retention, behavior production ability, motivation

Imagine that a rat only gets reinforced if it presses the bar at least 20 times a minute. What type of schedule of reinforcement is this?

DRH

Timeline including fixation point, cue, delay, and the same response is a...

Delayed match to sample

In the hippocampus, place cells are topographically organized so that the pattern of activation in the hippocampus can be read as a map of the space the animal is in (T or F)

False

Many ADHD drugs affect neurotransmitters in the prefrontal cortex. Which neurotransmitter is increased in the PFC by ADHD drugs?

Dopamine

Ethan is sitting in front of a computer watching a silent video when he hears a quiet tone quickly followed by a very loud tone. What can you predict about Ethan's startle response to the loud tone?

Ethan will have a less than normal startle response because of pre-pulse inhibition

Which of the following reinforcement schedules would be easiest to extinguish?

FR-1

Which of the following is the best description of the mood congruence effect?

It is easier to retrieve memories that have emotional content that matches our current mood

Who said, "Give me a dozen healthy infants and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select"?

John Watson

In Hull's mathematical model the size of the reinforcer is represented by _____.

K

In a classic study on the effects of emotion on memory storage, two groups of people watched the same slide show but one group was told that the slides in the middle of the slide show were of a boy getting hit by a car whereas people in the other group were told that the slides in the middle of the slide show were of a boy watching a disaster preparedness practice. The results of this study were:

People who thought the boy had been hit by the car remembered the middle slides better than people who thought the boy was watching practice.

The 1924 article that you read by Mary Cover Jones, describes Jones' attempts to get rid of Peter's fear of a rabbit. During the middle of the experiment, Peter had to take two months off. Why did Peter have to take two months off and what happened to his fear of the rabbit when he returned?

Peter got sick with scarlet fever and then when he came back his fear was greatly diminished because of extinction

Eugene had a traumatic brain injury. Since his injury, he's had trouble making long-term plans. He used to be very organized, but now he is very disorganized. He also has trouble shifting from one task to another. What part of his brain has Eugene damaged?

Prefrontal cortex

Peter is a subject in an hour long psychology experiment. During the first 10 minutes, Peter is given a stack of playing cards and told to put all the red cards in one pile and all the black cards in another. During the next 10 minutes, Peter is given pictures of flowers and is told to put all the red flowers in one pile, put all the yellow flowers in another pile, and put all the orange flowers in a third pile. After that, Peter is given a big jar of jelly beans and is told to pick out all the green ones. Finally, Peter is told to look at a computer screen and press the letter F on a keyboard whenever a red square appears on the screen and press the letter J on the keyboard whenever a blue circle appears on the screen. Knowing what you know about conditioning, what do think Peter would do if he saw a red circle on the computer screen?

Press the F Key

One hypotheses in the Bandura, Ross, & Ross (1961) article that you read?

Subjects would be more likely to imitate a model that was the same sex as them.

What is perspective taking?

The ability to imagine what you look like to someone else

According to the Rescorla-Wagner model of learning, the maximum association strength possible is determined by _________.

UCS

In a classic experiment, Watson and Rayner used classical conditioning to make Albert afraid of a white rat. Which of the following accurately reflects this experiment?

UCS- loud noise, CS- rat, UCR- fear, CR-fear

Research on place cells has shown that the place that will activate a place cell is:

a function of external cues

Which of the following is a good example of priming?

a human first listens to a list of words and then uses similar words during a word stem completion task

My children charge me a nickel every time I swear. But every once in a while, they forget to charge me when they hear me swear. What schedule of punishment do my children have me on?

VR

Baddeley's most recent model of working memory consists of the following components:

a central executive, a phonological loop, a visuo-spatial sketchpad, and an episodic buffer

Imagine that we have set up an experiment in which pressing a lever gets the animal some food, but only when a light in the cage is on. In the experiment described above, the light is _____________.

a discriminative stimulus

Imagine that you have a rat in an operant box with a single bar for the rat to press. You notice that immediately after the rat presses the bar, a brief tone sounds. This happens every time the rat presses the bar. The rat doesn't seem to be exhibiting any other interesting behaviors, just pressing this one bar. In this scenario, the tone is probably:

a secondary reinforcer

Without rehearsal, what is the duration of short-term memory?

about 30 seconds

In Fitt's three-stage model of skill learning, the associative stage is when:

actions become stereotyped

An fMRI image tells you...

activity in certain parts of the brain

Imagine that you are the batting coach for the Regis women's softball team. Every other day all the players on your team have batting practice where they swing at 50 pitches. If your goal is to improve the long-term performance of each player, how often should you give each player feedback about their swing?

after every 25 swings

In Bandura's classic Bobo doll study children watched a video of an adult model interacting with a Bobo doll. In the second phase of Bandura's classic Bobo doll study when he promised children a reward if they would imitate the model, which group of children had learned from viewing the videotape?

all of the children

Imagine that I had used classical conditioning to condition a fear response to the symbol "4". Which of the following are you likely afraid of?

all of these- semantic generalization

The ______________________ is a part of the brain involved in the emotional component of learning and memory, particularly when fear is involved.

amygdala

Maddy is trying to order pizza from the new pizza place down the street. She looks up the phone number of the pizza place and is trying to remember it while she looks for her phone. To do this, she is repeating the number over and over again in her head. This works great until Maddy's roommate asks her what time it is. Maddy looks at her watch and yells back at her roommate, "It's 9:30". Now Maddy can't remember the phone number for the pizza place. Why?

articulatory suppression

Imagine that you have a bunch of flies in a container and you are trying to form an association between and odor and being shocked. So you present the odor and then shock the flies. You do this several times. This is an example of _____________ conditioning.

aversive conditioning*

Amalia is a rock climber and has to learn specific moves to get to the top of the climbing wall at her gym. The skills that Amalia has to learn to excel at the climbing wall are _____________ skills.

closed

In basketball, shooting a free throw is a __________ skill and dribbling past a defender is a _________ skill.

closed; open

Women are hitting balls from a pitching machine. This is an example of _________ practice.

constant

The n-back test is used to test which of the following functions of the central executive?

controlled updating

Dr. Ivana Goodgrade was a professor at Regis for several decades and knew her way around campus very well. However, one day she was walking across the campus from Claver Hall to the library and couldn't remember where to go. Specifically, she had always known that Main Hall was between Claver Hall and the library, but this day she couldn't identify which building was Main Hall, nor did she remember which direction she should go once she got to Main Hall. Knowing what you do about the brain, what problem do you think Dr. Goodgrave has?

damage to the parahippocampal region of cortex

The central executive is in the ________.

dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

In the simplest version of Hull's mathematical model of learning, the probability of a behavior is driven primarily by __________ and ____________.

drive and habit

The two types of information that are stored in explicit memory are:

episodic information and semantic information

Peter is repeatedly shown a picture of a boat and asked to point to the boat. When Peter successfully points to the boat, he is given a grape. Once Peter has mastered this task, a second picture, of a tree, is gradually introduced so that eventually Peter is being shown two pictures at the same time, the boat and the tree. Peter is still asked to identify the boat and is still able to do that. This is an example of:

errorless discrimination training

According to the Regis aged rat study, which treatment is most effective at preventing cognitive decline in old rats?

exercise

What will cause the greatest increase in adult neurogenesis?

exercise

When I first asked you in class to write down the names of the seven dwarfs, I was asking you to perform which type of recall?

free recall

Many, but not all, people with autism have ________ Purkinje cells than normal.

fewer

What will "cure" a dog of learned helplessness?

forcing the dog to escape the shock

Hermann Ebbinghaus is most notable for his work on ______________________.

forgetting

Joe borrows his brother's car to drive to the ski area. At first, Joe hears a lot of squeaks and noises as he drives down the road. After 20 minutes, however, Joe no longer notices the noises. Then a rock falls across the road barely missing the car and startling Joe. For several minutes after the rock experience, Joe again hears a lot of noises from the car. This story has an example of ___________ followed by an example of ______________.

habituation; dishabituation

I am doing eye-blink conditioning where first I pair a tone with a puff of air to the eye. After doing this several times, I get a CR (a blink) to the tone alone. Then I start presenting a flash of light just prior to presenting the tone, but in this second condition I am not presenting the puff of air at all. Finally, when I test with just the light, I get a blink. This situation is an example of:

higher order conditioning

a model where nodes and links represent concepts and the relationships between those concepts:

hiherarchical semantic network model

Which structure is the most important for the storage and retrieval of long-term explicit memories?

hippocampus

According to Bandura, what should make it less likely that you will learn from a model?

if you believe the model is different than you

In class we talked about H.M., a man who had profound anterograde amnesia. One of the interesting things about H.M.'s memory problems is that his ___________ memory was mostly normal.

implicit

Research on vivid flashbulb memories shows us that these detailed, extremely emotional memories are _______________ accurate compared to any other memories.

just as

Which of the following is an example of an implicit memory?

knowing how to tie your shoes

According to Hull, as the probability of a learned behavior increases, the _________ decreases.

latency to respond

Miller and Dollard felt that observational learning was a behavior that could be...

learned through operant conditioning

neurons that are active both when one is performing a specific task and when one is observing someone else performing that same task.

mirror neurons

In the cerebellum, the granule cells receive information about the CS from:

mossy fibers

My brother likes to bet on horse racing. Lately, a horse named Belvedere has been winning a lot of races and so my brother has been betting on Belvedere a lot and winning a lot of money. There is also a jockey named Jacque Yee who has been winning a lot of races so my brother has been betting on any horse that Jacque Yee is riding and winning a lot of money that way as well. The last couple of weekends Jacque Yee has been riding Belvedere and they have lost every race. Nevertheless, my brother keeps betting on Jacque Yee riding Belvedere to win. Why?

negative patterning is hard to learn

In an untrained rabbit that has never had eye-blink conditioning, what would happen to the unconditioned eye-blink response if you lesioned the interpositis nucleus?

no effect

Based on what you've learned in the readings, who is most likely to develop a drug addiction? (Hint: ___ levels of ____)

people w/ higher than normal dopamine levels

As you are reading this sentence, your working memory of the words that came earlier in the sentence are stored in the:

phonological loop

Suppose Pigeon A is reinforced for pecking a key when a yellow light is on. Suppose too that pigeon B is reinforced for pecking in response to a yellow light, but is also trained to not respond when an orange light is on. If we test both pigeons with a yellow-orange light, we will find that:

pigeon A will give a stronger response to the yellow-orange light than pigeon B

In regards to the emotional content of information and memory, older adults tend to have better memory for things with _______ emotional content.

positive

Older adults tend to remember more _________ items than younger adults.

positive

My children charge me a nickel every time I swear. But every once in a while, they forget to charge me when they hear me swear. In the example above the _____________ is a discriminative stimulus.

presence of my children

Which of the following treatments is likely to lead to learned helplessness?

putting a dog in an operant chamber and shocking it regardless of what the dog does

A multiple choice question is a good example of which type of recall?

recognition

Based on what you've learned in the readings, the central reward pathway is probably turned off by parts of the brain that signal: ____________

satiety

Describe one of the studies that we discussed in class that suggests that animals have episodic memory.

scrub jays and ice cub trays

Which type of long-term memory includes general knowledge of facts and definitions?

semantic

___________ memories are usually retained during normal aging.

semantic and episodic

Imagine that you have an aplysia and when you touch the aplysia's mantle with a glass rod you get a gill withdrawal reflex. Then you shock the aplysia's tail and then a few seconds after the shock you touch the mantle with the glass rod. The scenario described is a good example of ______________.

sensitization

When looking for evidence of learning in the brain, a neuroimaging technique like an fMRI gives you good ___________ resolution and an event-related potential (ERP) gives you good __________ resolution.

spatial; temporal

In the Rescorla-Wagner formula, VA = k(h-VAX), what does h stand for?

the max. amount of association possible

What is the difference between expertise and talent?

talent comes naturally and expertise comes from practice

Explain what is meant by behavioral contrast. How could you demonstrate behavioral contrast with a rat in an operant chamber?

tantrum kid in school and home

Imagine that you have an aplysia and when you touch the aplysia's mantle with a glass rod you get a gill withdrawal reflex. Then you shock the aplysia's tail and then a few seconds after the shock you touch the mantle with the glass rod. What response would you expect from the aplysia?

the aplasia will withdrawal its gill but with more intensity than the first gill withdrawal

In the article you read by Skinner about superstitious pigeons, Skinner eventually put a superstitious pigeon on extinction. Skinner writes, "More than 10,000 responses were recorded before 'extinction' had reached the point at which few if any responses were made". After this extinction, what did the pigeon do when Skinner started giving the pigeon food again every minute?

the pigeon quickly resumed its superstitious behaviors

Imagine that you have a rat in which you have lesioned (destroyed) the basal ganglia. You are trying to teach the rat to press a lever to get a food reward, but to only press the lever after hearing a tone. What learning deficit should you expect from this rat?

the rat will learn the association between lever pressing and food, but will not learn to only press the lever after the tone

In the Rescorla-Wagner formula, VA = k(h-VAX), what does k stand for?

the rate of conditioning

At my son's track meet the starter wears an orange sleeve on his arm. At the beginning of each race, the started raises his arm with the orange sleeve and then fires a gun into the air. The sound of the gunshot always makes me startle. Recently I've noticed that I start to get nervous as soon as I see the starter raise his arm with the orange sleeve. In this scenario, what is the CS?

the sight of the orange sleeve in the air

I drive a blue pickup truck. Near my house just before a major intersection is a big sign that says "photoradar in use". Whenever I see that sign, I slow down because I don't want to get a ticket for driving too fast. In this example, what is the discriminative stimulus?

the sign

The central reward pathway connects:

the ventral segmental area and the nucleus accumbens

Imagine the letter T. Your job is to indicate, starting at the upper left corner, whether each corner is an outside corner or an inside corner. This task is an example of a task that requires:

the visuo-spatial sketchpad

In a human patient with damage to the cerebellar cortex (Purkinje cells), what deficits would you expect to see when they are trying to learn an association between faces and names?

these patients would learn face/name associations at the same speed as normal

Imagine that you have used eye-blink conditioning to train a rabbit to blink when it hears a tone. What would happen if you lesioned the Purkinje cells after training?

this lesion would lead to a poorly timed CR

Imagine that you have used eye-blink conditioning to train a rabbit to blink when it hears a tone. What do you expect to happen to the CR if you lesion the interpositis nucleus after training?

this lesion would permanently abolish the CR

Imagine that we present an animal with a tone (CS) which is on for 20 msec. Once the tone shuts off, there is a 2 second period of silence followed by the presentation of some food (US). This scenario is an example of:

trace conditioning

Imagine a plastic cube. Each side is about 2 inches long. Each side of the cube is either red or green, but no red side touches another red side. The top of the cube is red and the bottom of the cube is green. If I ask you what color the side facing away from you is, I am asking you to use your:

visuo-spatial sketchpad

Why are humans better than other animals at observational learning?

we can use language during rehearsal

What is a schema?

what we think is normal in a situation