Cognition and Learning

Who is B.F. Skinner?

American psychologist who developed the operant conditioning model of learning; emphasized studying the relationship between environmental factors and observable actions, not mental processes, in trying to achieve a scientific explanation of behavior trained pigeons

Which of the following psychologists is known for research on operant conditioning?

B.F. Skinner

Who proposed that children's language development was caused by imitation and reinforcement?

B.F. Skinner

Who is Watson?

Behaviorist. When you hear "Watson" think: Litle albert and rat, operant conditioning...

The "Little Albert" experiment involving the rat and the loud noise is an example of which of the following types of experiments?

Classical conditioning

Describe and differentiate classical and operational conditioning.

Classical conditioning involves associating an involuntary response and a stimulus. Operational conditioning is about associating a voluntary behavior and a consequence.

Each year, working Americans are required by law to file their income taxes by the April 15 deadline. This describes a _____ schedule of reinforcement.

Fixed interval

__________ procedures cause behaviors to decrease in probability or become less likely.

punishment

You are at a parade where there are a number of marching bands. You perceive the bands that are all in the same uniforms as being grouped together. The red uniforms are one band, the green uniforms another, and so forth. You have this perceptual experience because of the law of

similarity

In the text's use of the Olympic Rings example, which Gestalt law contributes to the correct perception of five interlocking circles?

simplicity

Strayer and Johnston's (2001) experiment involving simulated driving and the use of "hands-free" versus "handheld" cell phones found that

talking on either kind of phone impairs driving performance significantly and to the same extent.

According to your text, the ability to divide attention depends on all of the following EXCEPT (a) the difficulty of the tasks. (b) the type of processing being used. (c) task cueing. (d) practice.

task cueing

With the Stroop effect, you would expect to find longest response times when

the color and the name differed

Information remains in sensory memory for

seconds or a fraction of a second

When Sam listens to his girlfriend Susan in the restaurant and ignores other people's conversations, he is engaged in the process of __________ attention.

selective

Remembering that a tomato is actually a fruit rather than vegetable is an example of _____memory.

semantic

The sequence of steps that includes the image on the retina, changing the image into electrical signals, and neural processing is an example of ____ processing.

bottom-up

Behaviorism

A theoretical orientation based on the premise that scientific psychology should study only observable behavior

Who founded the first laboratory of scientific psychology at the University of Leipzig in Germany?

Wilhelm Wundt

The founder of the first laboratory of scientific psychology was...

William Wundt

Who is Thorndike and what did he believe?

Law of Effect - the response to a stimulus is affected by the consequence of that behavior - trial & error learning results in some behaviors (those follows by a good consequence) being "stamped in", while others (those follows by discomfort or unpleasant consequences) are stamped out - behavioral response is affected by the consequence of that behavior - behavior changes because of its consequences - rewarded behavior is likely to reoccur

The first formal laboratory of psychology, where the approach of structuralism was created, was founded in which city?

Leipzig, Germany

A person with a reduced digit span would most likely have a problem with ______ memory.

Short-Term

Describe the Stroop effect and explain the significance of the Stroop effect for understanding attention.

The Stroop effect is a neuropsychological test. It shows the delay in reaction time between which the names of words interfere with the ability to name the color used to print the words. It takes some precedence over color naming, which requires higher cognitive demands.

The episodic buffer directly connects to which two components in Baddeley's model of memory?

The central executive and long-term memory

Regarding children's language development, Noam Chomsky noted that children generate many sentences they have never heard before. From this, he concluded that language development is driven largely by

an inborn biological program

Which of the following methods, often associated with structuralism, was used in the psychology laboratory established by Wilhelm Wundt?

analytic introspection

Who is Pavlov and what did he do?

classical conditioning and making dogs salavate

Attention, perception, memory, and decision making are all different types of mental processes in which the mind engages. These are known as different types of

cognition

The branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of the mind is called

cognitive psychology

Using behavior to infer mental processes is the basic principle of

cognitive psychology

Who is Ebbinghaus and what did he do?

discovery of the forgetting curve and the spacing effect. He was also the first person to describe the learning curve.

The distribution of attention among two or more tasks is known as

divided attention

According to your textbook, perception goes beyond the simple receipt of sensory information. It is involved in many different cognitive skills. Which of the following is not one of those skills as noted by the chapter?

experiencing neuromodulation

What is an operant conditioning procedure that involves reinforcing the last of a specific number of responses

fixed ratio

You look at a rope coiled on a beach and are able to perceive it as a single strand because of the law of

good continuation

The emphasis of the concept of working memory is on how information is

manipulated

The main difference between early and late selection models of attention is that in late selection models, selection of stimuli for final processing doesn't occur until the information is analyzed for

meaning

Stevie Allison enjoys playing football for his high school team. Stevie was not allowed to play football for three games when he got in a fight with a soccer player after school. Taking away the privilege of football to decrease fighting is an example of

negative punishment

According to Treisman's attenuation model, which of the following would you expect to have the highest threshold for most people? (a) word home (b) word money (c) word platypus (d) their child's first name

the word "platypus"

What is an operant schedule in which the individual receives one reinforcement for several responses; the number of responses required varies but averages out to the ratio value?

variable ratio

Which statement best summarizes the focus of the Gestalt psychologists?

we must understand the basic components of perception

Evidence for the role of top-down processing in perception is shown by which of the following examples?

when someone accurately identifies a word in a song on a radio broadcast despite static interfering with reception

Working memory differs from short-term memory in that

working memory is concerned with both holding and processing information

The Stroop effect demonstrates

how automatic processing can interfere with intended processing

The primary effect of chunking is to

increase the efficiency of short-term memory

Scene schema is

knowledge about what is contained in a typical scene.

People perceive vertical and horizontal orientations more easily than other orientations according to the

oblique effect

According to the behaviorists, only the study of ______ should be the emphasis of the science of psychology.

observable behavior

John Watson believed that psychology should focus on the study of

observable behavior

The investigation of how behavior is strengthened by presentation of positive reinforcers (e.g., food) or withdrawal of negative reinforcers (e.g., shock) is best known as

operant conditioning

Speech segmentation is defined as

organizing the sounds of speach into individual words

Experience resulting from stimulation of the senses and information from the senses that can help guide our actions is called

perception

Ebbinghaus's "memory" experiments were important because they

plotted functions that described the operation of the mind

Behaviorists believe that the presentation of ____________ increases the frequency of behavior.

positive reinforcers

Behaviorists believe that the presentation of increases the frequency of behavior.

positive reinforcers