Psych Revel Questions

Bridgette feeds her cat canned food every night. The ritual is always the same: Bridgette takes out the electric can opener, whirs the can around the blade to open it, scoops the food into a bowl, and presents it to Zorro. Bridgette has noticed, however, that Zorro will run into the kitchen in eager anticipation as soon as she hears the sound of the cabinet door open and hears the whir of the can opener in motion. According to the principles of classical conditioning, the sound of the can opener is the

CS

Environmental influences on intelligence exist, such as poverty, malnutrition, or exposure to lead. However, it is often difficult to disentangle the effects of such influences. Why is that?

Environmental factors, such as poverty, malnutrition, or exposure to lead, tend to be correlated with one another

______ is any outcome that increases the probability of a response

Reinforcement

How someone responds to something depends on her or his interpretation of what that something means. This is the underlying difference that distinguishes _____ from previous views of learning

S-O-R osychology

Which IQ test, first published in 1916, was originally developed for children but has since been extended to adults, and involves testing vocabulary and memory for pictures, naming familiar objects, repeating sentences, and following commands?

Standford-Binet

Brain structures are important in the processing of memories that are the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex

TRUE

Which of the following is a compelling argument against the existence of repressed traumatic memories?

There is growing evidence that painful and disturbing memories are actually remembered well, and in fact, too well by the people plagued with them

When trying to recall an event, which of the following processes best describes how that takes place?

We actively reconstruct our memories using cues and information available to us

Many highly promoted learning techniques...

are not supported by careful research

Ivan Pavlov discovered __________ while conducting research on digestion in dogs.

classical conditioning

Because we process so much information every day, our brains have become __________ in order to economize our mental effort.

cognitive misers

Yawen is against the death penalty. She attends a conference that debates the topic and while listening to the keynote speaker, she seems to only hear the data that supports arguments against the death penalty. This is an example of

confirmation bias

Studies have shown that students perform slightly better on exams if they are tested in the same room where they learned the material. This is evidence for

context-dependent learning

When computing adult intelligence, most modern intelligence researchers use a statistical measure of variability to determine the _____, which expresses individual results in relation to the norms for that age group

deviation IQ

As a student studying for your next exam, it would be best for you to spread out your learning over long intervals rather than cramming. this is a good strategy that is associated with ____ as discovered by Hermann Ebbinghaus.

distributed versus massed practice

There are various techniques available to help people improve their ability to recall material. For example, when you remember something new by connecting it mentally to something you already know, you are using ____.

elaborative rehearsal

More than 300 convicted prisoners to date have been released because DNA evidence showed they were innocent, despite confident testimony from __________.

eyewitnesses

Long-term potentiation enhances the release of which neurotransmitter into the synaptic cleft, resulting in enhanced learning?

glutamate

Leif is ticking his daughter Inga. As he continues to tickle her, she responds less and less to the tickles. This is known as

habituation

Negative reinforcement ____ the rate of behavior, whereas punishment _____ the rate of behavior.

increases; decreases

When an animal, despite repeated attempts at conditioning, returns to its innate behavior, researches call this

instinctive drift

Longitudinal studies of the stability of IQ through adulthood generally reveal that

intelligence is relatively stable over time, but not perfectly so, as indicated by strong positive correlations

Tolman and Honzik conducted an experiment using a maze to discover __________ in rats, demonstrating that direct reinforcement is not necessary in order for learning to take place.

latent learning

The connections among neurons gradually strengthen over time, and do so by means of repetitive stimulation. This process is known as __________.

long-term potentiation

What part of the brain did investigators note was "highly g-loaded" for reasoning tasts?

prefrontal cortex

Under most circumstances, which is a comparatively easier memory retrieval task to perform?

recognition

When you are asked to think about a car, you think about a sedan with four wheels that can get you from place to place. In your mind, the sedan is your ____ of a car

schema

Although using ____ can sometimes lead to mistakes, they provide us with a frame of reference for interpreting new situations

schemas

Zhenya remembers that St. Paul is the capital of Minnesota. Alina remembers that she lived in St. Paul when she was 12 years old. Zhenya is demonstrating __________ memory, whereas Alina is demonstrating __________ memory.

semantic; episodic

Which of the following lists places the types of memory in order from the memory that is shortest to the memory that is longest?

sensory memory; short-term memory; long-term memory

What type of graph would be used to illustrate the primacy and recency effects?

serial position curve

Spectators often marvel at shows that feature animals doing amazing stunts and complicated maneuvers. Animal trainers use ____ to accomplish this, by reinforcing behaviors that are progressively closer to the target behavior until the target behavior is achieved.

shaping

Tatiana is an international student who is learning English at night that she can, without effort, learn to speak English more accurately. Tatiana is trying to take advantage of

sleep-assisted learning

Moira believed she had removed her keys from the desk and now could not find them. In actuality, she had watcher her boyfriend, Derek, take the keys from the desk. This error in memory is due to

source monitoring failure

Conditioned taste aversions are usually highly specific to a particular food and show little evidence of

stimulus generalization

E.L. Thorndike's experiments using a puzzle box demonstrated that cats learn by ____.

trial and error

The extent to which genetics influences the variability of a trait for members of a particular group is called ______ heritability.

within-group