Psychology Unit 2

The famous neuroscientist Donald Hebb once said "neurons that ______ together _______ together"

fire : wire

A friend of yours is doing her second Shakespearean play in a row right now. She says the lines from her previous role are getting of the way of learning her current lines, since the language is similar. You tell her this is a common occurrence called,

proactive interference

You take a house sitting job in a creepy old house. You think you hear noises outside and had recently heard a story of a chupacabra in the area. Each sound makes you more scared so when your mom calls your phone, which is set to ring and vibrate. This sudden noise when you were already scared was enough to make you jump and scream. This is an example of

sensitization

Before conditioning, conditioned stimuli,

were neutral to the individual

What is the coefficient of relatedness (the r value) between a parent and offspring?

0.5

A friend of yours has been studying schizophrenia for many years, and has come to the conclusion that schizophrenia has a heritability of about 0.08. Since you know how heritability works, you know that this means that:

80% of the differences we see in people with regard to schizophrenia are due to differences in genes.

Evolution is

A change in gene frequencies in a population over time

What's the main difference between a conditioned stimulus and an unconditioned stimulus

A conditioned stimulus is something an individual responds to after learning, whereas reacting to an unconditioned stimulus requires no learning

Which of the following is an example of a fixed action pattern

A joey (baby kangaroo) finds its way to its mother's pouch and attaches to a nipple

Which neurotransmitter appears to be important for memory

Acetylcholine

When shopping the first thing Dave noticed was the suggested retail price. Then a sales person came over and told him it was much less than the suggested price. Dave felt like he was getting a good deal and decided to buy the car. This is an example of

Anchoring

Which brain area appears to be involved with working memory

Anterior cingulate cortex

All of the following are non-declarative memories except

Autobiographical memories

Even though my spouse and I agree and disagree equally, I remember the times we disagree more and therefore think we disagree more often. This is an example of the

Availability heuristic

Why are addicts often successful while at rehabilitation facilities at staying off the drug they're addicted to

Because conditioned stimuli associated with drug use are not present in the rehabilitation facility

Which of the following could be an unconditioned stimulus

Being bitten by a dog

The difference between classical and operant conditioning is

Classical conditioning tends to involve reflexes, while operant conditioning involves voluntary behavior

A kid sorted his toys into two groups. Things that were "alive" and things that were not alive. What was he demonstrating he has a grasp of with regard to things being alive vs. not alive

Concept

Which schedule of reinforcement is ideal when an individual is first learning a new behavior

Continuous reinforcement

One way of getting over a phobia is to pair the thing that is feared with something a person finds pleasant. This is called

Counterconditioning

What does the word "metacognition" literally translate to

"Thinking about thinking"

Your dog learns to become excited only at your specific doorbell and not any others, this is an example of

Discrimination

The process of taking information and putting it into memory is called

Encoding

B.F. Skinner noticed that if pigeons were "accidentally" reinforced they

Engaged in "superstitious" behaviors that were not actually responsible for the appearance of the reinforcer

Which part of working memory are you using when you're linking different bits of information together, including information from long-term memory

Episodic buffer

Behavior can't _______

Evolve like other traits

Whenever thinking of dogs, William always thinks of the dog he had growing up. This is an

Exemplar

A dog is trained to receive a treat with a clicker and then hears the clicker but doesn't get a treat so the dog doesn't salivate. This process is called

Extinction

Of the four main types of reinforcement, which type leads to a typical "scalloped" shape of the graph of responding?

Fixed interval

A rat receives a food pellet after pressing a bar exactly 15 times. What type of schedule of reinforcement does this represent

Fixed ratio

In Pavlov's lab, which of the following was an unconditioned stimulus for dogs

Food

When meeting with her clients, an investment advisor decides to tell potential investors that they have an 80% chance of making money with a particular investment, rather than focusing on the fact that the same investment had a 20% chance of losing money. What is the investment advisor using to try to convince her clients to invest?

Framing

Your dog likes visitors and gets excited when the doorbell rings, so when the doorbell rings on TV your dog became excited even though it didn't sound the same. This is an example of

Generalization

Which brain area appears to be important for spatial memory, and was larger in London taxi drivers compared with others in the population

Hippocampus

Why is the MHC important

Human females appear to be able to differentiate males with different MHC genes by smell

According to the Atkinson-Shiffrin Model of Memory, where can information be lost

Information can be lost from any stage

What's the biggest problem with instinct

Instinct is less flexible than learning

What does the term "negative" mean in the context of reinforcement or punishment

It means something was taken away

Edward Thorndike determined that when it came to the consequences of behaviors, they could have either a "satisfying" or "annoying" state of affairs. This is his

Law of Effect

When in sociology class, a student thinks about how each of the theories she's learning about applies to herself, and those close to her. She remembers information better than another student who tries to memorize it by repeating it over and over. Which theory applies to why these two students learned different amount of information

Levels of processing theory

During a earthquake that happened decades ago, a schoolteacher remembers helping his children get under their desks before retreating to a safe place himself. Recent footage shows the teacher hiding under a desk himself, while not helping his students. It turns out his memory had become distorted because he likes to think of himself as being kind and helpful towards children. This is an example of

Motivated forgetting

What is something that has NOT been shown to make observational learning more likely

Past experience with intermittent reinforcement

You're playing a game with your niece where she has to stack cards according to color and item. Then you ask her to stack all of one item regardless the color. She continues to sort them based on color. You conclude that she needs a little more development in her ______ before she'll be able to do that task

Prefrontal cortex

In an experiment, people that experienced a pleasant smell rated their experimenter more highly than people that had an unpleasant smell. This is an example of:

Priming

A teacher asks students to draw an airplane and although there are several types most students drew their _____ which resulted in a lot of pictures of a typical plane

Prototype

You offer to watch your neighbor's kid when he has to stay late at work, and he lets you borrow his car when you need it. This is an example of

Reciprocal altruism

While traveling abroad I was given a choice of rental cars. I chose the brand I recognized over the other option. This is an example of the

Recognition heuristic

Shaping is

Reinforcing small steps toward a particular behavior until that behavior is produced and can be reinforced

On TV there was an older white man from a southern state being interviewed because he was running for local office. Given his demographics people assumed he was republican but was actually a democrat. This is an example of the

Representativeness heuristic

Males tend to have much greater variance in their ______________ compared with females

Reproductive success

When we form new memories, our set of expectations, or ___________, seems to be important in that we pay more attention to and retain more information that conforms to our expectations

Schema

Evolutionary psychologists refer to ___________________, which is when an individual engages in a behavior that is detrimental to another party, but also him or herself.

Spite

A dog hears a clicker but doesn't receive treats so it stops salivating. Two weeks later you make the clicking noise and the dog salivates. This is an example of

Spontaneous recovery

What was learned from the Little Albert experiment

That fear responses in children can be the result of classical conditioning

Parents set up a contingency where their child will get to go to an amusement park if they finish all of their chores on time. This is an example of

The Premack Principle

You are walking through a park and see a flock of birds you think are the same species. Three of these birds are small and have gray feathers. Three other birds are larger and have brightly-colored feathers. Given what you learned about sexual selection, which of the following predictions would you make about this flock?

The brightly colored ones are male

What is the name of the technique that requires setting a timer to study for a period of time, interspersed with taking breaks

The pomodoro technique

In a study that had eye-witnesses recall a car accident, what influenced the subjects with regard to the speed they reported the cars were going at the time

The precise verb used when asking about the accident

Which brain network is the one that is active when we are focused on a particular task

The task-positive network

What's the main advantage of using algorithms to solve problems

They tend to be accurate compared with other methods

What is it called when you feel like you almost remember something, but not quite

Tip of the tongue phenomenon

Every time someone flushes a toilet in the apartment building, the shower becomes very hot and causes the person to jump back. Over time, the person begins to jump back automatically after hearing the flush, before the water temperature changes. What are the unconditioned and conditioned stimuli and responses?

UCS: the hot water CS: hearing the toilet flush UR: feeling pain from the hot water CR: jumping out of the way

You play slots and get a payout every 50 pulls on average. What type of schedule reinforcement does this represent?

Variable ratio

My dog likes to stick his head in holes in the ground in order to try to catch rodents that live in them. He catches a rodent on average every 25 times he sticks his head in a hole. What type of schedule of reinforcement is this

Variable ratio (VR) 25 schedule

What is the primacy effect

When a person remembers the first bits of information in a list of things

What is the definition of learning

a relatively permanent change in behavior due to individual experience

When meeting her daughter's new boyfriend for the first time, Josie decided she liked him before even knowing him. She just had a feeling that he was a nice guy based on the short exchanges they had. This is an example of the

affect heuristic