PSY 101 - Quamme - exam 2

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

Recognition

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 psychology

In which memory system is information retained for the shortest amount of time?

Sensory memory

Which of the following can account for the fact that some people believe they have engaged in a particular action when, in fact, they watched someone else perform that action?

Source monitoring failure

The tendency to respond to a conditioned stimulus that is similar, but not identical, to the original conditioned stimulus is called _____

Stimulus generalization

In a study on decision making, Wilson and his colleagues gave female college students a choice of five art posters to take home but gave them different directions about how to make their choice. Which group of students was happier with their poster choice after a few weeks had passed?

The students who "went with their gut" and took the posters they liked without thinking it over

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.

When someone witnesses a crime in which a gun was involved, her or his description of the perpetrator's appearance can be flawed. This is often due to __________, a psychological process demonstrated in many experiments.

Weapon focus

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

According to B.F. Skinner, different people react differently to the same stimulus, such as receiving criticism, because of their __________.

learning histories

Which mental phenomenon can be defined as "the retention of information over time"?

memory

Bob is given 10 math problems, and can solve the first nine the same way. However, he struggles with the tenth problem because it requires a different method to solve it. This tendency to get stuck in a specific problem-solving strategy is the phenomenon of

mental sets

Dave has to remember 4 items that he needs at the corner market, so he visualizes the path he will take to get there. He imagines a bar of soap hanging from a large tree, envisions a roll of paper towels next to a stoplight, "sees" a packet of gum on the newspaper rack, and imagines the fire hydrant spurting out soda. Which memory strategy is Dave relying on?

method of loci

The ossicles, the smallest bones in the body, are found where?

middle ear

During the acquisition phase of classical conditioning, when the pairing of the CS and the UCS is closer in time, learning occurs __________.

more quickly

The tendency to interpret an object as always being the same physical dimensions, regardless of its distance from the viewer, is an example of:________________

perceptual constancy

While watching some friends skateboarding, you wince in empathy when one of them falls and scrapes her leg very badly. This is the result of the firing of your mirror neurons, which are found in what part of the brain?

prefrontal cortex

A __________ reinforcer is any reward that satisfies a basic, biological need, such a hunger, thirst, or touch.

primary

Which Gestalt principle holds that objects and features physically close to each other tend to be percieved as parts of the same thing?

proximity

In a notorious study by Watson and Raynor (1920), Little Albert, a toddler, was taught to fear a ________ through classical conditioning

rat

Psychologists measure people's memory abilities by assessing three capacities: __________.

recall, recognition, and relearning

An outcome or consequence of a behavior that increases the probability of the behavior is called a ____________.

reinforcement

Which of the following would be an example of episodic memory

remembering where you ate lunch yesterday

The vestibular senses rely on three ______, which are fluid-filled structures located in the inner ear.

semicircular canals

The brief storage of perceptual information before it is passed to short-term memory is called ________ memory.

sensory

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

serial position curve

The order in which items are presented can affect memory for those items. In general, this is known as the _________________ .

serial position effect

The "Magic Number" of short-term memory is:

seven plus or minus two

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

If you read a sentence, and then rehearse it to yourself for the next 20 seconds, you are holding the sentence in:

short-term memory

When a conditioned response appears to be extinct, it can sometimes come back, but will often be weaker than it was originally. This return of the CR is called __________.

spontaneous recovery

Pavlov discovered a phenomenon of classical conditioning called __________, which means that a similar stimulus can elicit the same response as the conditioned stimulus.

stimulus generalization

B.F. Skinner was able to produce what he called __________ in pigeons by delivering reinforcement in the form of food regardless of what the birds did.

superstitious behavior

When we need to make an important decision, and carefully consider all the angles and options, we are using __________ thinking

system 2

When we make a guess as to how likely something is to happen based on how quickly the answer comes to mind we are using __________.

the availability heuristic

When we seek out evidence that supports an opinion or belief that we already hold, we are engaging in __________.

the confirmation bias

What is the name of the effect whereby the last few items are more likely to be recalled than the middle items?

the recency effect

Mental activities such as learning, remembering, perceiving, communicating, believing, and deciding can all be included under the overarching term __________.

thinking

You meet your brother's new girlfriend and are immediately put off by the grating quality of her voice. Which aspect of her voice is bothering you?

timbre or pitch

The term "mondegreen" refers to certain song lyrics that are commonly misheard as completely different strings of words, often combinations that make no sense. Mondegreens are an example of __________ processing.

top-down

The somatosensory system responds to sensory information about:

touch, temperature and pain

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

trial and error

The persistence of anxiety disorders can be explained by the __________ theory, because phobias created by classical conditioning are negatively reinforced by avoidance behavior

two-process

Which of the following reinforcement schedules typically yields the highest rate of responding from an organism

variable ratio

Learning is best when a person adopts which of the following study or practice schedules?

distributed practice

Negative reinforcement __________ the rate of behavior, whereas punishment __________ the rate of behavior

increases; decreases

When we suddenly see the solution to a problem and get that "aha reaction," we have learned something through __________.

insight

The loudness of a sound is determined by the _____ of a sound wave.

Amplitude

When Bill looks at his lamp alternately with his left eye and right eye, the image seems to jump from one position to another. This phenomenon illustrates _____.

Binocular Disparity

What memory technique can be used to get around Short-Term Memory's limited capacity and can permit you to hold greater quantities of information in mind

Chunking

People tend to make decisions and solve problems in ways that impose order and reduce effort. This principle is called

Cognitive Economy

Studies have shown the 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

What new field tries to incorporate scientific evidence into the decision-making process for businesses?

Decision management

Research indicates that primacy and recency effects, at the level of brain activity, operate by following:

Different mechanisms

Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered the law of __________, which says that people tend to remember information better when they spread their learning out over long intervals rather than cram it into short ones.

Distributed versus massed practice

We can use mnemonics to help us __________ information we want to retain in our memories.

Encode

Scientists devise __________ in order to ensure that the memories elicited in their false-memory-implantation experiments are actually false.

Existence proof

Emotional memories recalled with extremely vivid detail are called

Flashbulb Memory

The fact that people usually correctly remember where they were when they learned of the September 11th, 2001, attacks but are less exact about what they were doing or who told them, leads researchers to believe that __________, although not completely reliable, contain "substantial kernels of accuracy."

Flashbulb memories

Peoples' decisions often depend on how questions are formulated. For example, people with cancer tend to be more optimistic if their doctor says "You are 90% certain to survive" as opposed to "There is a 1 in 10 chance you will die." This illustrates the phenomenon of __________.

Framing

Dee Dee is asked to remember the following list of names: Fritz, Tommy, Mike, Arlo, Ringo, Desi, Lupe, Jerry, Franco, Greg, Henry, Dez, and Aldo. According to the primacy effect, which names should Dee Dee recall the best?

Fritz, Tommy, Mike

A problem-solving strategy that doesn't guarantee a correct solution, but can save time and effort arriving at a correct answer is a(n):

Heuristic

Which of the following was NOT given as a reason for the serial position effect?

Items at the end of the list have no proactive interference from previous items, so they are more easily recalled.

Who was the subject of the ethically questionable study of classical conditioning in which an infant was conditioned to fear white, furry objects?

Little Albert

To remember information such as a telephone number until you can finish dialing it, you could just say the number over and over again until it is fixed in your mind. This memory technique is called __________.

Maintenance rehearsal

The memory technique that associates rhymes with a list of words in a particular order is called the __________.

Pegword method

Which term describes a step-by-step process of learned procedures we can use to solve particular problems?

algorithms

According to the theory of classical conditioning, an unconditioned stimulus is a stimulus that elicits

an automatic response

Many scientific breakthroughs have come by way of __________, which involves recognizing similarities between two unrelated subjects. This type of problem-solving allows us to look at things in a new way.

analogies

When we judge the likelihood of an event based on how easy it is to remember or imagine an example, we are relying on the __________ heuristic.

availability

When people rely on mental shortcuts to reach a conclusion or make a decision, they often fail to take into account how common a behavior or characteristic is in general. This kind of information is called the __________ by psychological scientists.

base rate

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

classical conditioning

Which part of the ear is shaped like a spiral with a bony outer portion and an inner cavity filled with a thick fluid?

cochlea

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

cognitive misers

Which term describes a stimulus that signals the presence of reinforcement?

discriminative stimulus

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

Neuroimaging studies of the brain show that the sensory areas become active when we think about objects, actions, and events. This is consistent with the __________ view of thinking.

embodied

In operant conditioning, the response of the organism to the stimulus is __________.

emitted voluntarily

Which term refers to the classical conditioning phenomenon in which a new CR "writes over" an existing CR?

extinction

Nathalia listens intently as her economics professor describes the 4 percent unemployment rate in her county. Troubled by this statistic, she later talks with her friend Gigi, who is enrolled in a different section of the same economics course. "Unemployment in our county is horrible!" laments Nathalia. "What do you mean?" replies Gigi. "The professor clearly told us that 96 percent of people in our county have a job, which sounds pretty good to me." Which barrier to reasoning rationally could be affecting Nathalia and Gigi's conclusions?

framing

In a research study in which people were asked to figure out how to mount a candle on the wall when they were given only a candle, a book of matches, and a box of tacks, what concept was being tested?

functional fixedness

When someone solves a problem by using an object for a different purpose than for which it is typically used, that is called overcoming

functional fixedness

The process whereby someone responds less strongly over time to a given stimulus represents one of the simplest forms of learning. This process is called __________.

habituation