Exam 7: Learning and Conditioning

The process by which a stimulus weakens the probability of the response that it follows is called ________.

Learning is one of the mechanisms by which an animal can adapt its behavior to its environment. For example, you learned in Chapter 7, Learning and Conditioning, that classical conditioning allows animals to prepare for biologically important events. In Chapter 3, Genes, Evolution, and Environment, you learned about how natural selection is another mechanism of adaptation. Compare and contrast learning and natural selection as mechanisms of adaptation. Include in your answer a specific example of how both mechanisms might affect an organism's behavior.

________ occurs when a parrot that has been trained to peck at a picture of a circle also pecks at a picture of an oval.

Humans are biologically primed to associate sickness with tastes more readily than with sights.

The application of operant-conditioning techniques to teach new responses or to reduce or eliminate maladaptive or problematic behavior is called ________.

Punishing a child's misbehavior is most effective if there is a delay between the behavior and the punishment so that the child has time to think about the consequence to come.

Robert Rescorla said that a stimulus must reliably _______________ an unconditioned stimulus for the stimulus to begin eliciting conditioned responding.