Exam 7: Learning and Conditioning

When 4-year-old Aileen goes to the store with her dad and whines for candy at the checkout, she gets the candy. But when she goes with her mom, whining never ends up getting her candy. Before long, Aileen only whines when she is at the store with her dad. This is called ________.

Ivan Pavlov studied the reflexive flow of saliva in dogs. He used meat powder or other food to trigger the salivation. It was later observed that the salivation in the dog was triggered when the dog saw its dog dish, even before the food was placed in it. In this instance, the dog dish is the ________.

What is the difference between the traditional Pavlovian approach and the contemporary view on what is actually learned in classical conditioning?

Which of the following is a primary reinforcer?

The application of conditioning techniques to teach people new responses or to reduce maladaptive behaviors is called behavior modification.

Tim yells at his daughter Allison for soiling her pants. He also threatens to spank her if she ever does it again. Next week, she soils her pants again. According to studies on punishment, why did Tim's approach fail?

_____________ reinforcement occurs when you escape from something unpleasant.

Evolutionary psychologists note that humans are primed to be susceptible to certain kinds of acquired fears. Explain why this would be adaptive.

During operant learning, the tendency for an organism to revert to innate, species-specific behaviors is called ________.

The process of observational learning would explain how 3-year-old Ryan knows how to lather up his own face after watching his dad shave earlier that day.

In classical conditioning, the ________ is an initially neutral stimulus that comes to elicit a response.

Thorndike was known for his work with:

________ is an operant-conditioning procedure in which successive approximations of a desired response are reinforced.

Intermittent reinforcement results in ________.

Brett's mom keeps a chart on his bedroom wall and adds a gold star for each day that his room is clean. His mom is using _______________ to strengthen the response.

According to behavioral principles, what is happening here? 1. An adolescent whose parents have hit him for minor transgressions since he was small runs away from home. 2. A young woman whose parents paid her to clean her room while she was growing up is a slob when she moves to her own apartment. 3. Two parents scold their young daughter every time they catch her sucking her thumb. The thumb sucking continues anyway. B. Certain school systems are rewarding students for perfect attendance by giving them money, shopping sprees, laptops, and video games. What are the pros and cons of such practices? C. Some harried parents habitually resort to physical punishment without being aware of its many negative consequences for themselves and their children. What alternatives do these parents have?

In classical conditioning, when the conditioned response is extinguished, but reappears later, the reappearance of the response is called:

A conditioned response is a reflexive response elicited by a stimulus in the absence of learning.

When Keller and Marian Breland, two psychologists who became animal trainers, decided that it would be cute to have a pig drop a big wooden coin into a box, they found that:

In the initial salivary reflex studied by Pavlov, the dogs salivated when food was placed in their mouths. This salivation was a(n)________.