Exam 7: Learning and Conditioning

Operant conditioning occurs when a stimulus that resembles the conditioned stimulus elicits the conditioned response.

After watching her teenage sister put on lipstick, a little girl takes lipstick and applies it to her own lips. She has acquired this behavior through a process of __________.

Ivan Pavlov studied the reflexive flow of saliva in dogs. He used meat powder or other food to trigger the salivation. In this instance, the meat powder was the ________.

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

Behaviorists focus on a basic kind of learning called ________.

Classical conditioning is considered to be an evolutionary adaption that allows an organism to anticipate and prepare for an event that is about to happen.

Stimulus generalization has occurred if a child learns to fear spiders and then responds to beetles and caterpillars with fear.

Joan begs her father for a frosted cookie at the bakery but he refuses to buy her one. Joan continues to whine and complain until finally he breaks down and gets her the cookie. For Joan, the cookie is a ________.

Matt classically conditions his dog, Wally, to salivate when he strums the G chord on his guitar by providing food after the chord is played. After some time, Matt notices that Wally salivates even when other chords are strummed although the chords were not followed by food. This phenomenon is known as ________.

Quarters spilling from a slot machine would be secondary reinforcers.

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 even before the food was placed in its mouth. In this experiment, ________ was the unconditioned response.

Margaret gives her son a quarter every time he makes his bed; she is using ________.

The difference between a reinforcer and a punisher is that:

________ is the process by which a response becomes more likely to occur or less so, depending on its consequences.

Margaret gives her son a quarter every time he makes his bed; she is using ________.

In the first chapter of the textbook, What Is Psychology?, one of the critical thinking guidelines that we learned about was "Consider Other Interpretations." Before settling on one interpretation of the evidence, critical thinkers generate as many interpretations as possible. For example, an athlete wears a new pair of socks and then surpasses her own record for the number of baskets made during a game. Her socks become "lucky" and she makes sure to wear them for each basketball game. What type of reinforcement (from Chapter 7, Learning and Conditioning) explains the fact that she clings to her socks as a lucky charm? What other interpretations should she consider?

In order for latent learning to occur, there must be obvious reinforcement.

Which of the following portrays an intrinsic reinforcer?

Food and water are examples of ________.

Name the unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned stimulus, and conditioned response in these two situations: 1. Five-year-old Emily is watching a storm from her window. A huge bolt of lightning is followed by a tremendous thunderclap, and Emily jumps at the noise. This happens several more times. There is a brief lull and then another lightning bolt. Emily jumps in response to the bolt. 2. Gregory's mouth waters whenever he eats anything with lemon in it. One day, while reading an ad that shows a big glass of lemonade, Gregory finds that his mouth has started to water. B. In the view of many learning theorists, pairing a neutral and unconditioned stimulus is not enough to produce classical conditioning; the neutral stimulus must __________ the unconditioned stimulus.