Exam 1: Fundamental Themes in the Psychology of Learning and Memory

A pharmaceutical company has developed a new medication to treat anxiety. In order to check how well the medication responds, neither the experimenter nor the subjects know who received the medication. By doing this, the pharmaceutical company attempts to eliminate the chance of the subject's or experimenter's preconceived notions affecting the results. This is called:

Mary wants to encourage her son to work harder in school. She has decided to reward him with money for good grades and punish him by adding extra chores for bad grades. Mary's approach is MOST similar to the ideas of:

How would Aristotle's three principles of association explain how people come to associate dog and cat?

Which statement is NOT one of Charles Darwin's proposed criteria for traits to evolve through natural selection?

Marty's dog always sits when Marty opens the cupboard to get the dog a biscuit. How would a behaviorist describe the dog's behavior?

If a person looks at a golden retriever and a cocker spaniel and realizes the similarity that both of them are dogs, what process is the person using?

Which description is an example of a stimulus in René Descartes' reflex arc?

Someone who is highly trained in distinguishing different faces might still make occasional mistakes when presented with a particular face. How might this be explained by stimulus sampling theory?

Which statement predicts the law of effect?

In experimental psychology, the group that receives the treatment is referred to as the:

Barry was in a car accident in which he was not wearing a seatbelt. He was not injured, and now, based on this experience, he believes that seatbelts are unnecessary. Barry exhibits the views of:

In Ebbinghaus's studies of memory, the length of delay between learning and relearning was the _____ variable.

Who believed that human ability is due to a combination of both nature and nurture?

Who believed that rats were forming a "cognitive map" when they learned to navigate through a maze?

John Watson's studies of rats running through mazes demonstrated that rats had learned to use their _____ to navigate.

The principle that the mind and body exist as separate entities, each with different characteristics and governed by its own laws, is called:

Edward Tolman's research on the formation of cognitive maps in rats was important because it:

Who proposed connectionist models of the mind?

People raised in different cultures often exhibit different behaviors (e.g., perceptual, social, motivational, etc.) How would an empiricist account for such differences across cultures? How would a nativist account for the differences?

If a rat receives a food reward whenever it presses a lever, the likelihood of the rat pressing the lever will increase. This is an example of: