Exam 5: Learning

Take B. F. Skinner's viewpoint of free will and respond to the assertion that you consciously choose to answer this essay question.

Researchers found that people easily acquire a conditioned fear response to pictures of snakes and spiders when the images were paired with a mild electric shock. However, people did NOT easily acquire a conditioned fear response to pictures of flowers and mushrooms when these images were paired with a mild electric shock. Which perspective provides the best explanation for this finding?

How did Edward Tolman demonstrate the role of mental processes in operant conditioning?

The radio program Entrelazado, which is Spanish for "entwined," encourages healthy behaviors, including prevention of obesity and tobacco use, among the local Hispanic population. These entertainment-education programs use the principles of:

Gambling is a classic example of a fixed-ratio schedule.

B. F. Skinner advocated that totalitarian governments should shape all human behavior through the use of punishment, believing that this approach would solve human problems in a humane and rational way.

Which famous psychologist said the following? "It became my mission in life to help create a positive psychology whose mission would be the understanding and building of positive emotion, of strength and virtue, and of positive institutions."

What happened after "Little Albert" was classically conditioned to fear a tame white rat?

You take two aspirin to relieve a headache. Thirty minutes later, the headache is gone. You are now more likely to take aspirin to deal with bodily aches and pains in the future. In other words, _____ has occurred.

A movement called _____ advocates turning daily life into a kind of virtual reality game, in which points or other conditioned reinforcers are awarded to reward healthy or productive behaviors.

The different schedules of reinforcement produce different patterns of responding. In the graph shown, the fixed-interval schedule of reinforcement is reflected in which pattern of responding?

To enhance the effectiveness of positive reinforcers, you should make sure the reinforcer is reinforcing to the individual whose behavior you want to modify.

Prior to conditioning, a dog will salivate in response to food placed in its mouth. Using classical conditioning terms, the food would be labeled the _____, while the dog salivating would be labeled the _____.

According to Bandura's model of observational learning, which of the following characteristics of television depictions of violent behavior makes the violent behavior more likely to be imitated?

Pavlov found that a conditioned response would be stronger if:

In training various animals to perform tricks, Marian and Keller Breland discovered that certain natural behavior patterns interfered with the operant behaviors they were attempting to condition in some animals, a phenomenon called instinctive drift.

Identify the learning researcher who said, "The animal behaves like a scientist, detecting causal relations among events and using a range of information about those events to make relevant inferences."

Psychologist Martin Seligman proposed that humans are biologically predisposed to learn to fear certain objects or situations that may have once posed a threat to humans' evolutionary ancestors.

Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov accidentally discovered the process of classical conditioning while studying the role of saliva in digestion.

As studies with rats have shown, taste aversions can be produced when the interval between the conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus is: