Exam 5: Learning

Using Skinner's words, an operant is any "active behavior that operates on the environment to generate consequences."

Martin Seligman developed a program to teach learned optimism as a way of overcoming feelings of helplessness, habitual pessimism, and depression.

After establishing a classically conditioned response to a tone, an experimenter sets up a second trial using a new conditioned stimulus, a red light. He repeatedly pairs the new conditioned stimulus (the red light) with the conditioned stimulus from the first trial (the tone). This procedure results in the conditioned response being elicited by the red light alone, even though it was never paired with the unconditioned stimulus. The experimental results demonstrate:

Rats are allowed to wander through a maze for several days with no food reward at the end of it. On the tenth day, a food reward is placed at the end of the maze. Which of the following results would provide evidence for latent learning?

The nonprofit group Population Communications International uses the principles of _____ in its attempts to promote social change.

If you own a dog that tends to salivate and get excited when you shake a box of dog biscuits, you may have noticed that your dog also drools when you shake a bag of cat food. If so, this would be an example of:

Researchers have used a miniature shuttlebox to produce learned helplessness in cockroaches.

Awards, frequent flyer points, and college degrees are examples of:

_____ founded an early "school" or approach to psychology called behaviorism.

A Skinner box, or operant chamber, is a complex maze that a rat must successfully negotiate to get to a food reward in the goal box at the end.

Bill always starts his day with a cup of strong coffee. When Bill stays overnight at his mother's home, she makes him a cup of coffee when he gets up. Later, he is surprised to discover that his mother's coffee was decaffeinated, because he felt more alert after drinking it. In this example, what are the CS and CR?

Puppies who had seen their mothers locate and retrieve packets of narcotics were significantly better at performing the same task three months later than were puppies who had not seen adult dogs perform this behavior. According to the textbook, this is evidence of observational learning.

Once acquired, learned helplessness cannot be overcome.

After an individual chimp learned a new food-gathering technique, the rest of its group acquired the new skill within a few days. In turn, the newly acquired skill spread to other chimpanzee groups who could see the new behavior. According to the textbook, this is evidence of latent learning.

Little Albert developed a strong conditioned fear of the white rat but not of other animals or furry objects.

Faced with an ever-changing environment, an organism's capacity to learn is critical to adaptation and survival.

According to Albert Bandura, motivation to imitate a behavior is crucial to the actual performance of the learned behavior.

A stimulus or event that is naturally or inherently reinforcing for a given species is called a _____, and a stimulus or event that has acquired reinforcing value by being associated with a primary reinforcer is called a _____ .

You make a comment in your workgroup meetings, and a coworker responds with a sarcastic remark. As a result, you no longer speak during your workgroup meetings. This is an example of negative reinforcement.

Pavlov taught a dog to salivate at the sound of a musical tone by repeatedly pairing food with that tone. In this example, the food is the _____ and the dog salivating to the food is the _____.