Questions and Answers of Behavior A Contemporary

What makes us forget? Is forgetting always bad, or do you suppose that it can be functional? Why should organisms ever forget?
What is the evidence that extinction does not destroy or erase the original learning? What are the implications for understanding relapse after exposure therapy? Given what you know about extinction,
What is a context? How do contexts influence learning and remembering?
Provide an example of a feature-positive discrimination and a featurenegative discrimination from real life. Can you explain them in the Rescorla-Wagner way? Can you explain them in the
Develop a behavior systems perspective analogous to the ones used to explain sexual conditioning in quail and panic disorder in humans to help conceptualize appetite and eating behavior in humans.
Discuss the methods that have been used to study categorization in pigeons. Identify the discriminative stimulus, operant response, and reinforcer. Why are transfer tests so important in this
Discuss the key results that indicate that generalization is influenced by learning. Then take one of those results and discuss how it could affect the generalization we might see in a study of
Distinguish between working memory, reference memory, and episodiclike memory in animals. How have investigators studied them?
Use the pacemaker–accumulator model to explain why a pigeon earning food on a Fixed Interval 60-second reinforcement schedule will show a peak of responding every 60 seconds. How would the
It has been argued that simple associative learning principles (like those emphasized in theories of classical conditioning) can go some distance in explaining examples of animal cognition like
Why is it important to have terms like CS, US, CR, and UR to describe the critical events in conditioning experiments? What are the typical CSs and USs used in each of the conditioning preparations
See if you can come up with real-world examples of the following phenomena:(a) Second-order conditioning(b) Sensory preconditioning(c) Latent inhibition (the CS preexposure effect)(d) Conditioned
Illustrate the various “things that affect the strength of conditioning” by considering how they might influence the conditioning of fear, appetite for food, or drug craving in humans.
How exactly do the various results described in the “Information value in conditioning” section of this chapter support the idea that pairing a CS and a US is not sufficient to produce
Early motivation theorists thought that motivational states like hunger and thirst provide energy that blindly energizes or invigorates behavior.What is the evidence for and against this idea? Given
According to the concept of incentive learning, organisms learn about reinforcers and how they make them feel. Discuss the evidence for this concept. How can you use what you know about incentive
According to early research from Tolman’s laboratory—for example, the latent learning experiment (Tolman & Honzik, 1930) and Tinklepaugh’s bait-and-switch experiment with monkeys (Tinklepaugh,
Use opponent-process theory along with the other various motivational processes discussed in this chapter to provide a general account of why people can become so strongly motivated to eat junk food
Early in this book, I warned you that even though Pavlovian conditioning and instrumental learning are usually discussed separately, they often work together and interact. Given what you have learned
What is prediction error? How does prediction error make learning happen? What is its role in the Rescorla-Wagner model, the Mackintosh model, and the Pearce-Hall model? How do you think the concept
How do the Mackintosh and Pearce-Hall models conceptualize attention?How do they capture the idea that learning (conditioning) depends on attention? Conversely, how do they propose that attention
What is the role of short-term memory in conditioning? Is there a role for short-term memory in Wagner’s SOP model?
Suppose that the car you are driving one rainy night skids off the road and crashes into a ditch while you are negotiating a curve. You are not hurt, but this event constitutes a major conditioning
Contrast the way an associationist like Locke and a rationalist like Kant viewed the mind. How are these points of view represented in what you know about Learning Theory and/or other fields of
Why did the early comparative psychologists and biologists who studied the reflex all come to focus on the conditioning experiment at the turn of the 20th century? What is the role of the
What are the main ideas of “behaviorism?” Considering all the great thinkers beginning with Descartes, who before Watson do you think could be considered the earliest “behaviorist?”
Contrast the information processing approach with the connectionist approach to cognitive psychology.
Describe two examples of S-O learning (classical conditioning) and two examples of R-O learning (operant conditioning) that you have observed in your own behavior, or that of your family or friends,
Discuss methods that ethologists have used to test hypotheses about the evolution of behavior. Why is it difficult to claim that a behavior is“innate?”
How do we know that the decrease in responding that occurs in habituation is not merely a result of fatigue? How is habituation functional?
Using several examples, discuss how classical conditioning and instrumental learning help us adapt to the environment.
When psychologists began to study classical conditioning with drug outcomes, they discovered the conditioned compensatory response.What is this, and how does it explain the development of tolerance
Using what you know about habituation, stimulus learning, and response learning, discuss some of the reasons humans might develop a taste for junk food, seek out restaurants that serve it, and
Why was taste aversion learning thought to be such a special form of learning? List the phenomena that suggested that it might follow unusual learning laws. Then use research on them to explain why
Use your knowledge of concepts like adaptation, exaptation, and functional incompatibility to outline conditions that might lead to the evolution of specialized versus general learning mechanisms.
Use concepts that you know from classical conditioning to explain how honeybees learn to approach flowers with different colors and odors when they forage for nectar. What evidence supports the idea
How can we use classical conditioning principles to understand category learning and causal learning in humans? What is the CS, and what is the US? What are the strengths and weaknesses of this
The early theorists (Thorndike, Guthrie, and Tolman) had very different ways of thinking about instrumental learning. Summarize their views with an emphasis on (a) how they conceptualized the effects
Provide an example of an operant behavior that you recently observed in your own behavior or that of a friend over the last few days. Then use it to illustrate the concepts of discriminative
What does the quantitative law of effect say influences the strength of an operant behavior? Using the law, recommend ways to (a) decrease a child’s overconsumption of candy and (b) increase the
Explain how the Ainslie-Rachlin rule predicts that a person’s choice of a small and more immediate reward (over a bigger but more delayed reward)can be influenced by the time when the choice is
Modern views of operant behavior generally accept the idea that choice is everywhere—organisms are always engaged in choosing between different behaviors and their associated reinforcers. Choice
On her days off, a student likes to read, cook, play tennis, watch movies, play cello, and talk to her family and friends. (These activities are not listed in any particular order.) How could you use
Describe the idea that reinforcement works through selection by consequences.Discuss the parallels with evolution. How does this perspective enrich or enhance the perspective on instrumental learning
What are the two factors in Mowrer’s two-factor theory of avoidance learning? What is the evidence for and against this theory? According to the theory, what reinforces avoidance behavior? What
Why is it so hard to punish an SSDR like freezing in a rat? Why is it so hard to weaken the pigeon’s pecking at a key that signals food by making each peck prevent the delivery of food (“negative
Describe learned helplessness and the immunization effect. Discuss what you think are the most important implications of these phenomena for understanding the development of stress and anxiety, as
How have experimenters separated the contributions of stimulus learning(S-O) and response learning (R-O) in punishment?
Describe the reinforcer devaluation effect. What does it tell us that organisms must learn in instrumental (operant) learning situations, and why might they choose to perform one instrumental
What is the evidence for S-(R-O) learning?
What is a habit? How common do you think habits are in your life? How is a habit different from a goal-directed action? How do experimenters distinguish between the two? What makes an action turn
Use what you know about S-O learning, R-O learning, S-(R-O) learning, and habit learning to come up with a general explanation of why people overeat food or become addicted to drugs.