AP Psych A - Unit 4 Review - Learning

Which of the following most accurately describes an impact of punishment?

• Punishment is a good way to increase a behavior, as long as it is not used too frequently.

• Punishment may create problems in the short term but rarely produces long-term side effects.

• Punishment can be effective at stopping specific behaviors quickly.

• Punishment typically results in an increase of a behavior that caused the removal of an aversive stimulus.

• Punishment should never be used (in the opinion of most psychologists), because the damage it causes can never be repaired.

Which of the following is an application of shaping?

• A mother who wants her daughter to hit a baseball first praises her for holding a bat, then for swinging it, and then for hitting the ball.

• A pigeon pecks a disk 25 times for an opportunity to receive a food reinforcement.

• A rat presses a bar when a green light is on but not when a red light is on.

• A rat gradually stops pressing a bar when it no longer receives a food reinforcement.

• A gambler continues to play a slot machine, even though he has won nothing on his last 20 plays, and he has lost a significant amount of money.

What is one of the principal functions of mirror neurons?

• To allow an organism to replace an unconditioned response with a conditioned response

• To help produce intrinsic motivation in some children

• To be the mechanism by which the brain accomplishes observational learning

• To produce the neural associations that are the basis of both classical and operant conditioning

• To explain why modeling prosocial behavior is more effective than modeling negative behavior

Which of the following illustrates generalization?

• A rabbit that has been conditioned to blink to a tone also blinks when a similar tone is sounded.

• A dog salivates to a tone but not to a buzzer.

• A light is turned on repeatedly until a rat stops flexing its paw when it’s turned on.

• A pigeon whose disk-pecking response has been extinguished is placed in a Skinner box three hours later and begins pecking the disk again.

• A child is startled when the doorbell rings.

What did Albert Bandura’s Bobo doll experiments demonstrate?

• Children are likely to imitate the behavior of adults.

• There may be a negative correlation between televised violence and aggressive behavior.

• Children are more likely to copy what adults say than what adults do.

• Allowing children to watch too much television is detrimental to their development.

• Observational learning can explain the development of fears in children.

What did Robert Rescorla and Allan Wagner’s experiments establish?

• That the acquisition of a CR depends on pairing the CS and the US

• That different species respond differently to classical conditioning situations

• The current belief that classical conditioning is really a form of operant conditioning

• That mirror neurons form the biological basis of classical conditioning

• The importance of cognitive factors in classical conditioning

What does Edward Thorndike’s law of effect state?

• The difference between positive and negative reinforcement

• That behavior maintained by partial reinforcement is more resistant to extinction than behavior maintained by continuous reinforcement

• How shaping can be used to establish operant conditioning

• That rewarded behavior is more likely to happen again

• The limited effectiveness of punishment

Which of the following processes would produce the acquisition of a conditioned response?

• Repeatedly present an unconditioned response

• Administer the conditioned stimulus without the unconditioned stimulus

• Make sure that the conditioned stimulus comes at least one minute before the unconditioned stimulus

• Pair a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus several times

• Present the conditioned stimulus until it starts to produce an unconditioned response

Which of the following would help determine what stimuli an organism can distinguish between?

• Negative reinforcement

• A variable-ratio schedule of reinforcement

• A fixed-ratio schedule of reinforcement

• Extinction

• A discriminative stimulus

A student studies diligently to avoid the bad feelings associated with a previously low grade on a test. In this case, the studying behavior is being strengthened because of what kind of reinforcement?

• Positive reinforcement

• Negative reinforcement

• Delayed reinforcement

• Primary reinforcement

• Conditioned reinforcement