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PSYC 140 MODULE 1–8 EXAM 2026
COMPREHENSIVE ASSESSMENT
◉ psychological science. Answer: the study of mind, brain, and behavior ◉ psychology. Answer: the study of mental activity and behavior ◉ amiable skepticism. Answer: open to new ideas but wary of new "scientific findings" when good evidence and sound reasoning do not seem to support them ◉ critical thinking. Answer: systematically question and evaluate information using well-supported evidence ◉ confirmation bias. Answer: ignore evidence that does not match what they believe; choose to believe studies that are consistent with their beliefs ◉ failure to judge source credibility. Answer: faced with who to believe; sources must be able to justify their claims
◉ misinterpreting statistics. Answer: failure to understand or use statistics to support belief ◉ seeing relationships that do not exist. Answer: misconception that two events happen at the same time must somehow be related ◉ using relative comparisons. Answer: information that comes first has a strong influence on how people make relative comparisons; how question is framed, presented, etc changes how people answer question ◉ hindsight bias. Answer: explain why things happened, but can't predict future events; try to make sense of events after they happen ◉ taking mental shortcuts (heuristics). Answer: following simple rules to make decisions. leads to inaccurate judgements and biased outcomes ◉ self-serving bias. Answer: inability to recognize your own shortcomings/weaknessees ◉ nature/nurture debate (Aristotle and Plato). Answer: whether nature or nurture influence an individual's psychology more
◉ structuralism. Answer: idea that conscious experience can be broken down into its basic underlying components ◉ problem with introspection. Answer: the experience is subjective; difficult for researchers to determine whether each participant in a study is employing introspection similarly ◉ William James. Answer: wrote first influential book on early psychology; rejected structuralism; argued mind is much more complex than its elements and cannot be broken down. Created functionalism ◉ stream of consciousness. Answer: mind consists of ever-changing, continuous series of thoughts ◉ functionalism. Answer: (William James) mind came into existence over the course of human evolution ◉ evolutionary theory. Answer: species change over time (psychical characteristics, skills, and abilities) ◉ adaptations. Answer: changes passed along that help increase individuals' chances of surviving and reproducing
◉ natural selection. Answer: the process by which changes that are adaptive are passed along and those that are not adaptive are not passed along ◉ Gestalt theory. Answer: the whole of personal experience is not simply the sum of its constituent elements ◉ A researcher shows people a triangle and they see a triangle instead of three lines on a piece of paper. This is an example of what. Answer: Gestalt theory ◉ Sigmund Freud. Answer: speculated that much of human behavior is determined by mental processes operating below the level of conscious awareness (unconscious) ◉ psychoanalysis. Answer: attempts to bring the contents of the unconscious into conscious awareness so that conflicts can be revealed ◉ behaviorism. Answer: emphasizes environmental effects on observable behavior ◉ B.F. Skinner. Answer: most famous and influential behaviorist
◉ social level of analysis. Answer: how group contexts affect the ways in which people interact and influence each other ◉ cultural level of analysis. Answer: how people's thoughts, feelings, and actions are similar or different across cultures ◉ Tabula rasa. Answer: Latin for "blank slate" Born knowing nothing, the infant acquires all of its knowledge through sensory experiences ◉ Learning (vs. Instincts). Answer: A relatively enduring change in behavior, resulting from experience ◉ Non-associative learning. Answer: responding after repeated exposure to a single stimulus, or event ◉ Habituation (Non-associative learning). Answer: When our behavioral response to a stimulus goes down ◉ Habituation (Non-associative learning). Answer: When our behavioral response to a stimulus goes down ◉ Sensitization (Nonassociative learning). Answer: When our behavioral response to a stimulus goes up
◉ Associative learning. Answer: linking two stimuli, or events, that occur together ◉ Observational learning. Answer: acquiring or changing a behavior after exposure to another individual performing that behavior ◉ Behaviorism. Answer: the theory that human and animal behavior can be explained in terms of conditioning, without appeal to thoughts or feelings, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior patterns ◉ Classical Conditioning. Answer: When we learn that a stimulus predicts another stimulus ◉ Pavlov Salivary reflex. Answer: Classical conditioning Pavlov created an apparatus that collected saliva from dogs. With this device, he measured the different amounts of saliva that resulted when he placed various types of food into a dog's mouth ◉ Neutral Stimulus. Answer: you learn that one event predicts another
◉ Spontaneous recovery. Answer: A process in which a previously extinguished conditioned response reemerges after the presentation of the conditioned stimulus Example, after extension, starting the metronome will once again produce the conditioned response of salivation ◉ Stimulus generalization. Answer: Learning that occurs when stimuli that are somewhat alike but not identical to the conditioned stimulus (CS) produce the conditioned response (CR) Example, a similar sounding bell may invoke salvation ◉ Stimulus discrimination. Answer: A differentiation between somewhat alike stimuli when only one of them is consistently associated with the unconditioned stimulus Example, dogs can learn to detect subtle differences in shades of gray or in tones of different frequencies/bell sounds ◉ John B. Watson & Little Albert. Answer: Watson was one of the first researchers to demonstrate the role of classical conditioning in the development of phobias Watson taught an infant named Albert B. to fear neutral objects ◉ Phobias & fear conditioning. Answer: Phobia: an acquired fear that is out of proportion to the real threat of an object or of a situation. Fear conditioning: the method by which organisms learn to fear new stimuli. a form of learning in which fear is associated
with a particular neutral context. Example: Animals can be classically conditioned to fear neutral objects ◉ Counterconditioning. Answer: a form of respondent conditioning that involves the conditioning of an unwanted behavior/response to a stimulus (like a phobia) into a wanted behavior/response by the association of positive actions with the stimulus. Example, when training a dog, a person would create a positive response by petting or calming the dog, when the dog reacts anxiously or nervously to a stimulus. Therefore this will associate the positive response with the stimulus ◉ Conditioned taste/food aversion. Answer: an animal associates the taste of a certain food with symptoms caused by a toxic, spoiled, or poisonous substance. Generally, taste aversion is developed after ingestion of food that causes nausea, sickness, or vomiting 1) After eating a poisonous mushroom this woman vomited 2) and thus learned to be more careful when picking wild mushrooms ◉ Biological preparedness. Answer: Some associations can be learned more easily than other associations learned through classical conditioning. these learned associations are evolutionarily important in order increase chances of survival of individuals and the species. Example, some animals are genetically programmed to fear specific objects
occur again, and any behavior that leads to an "annoying state of affairs" is less likely to occur again. When a person uses a substance for the first time and receives a positive outcome, they are likely to repeat the behavior due to the reinforcing consequence. Over time, the person's nervous system will also develop a tolerance to the drug. Thus only by increasing dosage of the drug will provide the same satisfaction, making it dangerous for the user ◉ B.F. Skinner. Answer: developed a more formal learning theory based on the law of effect ◉ Operant chamber (Skinner box). Answer: A box where one could expose rats or pigeons to repeated conditioning trials without having to do anything but observe ◉ Shaping. Answer: A process of operant conditioning; it involves reinforcing behaviors that are increasingly similar to the desired behavior. Example: trying to teach your dog to roll over, you initially reward the dog for any behavior that even slightly resembles rolling over, such as lying down. Once this behavior is established, you reinforce behaviors more selectively ◉ Primary vs. Secondary reinforcers. Answer: Primary: biological. (Food, drink, and pleasure). Secondary: Events/objects that serve as reinforcers but do not satisfy biological needs (money, A on a paper)
◉ Reinforcement vs. Punishment. Answer: Reinforcement: a consequence that will strengthen an organism's future behavior whenever that behavior is preceded by a specific antecedent stimulus. Punishment: any change in an organism's surroundings that occurs after a given behavior or response which reduces the likelihood of that behavior occurring again in the future ◉ Positive vs. Negative conditioning. Answer: Positive: the administration of a stimulus to increase the probability of a behavior's being repeated. Negative: the removal of an unpleasant stimulus to increase the probability of a behavior's being repeated ◉ Continuous vs. Partial reinforcement. Answer: Continuous: a type of learning in which behavior is reinforced each time it occurs. Partial: a type of learning in which behavior is reinforced intermittently ◉ Variable reinforcement schedule. Answer: vary in terms of basis for providing reinforcement and regularity with which reinforcement is provided ◉ Latent learning. Answer: Learning that takes place in the absence of reinforcement. latent learning occurs when a person learns something simply by observing it. When most people drive for the first time, they do not need to be told that rotating the steering wheel turns the car. They already know that they need to rotate the
◉ Three-component model (sensory, working, long-term). Answer: Encoding, storage, retrieval ◉ Sensory memory. Answer: a very brief recall of a sensory experience, such as what we just saw or heard ◉ Sperling's partial report experiment (text). Answer: three rows of letters were flashed on a screen for 1/20 of a second. Participants were asked to recall all the letters. Most people believed they had seen all the letters, but they could recall only three or four. That is, in the time it took them to name the first three or four, they forgot the other letters. These reports suggested the participants had very quickly lost their memories of exactly what they had seen. ◉ Iconic. Answer: visual memory ◉ Echoic. Answer: audio memory ◉ Haptic. Answer: Touch memory ◉ Working (Short-term) memory. Answer: the ability of our brains to keep a limited amount of information available long enough to use it. Working memory helps process thoughts and plans, as well as carries out ideas
◉ George Miller's magical 7±2 items. Answer: one of the most highly cited papers in psychology. Miller discussed a coincidence between the limits of one-dimensional absolute judgment and the limits of short-term memory ◉ Chunking. Answer: Organizing information into meaningful units to make it easier to remember ◉ Working memory (WM) capacity (3-4). Answer: An active processing system that keeps different types of information available for current use ◉ Rehearsal. Answer: a way to get some information into long-term memory. Repeated blah blah blah over and over again ◉ Long-term memory. Answer: The relatively permanent storage of information ◉ Encoding, storage & retrieval. Answer: encoding- the processing of information so that it can be stored. Storage- The retention of encoded representations over time. Retrieval- The act of recalling or remembering stored information when it is needed
◉ Episodic vs. semantic memory. Answer: Episodic - Memory for one's personal past experiences. Semantic- Memory for knowledge about the world. ◉ Medial temporal lobes & hippocampus (declarative). Answer: Important for ability to store new memories, responsible for formation of new memories. the medial temporal lobes form links between storages sights ◉ Flashbulb memories. Answer: a detailed and vivid memory that is stored on one occasion and retained for a lifetime ◉ Cerebellum. Answer: Motor action learning and memory ◉ Basal ganglia & procedural memory. Answer: Procedural Memory :a part of the long-term memory that is responsible for knowing how to do things, also known as motor skills. stores information on how to perform certain procedures, such as walking, talking and riding a bike ◉ Morris water maze. Answer: a behavioral procedure mostly used with rodents. widely used in behavioral neuroscience to study spatial learning and memory
◉ Patient H.M. (Henry Molaison). Answer: an American memory disorder patient who had a bilateral medial temporal lobectomy to surgically resect the anterior two thirds of his hippocampi, parahippocampal cortices, entorhinal cortices, piriform cortices, and amygdalae in an attempt to cure his epilepsy. His case played a very important role in the development of theories that explain the link between brain function and memory ◉ Clive Wearing. Answer: a British musicologist, conductor, tenor and keyboardist who suffers from chronic anterograde and retrograde amnesia. He lacks the ability to form new memories, and also cannot recall aspects of his past memories, frequently believing that he has only recently awoken from a coma. Only remembers his wife ◉ Retrograde and anterograde amnesia. Answer: Retrograde- a condition in which people lose past memories, such as memories for events, facts, people, or even personal information. Anterograde-a condition in which people lose the ability to form new memories ◉ Confabulation. Answer: a memory disturbance, defined as the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive ◉ Consolidation and reconsolidation. Answer: Consolidation - a category of processes that stabilize a memory trace after its initial
