How is long-term memory categorized into explicit (declarative) versus implicit (non-declarative) memory?

Explicit memory requires conscious recall (subdivided into episodic autobiographical events and semantic factual knowledge); implicit memory operates unconsciously (procedural motor skills, classical conditioning, priming).

How does Lev Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) conceptualize learning?

The ZPD is the range between what a learner can do independently and what they can achieve with guidance from a More Knowledgeable Other (MKO), supported through temporary instructional scaffolding (a concept formalized by Wood, Bruner, and Ross building on Vygotsky).

What four attachment classifications were identified using Mary Ainsworth's Strange Situation paradigm?

1. Secure 2. Insecure-Avoidant 3. Insecure-Resistant/Ambivalent 4. Disorganized/Disoriented (added later by Main & Solomon).

In operant conditioning, how do negative reinforcement and positive punishment differ in their goals and mechanisms?

Negative reinforcement increases a behavior by removing an aversive stimulus (e.g., buckling a seatbelt to silence a buzzer); positive punishment decreases a behavior by presenting an aversive stimulus.

Which intermittent schedule of reinforcement produces the highest response rate and highest resistance to extinction?

Variable-Ratio (VR) schedule (e.g., slot machines, gambling).

What is spontaneous recovery in classical conditioning?

The reappearance of a weakened, extinguished conditioned response (CR) after a rest period without further CS–UCS pairings, demonstrating that extinction inhibits rather than erases the original learned association.

Differentiate between the Availability Heuristic and the Representativeness Heuristic identified by Tversky and Kahneman.

Availability heuristic: judging the likelihood of an event by how easily instances come to mind; Representativeness heuristic: judging the likelihood that something belongs to a category by how closely it matches a mental prototype (often causing base-rate neglect and the conjunction fallacy).

What Piagetian cognitive limitation is demonstrated when a preoperational child believes liquid volume changes when poured into a taller glass?

Lack of Conservation, caused by Centration (fixating on only one salient dimension, such as height, while ignoring width) and Irreversibility.

What did Albert Bandura's Bobo Doll experiment demonstrate regarding vicarious learning?

Children exposed to adult aggressive models imitated novel violent behaviors without direct reinforcement, establishing the principles of observational (social) learning.

What is functional fixedness in problem solving?

A cognitive bias where an individual views an object solely in terms of its customary, traditional function, failing to see novel ways to utilize it to solve a problem (e.g., Duncker's candle problem).

What is operant shaping via successive approximations?

Reinforcing progressively closer approximations to a desired target behavior until the complete complex behavior is learned.

What is Martin Seligman's learned helplessness theory, and how is it linked to depression?

When an organism repeatedly experiences inescapable aversive events, it learns that its actions cannot control outcomes and becomes passive even when escape later becomes possible. In humans, learned helplessness and a pessimistic explanatory style (viewing setbacks as stable, global, and internal) model the hopelessness, passivity, and perceived lack of control seen in clinical depression.

What memory deficit characterized Patient H.M. (Henry Molaison) following bilateral medial temporal lobectomy?

Severe anterograde amnesia (inability to consolidate new long-term explicit episodic or semantic memories) and temporally graded retrograde amnesia for events shortly before surgery, while short-term working memory and implicit procedural learning remained intact.

What are the four components of Baddeley's expanded working memory model?

1. Central Executive (attentional control system) 2. Phonological Loop (verbal and acoustic rehearsal) 3. Visuospatial Sketchpad (visual and spatial manipulation) 4. Episodic Buffer (added by Baddeley in 2000 to integrate multimodal information with long-term memory).

What is the difference between a phoneme and a morpheme in linguistics?

A phoneme is the smallest distinctive sound unit in a spoken language (e.g., /b/, /p/); a morpheme is the smallest unit of language that carries meaning (e.g., root words, prefixes, suffixes like 'un-' or '-ed').

How does an algorithm differ from a heuristic in cognitive problem solving?

An algorithm is a well-defined, step-by-step procedure that guarantees a correct solution (when one exists), whereas a heuristic is a fast mental shortcut or rule of thumb that reduces cognitive effort but can lead to systematic judgment errors.

What did Elizabeth Loftus's Misinformation Effect research demonstrate regarding reconstructive memory?

Exposing eyewitnesses to misleading post-event information (e.g., using the verb 'smashed' vs 'hit') distorts their episodic memory, causing them to falsely recall non-existent details (e.g., broken glass).

What are the three storage stages in the Atkinson-Shiffrin multi-store model of memory?

1. Sensory Memory (iconic and echoic registers; high capacity, lasting milliseconds to a few seconds) 2. Short-Term Memory (limited capacity, lasting ~15–30 seconds without rehearsal) 3. Long-Term Memory (vast capacity and relatively permanent storage).

What is Edward Tolman's concept of latent learning?

Learning that occurs in the absence of reinforcement and remains hidden until an incentive or reward is introduced to demonstrate it (e.g., rats forming cognitive maps in mazes).

Distinguish between proactive interference and retroactive interference in memory retrieval.

Proactive interference occurs when previously learned information hinders recall of newly learned information; retroactive interference occurs when newly learned information disrupts recall of older information.

What cognitive milestones mark the transition from Piaget's sensorimotor stage to the preoperational stage?

In Piaget's framework, the mastery of Object Permanence (understanding that hidden objects continue to exist, though modern infant-looking studies detect implicit awareness much earlier) and the emergence of symbolic, representational thought.

According to Craik and Lockhart's Levels of Processing framework, why does elaborative rehearsal produce superior recall compared to maintenance rehearsal?

Elaborative rehearsal involves deep semantic processing (analyzing meaning and integrating with existing knowledge), whereas maintenance rehearsal involves shallow phonological repetition.

How does the Garcia Effect (conditioned taste aversion) demonstrate biological preparedness in learning?

In Garcia and Koelling's experiments, rats readily associated novel tastes with radiation- or toxin-induced nausea even across multi-hour delays and after a single trial, yet rarely associated audiovisual cues with internal illness—showing that evolution predisposes organisms to form species-specific adaptive associations.

What is the capacity of short-term memory according to George Miller, and how does chunking expand it?

7 ± 2 items (or ~4 chunks according to modern research); chunking organizes individual units of information into meaningful higher-order cognitive chunks.

What is the core psychosocial conflict of adolescence in Erik Erikson's eight-stage model?

Identity versus Role Confusion: exploring personal values, vocational paths, and beliefs to develop a coherent sense of self.

What did Hermann Ebbinghaus discover regarding the forgetting curve and the spacing effect?

Memory retention drops rapidly immediately after learning before leveling off (following a logarithmic/power-law decay curve); furthermore, distributed practice (spacing study sessions over time) yields substantially stronger long-term retention than massed practice (cramming).

In Pavlov's classical conditioning experiments, identify the UCS, UCR, CS, and CR.

Unconditioned Stimulus (UCS): Meat powder; Unconditioned Response (UCR): Innate salivation; Conditioned Stimulus (CS): Metronome/bell; Conditioned Response (CR): Learned salivation to the CS alone.

What explains the Primacy Effect and the Recency Effect in the serial position curve?

Primacy effect: early words receive greater rehearsal and transfer into long-term memory; Recency effect: terminal words remain accessible in the short-term working memory buffer.

How did Noam Chomsky's nativist theory of language acquisition challenge B.F. Skinner's behaviorist model?

Chomsky argued that children acquire complex syntax too rapidly and generate novel sentences ('poverty of the stimulus') to be explained solely by operant reinforcement and imitation, proposing instead that humans possess an innate Language Acquisition Device (LAD) and Universal Grammar.

What are Jean Piaget's four stages of cognitive development and their approximate age ranges?

1. Sensorimotor (0–2 years) 2. Preoperational (2–7 years) 3. Concrete Operational (7–11 years) 4. Formal Operational (12+ years).

What are Lawrence Kohlberg's three levels of moral reasoning?

1. Preconventional (morality governed by obedience, punishment, and self-interest) 2. Conventional (governed by social approval, norms, and law and order) 3. Postconventional (governed by social contracts and universal ethical principles).

What is the Framing Effect in human decision making?

The cognitive bias where people draw different conclusions or make different choices from the same information depending on how it is presented (e.g., framed as potential gains vs potential losses).

Learning, Memory, Cognition & Developmental Psychology

Introduction to Psychology 101 (Myers): conditioning and observational learning, multi-store and working memory, forgetting and reconstructive memory, decision heuristics, language, and lifespan development.

Level: intermediate
Languages: en → en
Cards: 32
Markdown: Learning, Memory, Cognition & Developmental Psychology (.md)

Flashcards (32)

#	Front (Term / Question)	Back (Definition / Answer)
1	How is long-term memory categorized into explicit (declarative) versus implicit (non-declarative) memory?	Explicit memory requires conscious recall (subdivided into episodic autobiographical events and semantic factual knowledge); implicit memory operates unconsciously (procedural motor skills, classical conditioning, priming).
2	How does Lev Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) conceptualize learning?	The ZPD is the range between what a learner can do independently and what they can achieve with guidance from a More Knowledgeable Other (MKO), supported through temporary instructional scaffolding (a concept formalized by Wood, Bruner, and Ross building on Vygotsky).
3	What four attachment classifications were identified using Mary Ainsworth's Strange Situation paradigm?	1. Secure 2. Insecure-Avoidant 3. Insecure-Resistant/Ambivalent 4. Disorganized/Disoriented (added later by Main & Solomon).
4	In operant conditioning, how do negative reinforcement and positive punishment differ in their goals and mechanisms?	Negative reinforcement increases a behavior by removing an aversive stimulus (e.g., buckling a seatbelt to silence a buzzer); positive punishment decreases a behavior by presenting an aversive stimulus.
5	Which intermittent schedule of reinforcement produces the highest response rate and highest resistance to extinction?	Variable-Ratio (VR) schedule (e.g., slot machines, gambling).
6	What is spontaneous recovery in classical conditioning?	The reappearance of a weakened, extinguished conditioned response (CR) after a rest period without further CS–UCS pairings, demonstrating that extinction inhibits rather than erases the original learned association.
7	Differentiate between the Availability Heuristic and the Representativeness Heuristic identified by Tversky and Kahneman.	Availability heuristic: judging the likelihood of an event by how easily instances come to mind; Representativeness heuristic: judging the likelihood that something belongs to a category by how closely it matches a mental prototype (often causing base-rate neglect and the conjunction fallacy).
8	What Piagetian cognitive limitation is demonstrated when a preoperational child believes liquid volume changes when poured into a taller glass?	Lack of Conservation, caused by Centration (fixating on only one salient dimension, such as height, while ignoring width) and Irreversibility.
9	What did Albert Bandura's Bobo Doll experiment demonstrate regarding vicarious learning?	Children exposed to adult aggressive models imitated novel violent behaviors without direct reinforcement, establishing the principles of observational (social) learning.
10	What is functional fixedness in problem solving?	A cognitive bias where an individual views an object solely in terms of its customary, traditional function, failing to see novel ways to utilize it to solve a problem (e.g., Duncker's candle problem).
11	What is operant shaping via successive approximations?	Reinforcing progressively closer approximations to a desired target behavior until the complete complex behavior is learned.
12	What is Martin Seligman's learned helplessness theory, and how is it linked to depression?	When an organism repeatedly experiences inescapable aversive events, it learns that its actions cannot control outcomes and becomes passive even when escape later becomes possible. In humans, learned helplessness and a pessimistic explanatory style (viewing setbacks as stable, global, and internal) model the hopelessness, passivity, and perceived lack of control seen in clinical depression.
13	What memory deficit characterized Patient H.M. (Henry Molaison) following bilateral medial temporal lobectomy?	Severe anterograde amnesia (inability to consolidate new long-term explicit episodic or semantic memories) and temporally graded retrograde amnesia for events shortly before surgery, while short-term working memory and implicit procedural learning remained intact.
14	What are the four components of Baddeley's expanded working memory model?	1. Central Executive (attentional control system) 2. Phonological Loop (verbal and acoustic rehearsal) 3. Visuospatial Sketchpad (visual and spatial manipulation) 4. Episodic Buffer (added by Baddeley in 2000 to integrate multimodal information with long-term memory).
15	What is the difference between a phoneme and a morpheme in linguistics?	A phoneme is the smallest distinctive sound unit in a spoken language (e.g., /b/, /p/); a morpheme is the smallest unit of language that carries meaning (e.g., root words, prefixes, suffixes like 'un-' or '-ed').
16	How does an algorithm differ from a heuristic in cognitive problem solving?	An algorithm is a well-defined, step-by-step procedure that guarantees a correct solution (when one exists), whereas a heuristic is a fast mental shortcut or rule of thumb that reduces cognitive effort but can lead to systematic judgment errors.
17	What did Elizabeth Loftus's Misinformation Effect research demonstrate regarding reconstructive memory?	Exposing eyewitnesses to misleading post-event information (e.g., using the verb 'smashed' vs 'hit') distorts their episodic memory, causing them to falsely recall non-existent details (e.g., broken glass).
18	What are the three storage stages in the Atkinson-Shiffrin multi-store model of memory?	1. Sensory Memory (iconic and echoic registers; high capacity, lasting milliseconds to a few seconds) 2. Short-Term Memory (limited capacity, lasting ~15–30 seconds without rehearsal) 3. Long-Term Memory (vast capacity and relatively permanent storage).
19	What is Edward Tolman's concept of latent learning?	Learning that occurs in the absence of reinforcement and remains hidden until an incentive or reward is introduced to demonstrate it (e.g., rats forming cognitive maps in mazes).
20	Distinguish between proactive interference and retroactive interference in memory retrieval.	Proactive interference occurs when previously learned information hinders recall of newly learned information; retroactive interference occurs when newly learned information disrupts recall of older information.
21	What cognitive milestones mark the transition from Piaget's sensorimotor stage to the preoperational stage?	In Piaget's framework, the mastery of Object Permanence (understanding that hidden objects continue to exist, though modern infant-looking studies detect implicit awareness much earlier) and the emergence of symbolic, representational thought.
22	According to Craik and Lockhart's Levels of Processing framework, why does elaborative rehearsal produce superior recall compared to maintenance rehearsal?	Elaborative rehearsal involves deep semantic processing (analyzing meaning and integrating with existing knowledge), whereas maintenance rehearsal involves shallow phonological repetition.
23	How does the Garcia Effect (conditioned taste aversion) demonstrate biological preparedness in learning?	In Garcia and Koelling's experiments, rats readily associated novel tastes with radiation- or toxin-induced nausea even across multi-hour delays and after a single trial, yet rarely associated audiovisual cues with internal illness—showing that evolution predisposes organisms to form species-specific adaptive associations.
24	What is the capacity of short-term memory according to George Miller, and how does chunking expand it?	7 ± 2 items (or ~4 chunks according to modern research); chunking organizes individual units of information into meaningful higher-order cognitive chunks.
25	What is the core psychosocial conflict of adolescence in Erik Erikson's eight-stage model?	Identity versus Role Confusion: exploring personal values, vocational paths, and beliefs to develop a coherent sense of self.
26	What did Hermann Ebbinghaus discover regarding the forgetting curve and the spacing effect?	Memory retention drops rapidly immediately after learning before leveling off (following a logarithmic/power-law decay curve); furthermore, distributed practice (spacing study sessions over time) yields substantially stronger long-term retention than massed practice (cramming).
27	In Pavlov's classical conditioning experiments, identify the UCS, UCR, CS, and CR.	Unconditioned Stimulus (UCS): Meat powder; Unconditioned Response (UCR): Innate salivation; Conditioned Stimulus (CS): Metronome/bell; Conditioned Response (CR): Learned salivation to the CS alone.
28	What explains the Primacy Effect and the Recency Effect in the serial position curve?	Primacy effect: early words receive greater rehearsal and transfer into long-term memory; Recency effect: terminal words remain accessible in the short-term working memory buffer.
29	How did Noam Chomsky's nativist theory of language acquisition challenge B.F. Skinner's behaviorist model?	Chomsky argued that children acquire complex syntax too rapidly and generate novel sentences ('poverty of the stimulus') to be explained solely by operant reinforcement and imitation, proposing instead that humans possess an innate Language Acquisition Device (LAD) and Universal Grammar.
30	What are Jean Piaget's four stages of cognitive development and their approximate age ranges?	1. Sensorimotor (0–2 years) 2. Preoperational (2–7 years) 3. Concrete Operational (7–11 years) 4. Formal Operational (12+ years).
31	What are Lawrence Kohlberg's three levels of moral reasoning?	1. Preconventional (morality governed by obedience, punishment, and self-interest) 2. Conventional (governed by social approval, norms, and law and order) 3. Postconventional (governed by social contracts and universal ethical principles).
32	What is the Framing Effect in human decision making?	The cognitive bias where people draw different conclusions or make different choices from the same information depending on how it is presented (e.g., framed as potential gains vs potential losses).