Classical conditioning
A stimulus that initially produces no conditioned response.
What is a neutral stimulus?
When a desirable consequence is used to increase the likelihood of a behaviour.
What is positive reinforcement?
A mental framework containing expectations and beliefs about a particular social group.
What is a stereotype schema?
Mental shortcuts that allow people to make quick judgements with limited effort.
What are heuristics?
An experiment using a naturally occurring difference between participants, rather than researcher-controlled allocation to the independent variable.
What is a quasi-experiment?
Explaining complex behaviour by breaking it down into simpler components.
What is reductionism?
The gradual reduction of a conditioned response when the conditioned stimulus is repeatedly presented without the unconditioned stimulus.
What is extinction?
A reinforcement schedule in which rewards are delivered after a certain number of responses rather than after a period of time.
What is a ratio schedule?
The process of changing an existing schema to incorporate information that doesn't fit.
What is accommodation?
The tendency to favour information supporting existing beliefs, rather than relying excessively on initial information.
What is the difference between confirmation bias and anchoring bias?
An experiment in which the independent variable changes naturally rather than being manipulated by the researcher.
What is a natural experiment?
What is a natural experiment?
A relationship between two variables, compared with a relationship in which one variable produces a change in another.
What is the difference between correlation and causation?
Food and salivation.
In Pavlov's study, what were the unconditioned stimulus and unconditioned response?
In Skinner's box, the rat presses a lever to obtain food.
What is the behaviour in the ABC (Antecedent – Behaviour – Consequence) model?
The words 'smashed' and 'hit ' were used to describe a vehicular collision in a memory experiment.
What were two verbs used by Loftus and Palmer (1974)?
The desire to protect existing beliefs and avoid the discomfort of being wrong.
What is one explanation for confirmation bias?
The type of experiment used by Glanzer and Cunitz (1966) to investigate serial-position effects.
What is a laboratory experiment?
The extent to which research findings can be applied to other settings, people, or situations.
What is external validity?
The amount of saliva produced.
In Pavlov's study with dogs, what was the dependent variable?
The event that occurs immediately after a behaviour and influences whether that behaviour is repeated.
What is a consequence in the ABC (Antecedent – Behaviour – Consequence) model?
A passage about washing clothes that was hard to understand without a clear title or context.
What material did Bransford and Johnson (1972) use to investigate the role of schemas in comprehension and memory?
The initial high or low number presented to participants and their subsequent estimate of Gandhi's age at death.
What were the independent and dependent variables in Strack and Mussweiler's (1997) anchoring experiment?
The unintentional influence of a researcher's expectations or behaviour on participants or research outcomes.
What is experimenter bias?
A research method used to record students' phone-checking behaviour during normal classroom lessons.
What is naturalistic observation?
A child hears a particular ringtone each time they receive exciting news. Eventually, the ringtone alone makes them feel excited. Explain this using classical conditioning.
The ringtone was initially a neutral stimulus. Through repeated pairing with exciting news, it becomes a conditioned stimulus that produces a conditioned emotional response.
A teacher rewards a student after an unpredictable number of completed tasks. Explain why the student may continue working even when rewards become less frequent.
A variable-ratio schedule produces persistent responding because the student cannot predict when the next reward will occur. This makes the behaviour relatively resistant to extinction.
A student believes they are bad at mathematics but repeatedly solves difficult problems successfully. Explain how schema theory could account for a change in their beliefs.
The successful experiences create a mismatch with their existing self-schema.
Through accommodation, the student may modify the schema to recognise their mathematical ability.
A student believes revision is unnecessary. They immediately accept articles supporting this view but dismiss research showing that revision improves performance. Explain the cognitive bias and thinking process involved.
Confirmation bias leads the student to favour evidence that supports their beliefs. Their quick, uncritical acceptance may reflect System 1 processing rather than more deliberate System 2 evaluation.
A researcher compares memory performance between two existing age groups without assigning participants to groups. Identify the experimental design and explain one limitation.
This is a quasi-experiment. Because participants cannot be randomly allocated to age groups, pre-existing differences may act as confounding variables.
A psychologist finds that students who use their phones more frequently have lower examination scores. Can they conclude that phone use causes lower scores? Explain.
No. A correlation does not establish causation. Other variables, such as motivation or study habits, could influence both phone use and examination performance.