Study Guide for Exam 3

Look over the general points and exam tips from the first study guide.

Overall concepts covered on the exam: (These are to guide your studying. You should make sure you thoroughly understand all the material covered on and related to each of these topics, and be able to come up with examples that illustrate the concepts. So, know what the concepts are, any characteristics of the concepts, examples of the concept, and any experiments on the concept). You will be responsible for the material from lectures and from the chapters in section 3 (except the part in chapter 10 we didn't cover in class).

Chapter 8:

• Extinction-- what is it & how is it used?

  • Side Effects of Extinction (extinction burst, increase in variablity, emotional behavior, aggression, resurgence, & depression) -- understand each of these and how they relate to extinction. Have an example of each.

  • Resistance to Extinction - what it is and the factors that affect it (schedule of reinforcment, history, magnitude, degree of deprivation, previous experience, and distinctive signal). Have examples illustrating each.

  • Spontaneous Recovery - what it is and characteristics of it.

  • DRO vs DRI as ways of making extinction more effective.

• Stimulus Control - what is it?

  • Stimulus Discrimination

  • Stimulus Generalization

    • Generalization gradient - what it is and what does the steapness represent?

  • Discrimination Training & discriminative stimuli for extinction

  • Peak shift effect - what is it and what are possible explanations for its occurrence.

  • Multiple Schedules & behavioral contrast (what are negative vs positive contrast?)

  • Limitations of discrimination training

  • fading & errorless discrimination learning - what is it and what are the limitations of this procedure?

  • Relation of stimulus control to memory - understand experiments and directed forgetting

Chapter 9:

• Escape & avoidance (resulting from negative reinforcement)

  • 2 factor theory of avoidance - understand the 2 processes that are proposed to be involved, predictions of theory, and experimental results of studies investigating it (experiments supporting and experiments not supporting it)

  • one-factor theory

  • avoidance conditioning & phobias (what is it and experiments investigating relation to phobias).

  • avoidance conditioning & OCD (how it relates to 2 factor theory)

• Punishment

  • Types of punishment -

    • positive & negative punishment (time out & response cost)

    • negative punishment vs extinction

    • intrinsic vs extrinsic punishment

    • primary vs secondary punishers

  • Problems with punishment (understand the 7 problems discussed in class and have examples)

  • Effective use of punishment (if implementing punishment, what are the most effective ways)

  • Theories of punishment

    • conditioned suppression & studies investigating it

    • avoidance theory of punishment

    • premack theory of punishment

• Effects of non-contingent punishment

  • Learned Helplessness - what is it? Understand study using dogs and human math study.

    • Ways to try and eliminate learned helplessness and ways to prevent it.

  • Masserman's experimental neurosis - what is it and how does it differ from learned helplessness (what were the findings of the study using cats & investigating it)

Chapter 10:

• Choice -

  • concurrent schedules of reinforcement

    • preference for schedules

    • behavior on ratio vs interval schedules between 2 tasks

    • maximizing - what does it mean for responding between 2 choices.

(Note: You do NOT need to know anything from chapter 10 beyond the material covered in class. We will begin covering the rest of the chapter during the last section of the class.).