How can operant conditioning research on infants inform us about infant memory?
What will be an ideal response?
Operant conditioning involves learning from the consequences of one's behavior. Behaviors (operants) that are followed by favorable consequences tend to be repeated; those operants followed by unfavorable consequences are not. For learning to occur and transfer to another situation, the infant must remember that a behavior produced a consequence and the nature of that consequence (favorable or unfavorable). Carolyn Rovee-Collier and colleagues demonstrated this by tying a mobile to an infant's foot such that the infant could kick and make the mobile move. The infant enjoyed doing this. The operant was kicking, and the favorable consequences was the movement of the mobile. The baby should want to kick again the next time he/she sees the mobile if he/she is able to recall this learning experience.
The researchers then tested babies of various ages some time after this initial learning experience and found that two-month-old infants remembered the learning experience for up to three days, while three-month-old infants remembered it for up to a week. In addition, further variations on this method revealed that it wasn't that after those timepoints the infants had "lost" their learning but that they simply required more memory cues to be able to access what they had initially learned.
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The belief that we inherit tried and true ways of adjusting to the environment from past generations is referred to as
a. crossing over. b. incomplete dominance. c. concordance. d. cultural evolution.
When writing a research report, it is best to a. vary the words used to describe aspects of the method to keep the reader interested. b. be consistent in the words used to describe aspects of the method to make the report as clear as possible
c. avoid the use of technical terms that are familiar to other researchers. d. avoid providing too many details of the method so that others cannot copy the research.
When research results generalize across subjects and situations, those results are considered to be:
a. internally valid b. positively correlated c. externally valid d. statistically significant
How did Tolman feel about Watson’s and Thorndike’s explanations of learning?
a. He disagreed with both of them. b. He agreed with Watson and disagreed with Thorndike. c. He agreed with Thorndike and disagreed with Watson. d. He agreed with both of them.