Learning, Memory & Cognition Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the tendency of a trained animal, over time, to slide back toward instinctive behaviours that get in the way of the trained response, as raccoons taught to drop coins into a box began rubbing the coins together instead, and pigs trained to carry them started rooting them along the ground?

Question 2

What is the name for spreading study or training out into shorter sessions separated by time, which produces markedly better long-term retention than the same total amount packed into one long block, even though the crammed version can feel more productive?

Question 3

What is the name for the study technique of mixing several different kinds of problem or topic together within one session, rather than doing a long run of one kind before moving on, which makes practice feel harder and slower but improves the ability to tell problem types apart and to apply skills later?

Question 4

What is the name for the stage in children's speech in which a newly grasped grammatical rule is applied too widely, producing forms such as 'goed', 'runned', 'foots' and 'mans', often after the child had earlier used the correct irregular forms?

Question 5

What is the name for the tendency to keep tackling a new problem with an approach that has worked before, even when a simpler or better method is available, shown by people who, after several water-jar puzzles needing a three-step formula, miss a one-step solution to the next?

Question 6

What is the name for the internal, map-like representation of the layout of a familiar place that lets an animal or person take a novel shortcut or detour, argued for by Edward Tolman against the view that running a maze is just a memorised string of left and right turns?

Question 7

What is the name for the finding that people are much slower and more error-prone at naming the colour of the ink a word is printed in when the word itself spells the name of a different colour, because reading the word happens automatically and competes with the task?

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About Learning, Memory & Cognition

This quiz is about how we learn, how we remember and forget, and how we think: classical and operant conditioning and their terms, the schedules of reward, learning that goes beyond conditioning, the memory systems from the fleeting sensory store to lasting knowledge, the ways memory fails, and the machinery of concepts, problem-solving, language and mnemonics. Ninety questions in six packs, each describing a process, a term, a technique, a memory system, a failure of memory or a thinking phenomenon and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it. It is a knowledge quiz.

The first pack is classical conditioning: the basic idea and its four elements, acquisition and extinction, spontaneous recovery, generalising and discriminating, second-order conditioning, one-trial taste aversion and biological preparedness, and the phobia treatments built on the same principles.

The second pack is operant conditioning: reinforcement and punishment in their positive and negative forms, primary and learned rewards, shaping, the four schedules of reward and the pattern each produces, the extra staying power of partial reward, Grandma's rule, and the token economy.

The third pack is learning beyond conditioning: latent learning and the cognitive map, insight, learning by watching and vicarious reward, instinctive drift and superstition, how a reward can kill enjoyment, spacing and retrieval practice and interleaving, errorless learning, the arousal-performance curve, the practice curve, and transfer.

The fourth pack is memory systems: the sensory, short-term and working stores, the inner voice and inner eye and the executive that runs them, the magical number seven and chunking, shallow versus deep rehearsal and the levels-of-processing idea, and the divisions of long-term memory into conscious and unconscious, and into events, facts and skills.

The fifth pack is remembering and forgetting: the three stages of memory, consolidation, the serial-position curve with its primacy and recency, the forgetting curve, interference forward and backward, cue-dependent forgetting and encoding specificity, the tip-of-the-tongue state, the misinformation effect and false and flashbulb memories, and the amnesia that blocks new learning.

The sixth pack is cognition: concepts and prototypes and schemas, algorithms and heuristics, functional fixedness and mental set, means-end analysis, the Stroop effect, mental rotation, the memory palace, and the acquisition of language, from the proposed built-in device and the critical period to over-applied rules and the idea that language shapes thought.

The wrong answers are always other processes, terms, systems, failures or phenomena of the same kind. About thirty-six of the ninety questions carry a photograph of a neutral object, a maze, a stopwatch, a conditioning chamber, a model brain, an electrode cap or a microscope, chosen because every option is the same sort of thing and the picture cannot point to any of them. Facts have been checked against standard reference works.