Learning, Memory & Cognition Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for a reward that is satisfying in its own right because it meets a basic biological need, such as food, water, warmth, sleep or sex, with no prior learning needed for it to work?

Question 2

What is the name for an increase in a behaviour that comes about simply from watching another person be rewarded for doing it, without the observer receiving any reward themselves?

Question 3

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 4

What is the name for the maddening experience of being sure you know a particular word or name, and being able to say its first letter, roughly how long it is, or words that sound like it, yet not being able to retrieve the word itself?

Question 5

What is the name for weakening a behaviour by following it with the loss of something the person values, such as taking away a teenager's phone, sending a child to sit out of the game, or docking pay?

Question 6

What is the name for the block to solving a problem that comes from thinking of an object only in terms of its normal use, so that people fail to see that a box holding drawing pins could be emptied and pinned to the wall as a little shelf for a candle?

Question 7

What is the name for the behaviour-management system, used in some classrooms, psychiatric wards and prisons, in which specified desirable behaviours earn tokens, stars or points that can later be traded for privileges, treats or goods?

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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.