AP Psychology: Classical Conditioning (Drill 16)

Question 1. A puppy is given a chew toy (which it enjoys) every time the owner opens a particular kitchen drawer. After several weeks, the puppy runs to the kitchen and begins wagging its tail the moment it hears the drawer slide open, even before any toy appears. Which element of this learning episode functions as the neutral stimulus prior to conditioning?

• A) The chew toy
• B) The sound of the drawer sliding open ✓
• C) The tail-wagging response that occurs after training
• D) The puppy's enjoyment of the toy

Explanation: Before conditioning, the drawer sound meant nothing to the puppy. Only after repeated pairings with the chew toy does it trigger tail-wagging, the shift from meaningless to meaningful is what makes a stimulus a neutral stimulus that later becomes a conditioned stimulus. (A) is the unconditioned stimulus because the toy naturally elicits excitement without learning; students who confuse NS with UCS often pick this. (D) is true-but-irrelevant, the puppy does enjoy the toy, but that enjoyment is the unconditioned response, not the neutral stimulus the question asks about. [Practice 1]

Question 2. A researcher exposes rats to a musical tone followed immediately by a mild puff of air to the eye; rats quickly learn to blink when the tone plays alone. In a second phase, she pairs a flashing light with the already-established tone (no air puff) until the light alone elicits blinking. What procedure is being demonstrated in the second phase?

• A) Stimulus generalization, because the blink response is now triggered by a different stimulus
• B) Operant shaping, because the rat is rewarded for closer approximations to an eye-blink response
• C) Spontaneous recovery, because a previously learned response reappears
• D) Higher-order conditioning, because a new neutral stimulus acquires its power through pairing with an established conditioned stimulus ✓

Explanation: The tone, already a conditioned stimulus, is being used to transfer conditioning to a new stimulus (the light) without ever pairing the light with the actual air puff. Using an established CS to condition a new stimulus is higher-order conditioning. (A) is wrong because generalization requires a stimulus similar to the original CS, not a different modality introduced through deliberate pairing. (B) is true-but-irrelevant: it's accurate that the air puff is absent, but extinction means the CS no longer produces the CR because the UCS no longer follows it, not that a new CS is being built. [Practice 1]

Question 3. Pavlov conditioned a dog to salivate to the sound of a bell by repeatedly pairing the bell with food. After the response was well established, he stopped delivering food when the bell rang, and over many trials the salivation response disappeared. Several weeks later, with no further training, Pavlov rang the bell again and observed renewed salivation. Which process best accounts for the renewed salivation?

• A) Acquisition, because an entirely new conditioned response is being formed
• B) Spontaneous recovery, because a previously extinguished conditioned response reappears after a rest period following extinction ✓
• C) Stimulus discrimination, because the dog responds differently to this bell than to others
• D) Counterconditioning, because a new association is replacing the old one

Explanation: The salivation response had been extinguished, but after a rest period it returned when the CS was presented again, the CED definition of spontaneous recovery. (A) is wrong because acquisition describes the original formation of a CR, not its reappearance after extinction. (D) is true-but-irrelevant: counterconditioning is a real phenomenon and the basis of exposure therapy, but nothing in the scenario describes a new, competing response being paired with the CS. [Practice 1]

Question 4. A developmental psychologist wants to demonstrate classical conditioning in 6-month-old infants. She plans to use a soft chime as the neutral stimulus and a gentle puff of air to the cheek as the stimulus that naturally produces a head-turn. Which of the following is most likely to prevent the infants from actually learning to turn their heads in response to the chime alone?

• A) The chime sometimes sounds during training without the air puff following, so the infants never get a reliable signal that one predicts the other ✓
• B) The study uses infants rather than adults, so the results may not apply to older participants
• C) The head-turn response can be measured accurately by trained observers
• D) The proposal fails to state how many infants will be tested in the study

Explanation: Conditioning depends on the infant detecting a reliable link between the chime and the air puff. If the chime sometimes occurs alone, there's no consistent pairing to learn, and a weak response could reflect the broken contingency rather than a real failure of conditioning. (B) is a concern about whether results generalize, not about whether learning happens in the study itself. (C) is true-but-irrelevant: reliable measurement of the response is a strength of the design, not a reason the infants would fail to learn. [Practice 2]

Question 5. A researcher conditions three groups of dogs to salivate to a 1000 Hz tone paired with food. After acquisition, she tests salivation to tones at 500 Hz, 1000 Hz, and 1500 Hz. The average number of saliva drops for each tone is shown below: Tone frequency | Mean drops of saliva 500 Hz | 2.1 1000 Hz | 8.7 1500 Hz | 2.4 Which conclusion is most directly supported by these data?

• A) The dogs show strong stimulus generalization across all three tones
• B) Extinction has occurred at both the 500 Hz and 1500 Hz tones
• C) The dogs show stimulus discrimination, responding most strongly to the trained tone and much less to dissimilar tones ✓
• D) Higher-order conditioning has transferred the response to new frequencies

Explanation: The highest response is at the trained frequency, with much smaller responses 500 Hz away in either direction. This shows the dogs are responding selectively to the specific CS, stimulus discrimination. (A) is the opposite of what the data show: strong generalization would produce roughly equal responding across all three tones. (B) is wrong because extinction requires repeated presentation of the CS without the UCS; the low responding at untrained frequencies simply reflects that those tones were never the CS. [Practice 3]