Explain how the classical conditioning of an eye blink came to be used as a diagnostic tool
What will be an ideal response?
Answer will include that one exciting possibility is that eye blink conditioning may be useful for distinguishing locked-in individuals from those with more severe brain damage and even severely brain-damaged individuals who are minimally conscious from those who are in a vegetative state. Patients who are at least minimally conscious can be conditioned and may recover some mental functions, while patients in a vegetative state likely cannot be conditioned or recover. Currently, some minimally conscious patients are misdiagnosed and are not offered appropriate therapy.
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Committing to one hypothesis without adequately testing other possibilities is called
a) set effect. b) confirmation bias. c) functional fixedness. d) difficulty in problem representation.
Recall that in the Stanford Prison Study conducted by Haney, Banks, and Zimbardo (1973), guards became increasingly aggressive and prisoners became increasingly submissive and withdrawn, all in under a week. Results of this (aborted) study suggest that
a. social roles can take on a power all their own. b. norms in the real world are often adopted in artificial settings. c. humans are inherently aggressive and will "act out" in the appropriate situation. d. interdependence can be reduced in powerful situations.