PSYC2050 Final Exam

What are the three assumptions of classical conditioning?

1. Any stimulus can be paired with any response (equipotentiality)

2. The more two stimuli are paired, the stronger the individual will associate them (contiguity)

3. Conditioning changes trial to trial in a regular way (contingency)

Which two phenomenon demonstrate that the assumptions of classical conditioning don't always hold?

Blocking and superconditioning

What is blocking?

Slower learning of association between a neutral stimulus and the US. This occurs when a neutral stimulus and an excitatory stimulus (CS+) together are paired with the US.

We don't learn about a novel CS when it's paired with an excitatory CS (i.e. if we are already expecting CR)

What did Kamin (1968) find in his experiments on rats in the context of blocking?

Rats who only saw the light and heard the sound at the same time when receiving a shock developed a CR. When tested if these rats would show the CR in reaction to only the light, it was shown that they did react and therefore associated the light with the shock.

Rats who heard the noise alone when receiving a shock, and then heard the noise and saw the light together when receiving a shock, did not react to just the light. Blocking has occurred here.

Which two conditioning principles did Kamin's (1968) blocking experiment provide evidence against?

Equipotentiality - pairing light with shock didn't lead to conditioning for the second rat group.

Contiguity - control group and blocking group saw the noise and light pair equally as often but showed different learning.

What did Recorla (1971) find with rats in context of superconditioning?

Rats who heard a tone without receiving a shock, and then received a shock during the noise-light pairing, associated the light with the shock faster than the control rats, who were only presented the tone (CS-) and light (CS+) separately.

What is superconditioning?

Faster learning of association between neutral stimulus and US. This occurs when neutral stimulus and an inhibitory stimulus (CS-) together are paired with the US.

i.e. CR happens when unexpected, so learning occurs faster.

What is surprise in learning?

Discrepancy between expected CS-US relationship and the actual CS-US relationship.

CS pre-exposure is also known as what?

Latent inhibition

If participants are pre-exposed to a CS without the US, how does this affect conditioning?

Slows subsequent conditioning.

Shown in experiment where Group 1 pre-exposed to yellow light, Group 2 exposed to blue light. Yellow light was then presented with a US. Group 1 was slower to learn the associated between the yellow light and the US than Group 2 due to the pre-exposure.

What are the two possible explanations for latent inhibition and why can't they fully explain it?

1. Habituation - Can't explain latent inhibition because pre-exposure is context specific. Habituation is not context specific.

i.e. Latent inhibition effect is eliminated if the context for learning the CS-US association is different to where pre-exposure to the CS occurred.

2. Conditioned inhibition - Must pass retardation and summation tests for this to be an explanation.

• Retardation test - CS pre-exposure retards learning. Passes

• Summation test - When paired with excitatory stimulus, a pre-exposed stimulus reduces responding less so than a true inhibitor. CS pre-exposure fails summation test

Does classical conditioning generalise? What is some evidence suggesting that it does/doesn't?

Most associations generalise to similar stimuli. To test, train an association between CS1 and the US, then test if the CR occurs for different CSs.

Little Albert - generalised to fluffy or white things

Moore (1972) Rabbit eye blink response:

US = mild electric shock, UR = eye blink

CS+ = 1200 Hz tone

Results - CR generalised to 400-2000Hz tones (more pronounced for 800 and 1600 than 400 and 2000)

Does generalisation to classical conditioning last? What is some evidence?

Not after extensive training trials. Each exposure of the CS1-US refines association, provided that CS2, CS3, etc. are never presented with the US

Rabbit eye blink response - CR lessened for tones other than the CS+ 1200 Hz tone after many trials

What is generalisation in classical conditioning? What makes it more likely to occur?

Stimuli similar to the CS may also produce CR. The more similar the new stimuli is to the original CS, the more likely the CR will occur.

What is discrimination in classical conditioning?

Early on during acquisition, generalisation may cause the learner to respond to a variety of stimuli. As learning continues, the organism learns which CS seems to be best associated with US - discrimination occurs.

What does the Rescorla-Wagner model suggest in terms of classical conditioning?

The level of conditioning is a result of an internal comparison between expected strength of the US-CS association and the actual strength of the US-CS association.

The expectation is based on prior experience with the US (i.e. previous trials)

Strength of US must be fixed

What is this model: ΔV = α β (λ - V)?

Rescorla-Wagner Model of Classical Conditioning.

• ΔV - Change in associative value of CS

• α - Salience of the CS

• β - Strength of the US to promote conditioning *α and β are fixed for a given learning context

• λ - Magnitude of associative value that can be conditioned for CS, i.e. actual predictive value of CS. 0 to 100, %

• V - Current associative value of CS (expectation about the CS-US association/CS value) - how predictive you think the CS is of the appearance of the US

• λ - V = Surprisingness of the US

What is the central concept to the Rescorla-Wagner model?

λ - V; Surprisingness of the US

- Difference between actual predictive value of CS (predicting appearance of US) and the expected value.

The more surprising the CS-US combination is, the more the organism will learn about it.

Compare the Rescorla-Wagner model of classical conditioning with previous models.

Previous models assumed that a CR gets stronger the more a CS is paired with a US

Rescorla-Wagner model assumes that a CR gets stronger if the CS-US pair is surprising

How does the Rescorla-Wagner model explain Kamin's (1968) findings on blocking: Rats ignored a light if it happened at same time as noise that they previously learned would predict a shock.

The light doesn't change how surprised the rat is at being shocked. The rat ignores the light because it already expects a shock to happen because of the noise, therefore they don't learn anything about the light

How does the Rescorla-Wagner model explain superconditioning?

The old stimulus is inhibitory, and the combination of the old + new stimuli is excitatory, so there is surprise that the US is presented, therefore learning occurs faster.

What does the Rescorla-Wagner model have difficulty explaining?

CS pre-exposure (latent inhibition)

Strong shock leads to ______ learning than a weak shock.

(a) The same

(b) Faster

(c) Slower

(b) Faster.

Why is taste aversion a unique form of classical conditioning? Why could this be?

In regular classical conditioning, acquiring a CR requires dozens of trials associating the CS and the US. BUT you can see taste aversion after ONE pairing between CS and US - one single association.

In regular classical conditioning, long-delay conditioning (more than a few seconds) is less effective for learning, BUT in taste aversion the time between eating the food and getting sick can be as long as 24 hours.

It usually takes you longer to feel sick after eating food, and it is important to know which foods are bad to eat as quickly as possible

What principle does the Garcia effect (preparedness) investigate and how did Garcia and Koelling (1966) they do so? What did they find?

Equipotentiality - every CS has same potential to be associated with the US.

Four groups

US: Shock vs sickness

CS: Taste + Noise + Light for all groups

Test: Taste, or Noise + Light

Results: Sickness US more rapidly conditioned with Taste CS than Noise + Light. Opposite happens for shock US - acquisition of learning with the Noise + Light is much quicker than with taste.

Demonstrates that some associations are learned faster than others.

What did Seligman's preparedness model predict for prepared associations when learning?

Faster acquisition and slower extinction would be seen.

Wht did Ohman and Mineka (2001) do and find in their experiment with snake and mushroom pictures?

One group had snake as CS+ (fear-relevant), one group had mushroom as CS+ (fear-irrelevant)

CS+ was paired with US of shock.

CR = SCR

Looked at extinction.

Results after removing CS+:

CR observed for much longer when the snake picture was the CS+ than when the mushroom picture was the CS+

Provides evidence for preparedness theory.

What did Olssen et al 2005 find in their research on the roles of social groups in persistence of learned fear?

Black and white American participants viewed images of unfamiliar black and white males - these were the CS+ or CS-. Found very similar response to the snake and mushroom experiment. If you are Caucasian, you have more pronounced response to pictures of African American faces compared to Caucasian faces; also seen in extinction response.

Follow up showed this was specifically due to outgroup.

What did Seigel et al (1982) predict and find in their experiment with rats and heroin?

Predicted: body's tolerance to heroin is influenced by classical conditioning due to environmental cues.

Experimental group had heroin in room A. Control group had no heroin.

Findings:

Mortality rate highest (96%) for control group, who had heroin for first time in the test phase.

Second highest (64%) for group who had heroin in a different room (room B) in the test phase.

Lowest mortality (32%) for group who had heroin in the same room (A) for both experiment and test phase.

How does systematic desensitisation use classical conditioning principles to reduce or eliminate phobias?

CS (phobic object) is presented without the US (anxiety). Relaxation training is given during sessions so this can occur. Successful for 60% of people.

What is memory?

Preservation of experience, including sensations, emotions, thoughts and beliefs

What are the differences between episodic and semantic memory?

Semantic (General knowledge)

- Not contextual

- Abstract

- Non-autobiographical

e.g.

- What is a hippo?

- Read/identify hippo

Episodic (Personal record of experiences)

- Context-sensitive

- Personal

- Autobiographical

e.g.

- Did you see a hippo at the zoo last week?

- Did hippo appear in the list of words I gave you earlier?

If you are watching a movie, what does each of the semantic and episodic memory do?

Semantic - identify objects, interpret speech, recognise routine actions and situations

Episodic - remember plot/prior actions of characters

Why does human memory differ from computers?

Computer memory:

- Organised by topic, date, time, place

- Memory accessed from pre-defined cue

- Rapid serial search

- Info completely and accurately represented

- Info not altered during storage or retrieval

- Memories remain separate within the system

- Details of context of occurrence and source of memories are retained

Human memory:

- Organised by experiences/sig. of info

- Access-cue less well specified

- Slower memory access

- Only part of experience stored according to personal relevance

- Info is re-interpreted or distorted over time and during retrieval

- Generalisation and composite memories, interference

- Source information may be lost

Summarise the modal model of memory stores.

The modal model of memory has three main components. They are: sensory register, short-term memory (STM), and long-term memory (LTM). This Atkinson and Shiffrin model of memory assumes that the processes of moving information from the sensory store to short-term and then long-term memory takes place in discrete stages.

Sensory memory -> attention -> STM -> rehearsal -> LTM formed from representations held in STM (-> retrieval -> STM)

Key points:

- Rehearsal keeps material in STM

- Material kept in STM long enough gradually transferred to LTM

What are primary and secondary memory?

Primary = short-term or working memory

Secondary = long-term memory

What is the primacy and recency effect and what do they reflect in terms of memory storage?

Memory accuracy for a series of words is higher for words at the beginning (primacy) or end (recency) of the series.

Primacy effect reflects transfer of items to LTM. Recency effect reflects items still in working memory.

What did Murdock (1962) find when investigating memory accuracy for a series of 10-30 words? What did they find when they distracted participants by asking them to count backwards from 100 before recalling words?

Memory accuracy depending on position in which a word occurred in a series. Best accuracy for the first and last words - primacy and recency effect.

For the distracted participants, the recency effect was eliminated - but not the primacy effect.

This supports interpretation of serial position effect.

Researchers agree that serial position curve shows ________.

distinction between LTM and STM

Why can forgetting occur?

Decay, or interference from later/prior items.

What does the sensory store do in the Modal Model of memory stores and what is its capacity/limitations?

Handle initial sensory analysis - modality specific: one for vision, touch, and sound

High capacity, but material decays quickly unless moved to STM stores

What does the short-term store do in the Modal Model of memory stores and what processes does it control?

Holds memory for current actions

Controls processes involved in rehearsal, coding, decision, and retrieval strategies

What does the long-term store do in the Modal Model of memory stores and what is its capacity?

Supports short term store - identifying words/objects

Vast capacity; long-term retention

What are the problems with the Modal Model of memory storage? What about it is still influential?

Problems:

- Rehearsal isn't what gets material into LTM

- More complex interplay between STM and LTM, not simple sequential transfer of information

Influences:

- Idea that memory behaviour due to properties of different stores or systems still influential - good evidence for distinction between LTM and STM

- Influenced development of Baddeley and Hitch's model of STM

What are the key features of episodic memory experiments?

- Many variations

- Materials include nonsense words, faces, pictures, shapes, with and without verbal labels

- Item vs relational: study single items vs pairs/groups; test single items vs associations between words, between words and pictures, etc.

- Cues provided or not

What are the three different recall test procedures? What is the DV and how is it measured?

DV = accuracy - % or number of correctly recalled items

Free recall - Ps produce words in any order they wish

Series recall - Ps produce words in order in which they were studied (Only works for long-term recall for short lists e.g. passwords)

Cued recall - cue provided for each word on the study list

What are the three different recognition test procedures?

Single item recognition - each memory item presented one at a time; P responds "old" or "new" ; accuracy is recorded (sometimes latency also)

Choice test - which word is old? e.g. house-cottage

Associative recognition - e.g. were 'pepper' and 'elephant' studied as a pair or not?

What are the differences between recognition tasks vs recall? Why are recognition tasks more complicated to interpret results from?

Recognition:

- More flexible and sensitive

- Can test items that can't be easily produced (complex shapes, pictures, symbols)

- More likely to detect memories that are weaker or incomplete

- However, interpreting accuracy scores is more complicated because % correct can't tell us if memory is good or if the participant just says "old" most of the time (response bias). Must take into account false alarms ("old" responses to new items)

What affects response bias in recognition tasks?

Motivational factors

Any information provided favouring 'old' over 'new' and vice versa

e.g. Participants offered 50 cents for every face they correctly recognise -> more likely to say old

What are: hit, miss, false alarm (FA), and correct rejection (CR)?

Hit = 'old' response when actually old

Miss = 'new' response when actually old

FA = 'old' response when actually new

CR = 'new' response when actually new

How can we use Hits and False Alarms to interpret accuracy in recognition tasks? When are Hits most interpretable and what does this mean for the results?

Hits interpretable when FA rate is low - accuracy of groups in different conditions can be compared if FA rates are low and similar

If there are lots of FA, it's hard to work out how sensitive the participant was to the recognition task

FA must be taken into account:

Accuracy = Hit rate - FA rate

When are implicit vs explicit tests of memory important and why?

Brain injury and ageing, because there are large differences in memory for these depending on how it's interrogated

Traditional episodic memory tests are: (IMPLICIT/EXPLICIT). What does this mean for the test? How do participants with reduced memory function perform on these tasks?

- Explicit (direct)

- Ps are told they should retrieve items that occurred in the study phase

- Deliberate and intentional remembering

- Participants with reduced memory function often perform very poorly

In what tasks may participants with reduced memory function (brain injury) perform well?

- Implicit (indirect)

- Ps asked to identify items or "give the first thing that comes to mind"

What key features do implicit memory tests have? What are three tests for implicit memory? What are the effects of studied words on the results of these tests?

- Ps study list of words; no mention of memory test

- Implicit test: semantic memory test, no mention of study episode (e.g. Lexical decision task (LDT))

-Ps with brain injury tend to do well

- PRIMING: effect of memory for study phase

TESTS

- LDT: Name briefly presented word (word vs nonword)

- Complete stem with first word that comes to mind

- Free association (e,g, what's the first word you think of when I say "cook"?)

RESULTS:

- Faster/more accurate for studied words in LDT, e.g. LDT for kitchen faster for those who had kitchen on their study list

- Words more likely to be given in stem completion if studied

- Words more likely to be given in free association test if studied

What is some evidence that implicit tests show memory encoding that might not be evident in explicit tests?

Participants who cannot retrieve words on explicit tests may show priming for it on an implicit test - showing it was encoded during study phase

How do we know if priming has occurred?

When a recently encountered word is more available or is better identified in an implicit test than explicit.

What is Korsakoff's syndrome? What did Schacter et al. (1981) find and conclude with Korsakoff's patients?

Difficulty remembering information acquired after onset of illness, and acquiring new information.

- Patients answered MC trivia questions; used Qs put back in pile

- Repeated questions were better answered, but patients were unable to say they had seen the Qs before

Conclude:

- Explicit memory is lost, but there are implicit (semantic) memory effects

- Patients appear to be unable to use contextual and source information to use episodic memory

What did Ebbinghaus find from his experiments on himself studying nonsense syllables with a wide range of recall delays of up to a year?

A forgetting curve - steadily dropped off, and could be described with a simple exponential equation based on delay between study and test

i.e. We lose information over time in a systematic, non-linear fashion

Concluded forgetting is systematic, and lawful

What is decay in memory? What are some conceptual and empirical issues?

- Memories fading as function of time

- Memories fade, or connections between them fade, if they are not used

Conceptual:

- Decay = 'loss due to passage of time' - doesn't tell you why it happens

- Forgetting = loss of knowledge over time... Tautology - saying same things in different words

- Using time as stand-in for unknown cause tightly correlated with time

Empirical:

- Not feasible to get direct evidence of decay at neural level

Which mechanisms might passage of time effect other than memory decay? What did decay theorists attempt to do to control for this?

Effectiveness of retrieval cues (e.g. context)

Sometimes forgotten information can be remembered late - retrieval failure, not decay

Theorists - show memories fade over time even when interfering material and changes in cues were controlled

What did Jenkins and Dallenback (1924) do, predict, find and conclude in their study on memory decay vs interference? What are limitations of this study?

"Sleep on it" - Ps learn information and have memory test. Compared recall after sleep for several hours vs wakefulness

Prediction - sleep group can only forget due to decay; awake group forgets due to both (potentially decay) + interference

Results - much more forgetting in awake than sleep condition

Conclusion - interference the largest source of forgetting

Limitations

- Time scale: what if decay matters more at longer time periods (i.e. months)?

- Role of sleep in consolidating information; it is important (reverses effects of decay?). Lack of sleep can inhibit cognition

- Need more precise theories of decay to get clear tests

What are the two broad classes of interference effects in memory retrieval?

Proactive - old information blocks new information

Retroactive - new information blocks old information

What did Baddeley and Hitch (1977) investigate and find in their experiment with rugby players and their recall of game details over time?

Looked at memory for details of various games, as function of when they were played and how many games were played before and after

Two interests: whether memory was related to time since the game OR number of games in between (retroactive interference)

Decay - loss of detail correlated with time elapsed after the game; r = .04

Interference - loss of detail correlated with number of games; r = .55

Conclusion: memory has more to do with interference than decay

What are the conceptual and practice problems with "repressed" memories? What can happen when trying to recover them and why does this occur?

- Events that are very traumatic are often well-remembered; arousal can affect memory encoding

- Difficult to establish facts from many years ago

- Events early in childhood may not be well understood at the time; may be poorly retrieved because they're fragmented and different to interpret

- Court cases; The "Memory Wars"

Recovering repressed memories:

- Not established whether memory repression does occur

- Some techniques can create false memories ("implanted" by the therapist)

- Repeated questioning can lead to suggestion about repressed memories, e.g. childhood trauma/abuse.

Occurs because:

- Human difficulty with source memory: when, where, who, how things were remembered; was it in a movie/book/imagined/told by someone else?

- Therefore suggestions may be remembered later as actual events because source is forgotten

What is the misinformation effect? How did Elizabeth Loftus find this effect?

Repeated questioning can cause remembering of something suggested in previous questioning.

Elizabeth Loftus - studies showed reduced memory accuracy in witnesses when incorrect information given during questioning e.g. "Did the blue car turn right?" when it was actually a green car.

What did Braun et al. (2002) do and find in their study investigating the misinterpretation effect?

- Application of this effect to 'recovered' memories

- False ad with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland (Bugs Bunny is Warner Bros, not Disney)

- On later questioning, 16% of Ps claimed to have met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland

What is the Deese, Roeidger & McDermott (DRM) paradigm?

Participants study list of related words - bed, dream, wake, tired, etc.

About 50% of the time, Ps falsely recall and recognise "sleep" as being on the list - also claim to have a clear memory of seeing it on the list

False memory and misinformation effects show that memory is a __________

re-constructive process.

What did Anderson et al. find when investigating the retrieval-induced forgetting paradigm?

Ps study category-target pairs, 2 targets per category (e.g. fruit-banana; fruit-orange)

Practice retrieving one of the targets (e.g. "fruit-or-orange")

Results: Cued recall was poor for unpractised target pairs from practised categories (e.g. fruit-banana, cued by "fruit-" or "fruit-b", when fruit-orange had been practised)

- Poorer recall than for categories not practised at all

- Concluded that "banana" was inhibited during practice of "orange"

-> Suppress "banana" to enhance "orange" memory

- Can work across categories e.g. blood for tomato/strawberry

However, some failures to replicate this finding.

What is learning?

An adaptive process where the tendency to perform a specific behaviour, emotion, and/or thought is changed by experience.

A more or less permanent change in behaviour potentiality which occurs as a result of repeated practice.

Change in a subject's behaviour or behaviour potential to a given situation brought about by the subject's repeated experience in that situation.

What is experience (in learning)?

Any effects of the environment mediated by sensory system.

What are 4 common features of learning definitions?

- There is a change (may be invisible - thus the

"behaviour potential")

- Change is lasting / long-term

- Experience and practice

- Learning situation is important

What are the two major ways of learning and what do they each involve?

Non-associative: habituation

Associative: conditioning

Each involve cause and effect relationships between behaviour (or thoughts or emotions) and the environment

What is habituation? What is the process?

"Getting used to" a novel stimulus. Simplest form of learning found in nearly every animal

- Initial pronounced response/an orienting response - head turns toward stimulus, heart rate slows, person "attends"

- This response decreases with each presentation i.e. negative relationship between looking time and stimulus presentation

- No longer have an orienting response

- Organism has "learned" that this stimulus has no special significance to them

Why is habituation adaptive?

Allows us to learn that a stimulus is not significant, therefore don't get distracted by it

What is behaviour caused by?

- Goals of the organism

- Environmental demands

- Internal states

What is associative learning?

Forming new associations

Connecting stimuli with each other and with behaviour

Avoid danger, find food, learn emotional responses to important situations and people/animals

Fundamental in human abstract conceptual learning and thinking

We measure ________ to infer learning.

observable behaviour

What changes in behaviour are NOT due to associative learning?

Habituation

Innate response tendencies (reflexes, taxes, instincts)

Maturation (regular stages, unaffected by practice)

- Fatigue (disappears after break)

Changes due to physiological/motivational state or evolution

What is cognitive psychology?

Study of mental processes such as perceiving, attending, remembering and reasoning

What is tabula rasa?

Belief in a "clean slate" - i.e. Behaviourist principle of nurture rather than nature

According to the information-processing model, what causes behaviour?

In computational theory of mind, the CPU compares input to storage, to create predictions. This leads to behaviour.

What are four approaches to studying the mind?

1. Experiments

2. Neuroscientific investigations

- Brain imaging and recording (with introspection or task performance)

- Lesion studies - Malfunctioning of the brain/mind

3. Modeling

- Computer simulations of human performance

4. Comparative

- Performance comparison across age groups, clinical groups and species

What are low and high cognition and how are mental representations characterised in each?

Low = close to the input from our senses (vision, hearing, etc.) - mental representations correspond to objects and events in the environment

High = abstract, conceptual, relational - abstract mental representations, derived from many individual experiences

e.g. the letter 'b' - abstract meaning

What two processes in lower-level cognition were covered in the course?

Attention - selecting what is relevant

Memory

What does higher-level cognition do and what three processes were covered in the course?

Deals with environmental input that has been re-processes by the human cognitive system

Imagery, language, comparative & evolutionary psychology

What are past conflicts between cognitivists and behaviourists? What are the modern perspectives on these conflicts?

Cognitivists complained that behaviourism:

- ignored basic mental processes like memory, attention, imagery etc.

- assumed equipotentiality and could not properly explain different learning within individuals and across species

Behaviourists complained that cognitivism:

- made merely inferences about mental constructs

- made no reference to physiology

- ignored emotion and motivational valence

Modern learning theorists

- appreciate biological constraints and preparedness

- acknowledge the utility of cognitive constructs in theory and practice: e.g. cognitive-behavioural therapy

Modern cognitivists

- appreciate the utility and power of learning principles

- apply associationism in theories of the mind

- research relation between brain and cognition

What are the four elements of classical conditioning and what are examples from the Pavlov experiments?

Unconditioned stimulus (US) - stimulus elicits unlearned response e.g. food

Unconditioned response (UR) - unlearned response to a US (salivation to food)

Conditioned stimulus (CS) - a stimulus to which an organism must learn to respond (whistle)

Conditioned response (CR) - the response to a CS which is learned (salivation to whistle)

What happens in eye blink conditioning?

US = puff of air

UR = blink

US paired with a tone (neutral stimulus)

Blink becomes CR

Note: Magnitude of CR is smaller than US

In a typical classical conditioning experiment, what are the three stages?

Stage 1 - Habituation: CS presented alone

Stage 2 - Acquisition: CS presented with US

Stage 3 - Extinction: CS presented alone again

Throughout, a response is measured (UR/CR)

What two factors influence the acquisition curve?

Intensity of the US (more intense = faster learning)

Order and timing (the CS coming before the US is better)

What are the 4 types of conditioning timing?

DELAY - CS presented alone first (interstimulus interval) before US is presented at the same time

TRACE - CS presented separately to the US with trace interval in between with no presentations

SIMULTANEOUS - CS and US presented at the same time for the same amount of time

BACKWARD - US presented alone, then break, then CS presented alone

Is there an optimal interstimulus interval (ISI) for delay conditioning?

Depends on what process you are looking at e.g. eyelid reflex, taste aversion, etc.

What is excitatory vs inhibitory conditioning?

Excitatory - CS predicts occurrence of US

e.g. A-US, A-US, A-US

Inhibitory - CS predicts absence of US

e.g. A-US, A-US, AB, A-US, AB - B predicts absence of US

What is a problem with inhibitory conditioning and how is this investigated?

Problem: How do we know the animal learned something about B?

Summation and retardation tests - an inhibitor must pass both

Retardation test:

- First inhibitory conditioning takes place

- To test, train an inhibitor and a neutral stimulus to become excitatory

- Should see slower learning to inhibitor

Summation test:

- First inhibitory conditioning takes place

- To test, present: new excitatory CS alone (A); then a new excitatory CS + inhibitor (A+I)

- Response should be decreased for A+I compared to A

What three processes can occur after extinction?

Spontaneous recovery sometimes occurs after successful extinction

- Reintroduce the CS after a "break"

- CR reappears, but weakened

Renewal

- Extinction occurs within a different environment (context specific)

- Acquisition in context X, extinction in context Y; present CS in context X will still have CR

- Issue in therapy - e.g. acquisition of phobia at home; extinction occurs in therapists office

Reinstatement (Reminder Effect)

- US presented alone after extinction

- Then present CS: CR

What are the key differences between classical and operant conditioning?

Classical - learning via association + involuntary responses (due to reflexive associations)

Operant - learning via reinforcement + voluntary behaviours (due to consequences)

What did Edward Thorndike do and find in his experiments with cats?

- Cats in puzzle boxe

- Cats could escape using a complex sequence of behaviours

- Learning = trial and error

- Cats get quicker at this with experience

- Behaviours that lead to reward will be repeated

What is shaping?

Selective reinforcement of behaviour resembling the desired target behaviour (e.g. with rats in Skinner's box: going within 5cm from the lever, touching the lever)

Start broad, gradually make criteria more strict for reward