PSY 3103: Principles of Learning and Behavior Analysis

Comprehensive practice flashcards covering the historical background of behaviorism, research methods, single-subject designs, elicited behaviors, simple learning mechanisms, classical conditioning phenomena, theoretical models, and clinical applications.

Plato

Greek philosopher who advocated nativism, asserting that human knowledge, abilities, and behavioral tendencies are inborn rather than learned through experience.

Aristotle

Greek philosopher and empiricist who proposed that knowledge and behavioral tendencies are acquired through sensory experience, observation, and laws of association.

Nature vs. Nurture

The philosophical and scientific debate regarding whether human abilities and behaviors are primarily inborn or acquired through environmental interaction.

Law of Similarity

An associative principle stating that events, objects, or ideas that share common physical or conceptual characteristics are readily linked together.

Law of Contrast

An associative principle stating that events, objects, or ideas that are direct opposites tend to become readily linked in memory.

Law of Contiguity

An associative principle stating that events that occur close to each other in time or physical space are easily associated.

Law of Frequency

An associative principle stating that the more often two events occur together, the more strongly they become associated.

Mind-Body Dualism

The philosophical position proposing that human conduct consists of involuntary, reflexive bodily motions and voluntary actions governed by conscious free will.

René Descartes

The philosopher who introduced mind-body dualism, suggesting that bodily actions operate mechanically via reflexes while voluntary behaviors stem from the mind.

British Empiricists

A philosophical group who maintained that virtually all human knowledge is a function of sensory experience and subjective reflection.

John Locke

The empiricist philosopher who proposed that the newborn mind is a tabula rasa, or blank slate, upon which experience writes.

Structuralism

An early psychological school that sought to identify the fundamental elements of conscious experience through experimental laboratory techniques and introspection.

Wilhelm Wundt

The German physiologist who founded the first formal experimental psychology laboratory in $1879$, establishing the scientific study of conscious experience.

Edward Titchener

The psychologist who promoted structuralism in America, emphasizing systematic introspective observation of one's own conscious experiences.

Positivist Science Psychology View

The scientific perspective asserting that psychology should function strictly as an objective, measurable discipline based solely on empirical facts.

Functionalism

An early psychological school emphasizing the study of the adaptive evolutionary functions of conscious mental processes in environmental adjustment.

William James

The founder of American psychology who approached the mind as an evolved biological organ that facilitates environmental adaptation.

Edward Thorndike

An animal learning researcher whose puzzle-box experiments and law of effect established empirical connections between functionalism and behaviorism.

John B. Watson

The founder of behaviorism who argued that psychology must discard subjective mentalism to become an objective natural science studying observable behavior.

Charles Darwin

The naturalist who formulated the theory of evolution, establishing that anatomical features and learning capacities evolve as adaptive traits.

Theory of Evolution

The scientific framework explaining that biological species gradually change over generations through natural selection operating on variable, heritable characteristics.

Natural Selection

The evolutionary mechanism wherein individuals possessing advantageous heritable traits adapt to environmental pressures and reproduce more successfully.

Three Aspects of Reproduction in Evolution Theory

The requirements that individual traits vary across organisms, many variations are heritable, and organisms must compete for limited survival resources.

Evolutionary Adaptation

A physical structure or behavioral mechanism that evolves through natural selection to enhance an organism's survival and reproductive success.

Behaviorism

A natural science approach to psychology emphasizing the empirical study of environmental influences on publicly observable actions.

Law of Parsimony

The scientific rule stating that the simplest sufficient explanation for any observed phenomenon is inherently preferable to more complex accounts.

Morgan's Canon

The rule dictating that animal actions should be interpreted in terms of lower, simpler psychological processes like habit rather than higher cognition.

Five Schools of Behaviorism

The historical divisions within the behavioral movement that differ primarily regarding how internal physiological and cognitive events should be treated.

Watson's Methodological Behaviorism

The behavioral perspective asserting that psychology should study only directly observable actions and stimuli, excluding internal subjective events entirely.

Hull's Neobehaviorism

A brand of behaviorism that utilizes operationalized, internal physiological-type intervening variables to mediate between environmental events and actions.

Tolman's Cognitive Behaviorism

A behavioral approach viewing behavior as an organized, purposive pattern directed toward goals, mediated by internal cognitive expectations.

Bandura's Social Learning Theory

A cognitive-behavioral approach emphasizing the strong roles of observational learning, cognitive processes, and person variables in explaining human actions.

Skinner's Radical Behaviorism

The philosophy emphasizing environmental influences on overt behavior while treating covert thoughts and feelings as private behaviors governed by learning principles.

Tolman & Honzik - Latent Learning in Rats

A study demonstrating that unrewarded maze exploration produces spatial knowledge that manifests behaviorally only after food rewards appear on day $11$.

Reciprocal Determinism

A model stating that environmental events, observable actions, and internal cognitive person variables continuously interact with and influence one another bidirectionally.

Countercontrol

The deliberate alteration or manipulation of environmental events to alter and manage one's own subsequent behavior.

Skinner's View - Holistic

An interpretive perspective explaining both overt physical actions and covert sensations by referencing environmental history rather than mentalistic causes.

Skinner's View of Genetic Factors

The perspective that genes establish biological foundations, but environmental selection allows ongoing behavioral change across an organism's lifetime.

Behavior Analysis

The experimental natural-science discipline established by B. F. Skinner to systematically discover basic principles governing operant and respondent conditioning.

Applied Behavior Analysis

The clinical and educational field dedicated to applying basic operant conditioning principles to solve socially significant real-world challenges.

Variable

Any person, place, environmental condition, or event that can change over time or vary from one situation to another.

Independent Variable

The environmental event or experimental condition that is systematically manipulated to evaluate its causal effect on an outcome.

Dependent Variable

The measurable aspect of behavior that freely varies as a function of changes in the manipulated experimental condition.

Functional Relationship

The predictive or causal relationship observed between systematic shifts in an independent variable and resulting shifts in a dependent variable.

Stimulus

Any physical event, energy change, or environmental cue capable of influencing an organism's actions.

Aversive Stimulus

An environmental event or consequence that an organism considers unpleasant and actively seeks to avoid or escape.

Appetitive Stimulus

An environmental event or consequence that an organism considers pleasant and actively expends energy to obtain.

Response

A specific, discrete instance of an organism's behavior.

Overt Behaviour

Any action or movement that can be directly observed and quantified by an outside observer.

Covert Behaviour

Private internal behavior, such as thoughts, images, and unexpressed feelings, perceived only by the individual performing it.

Motivating Operations

Environmental events or biological conditions that temporarily alter the appetitiveness or aversiveness of a stimulus and influence related behaviors.

Establishing Operations

A motivating procedure that increases the reinforcing or punishing effectiveness of an event, often via deprivation.

Abolishing Operations

A motivating procedure that decreases the reinforcing or punishing effectiveness of an event, often via satiation.

Contiguity

The condition of closeness or proximity existing between two or more events in either time or space.

Temporal Contiguity

The extent to which two or more events occur close together in time.

Spatial Contiguity

The extent to which two or more events are situated close to each other in physical space.

Contingency

A predictive relationship between two events in which the occurrence of one reliably predicts the probable occurrence of another.

Response Rate

The frequency with which a discrete action occurs within a designated unit of time.

Intensity

The physical force, magnitude, or amplitude of an emitted behavioral response.

Duration

The total length of continuous time that an individual spends performing a target behavior.

Speed

The measure of how quickly or slowly an action occurs, or the rate of movement through a given physical distance.

Latency

The length of time required for an action to begin following the presentation of an initiating stimulus.

Interval Recording

A measurement method that records whether a behavior occurs during each block across a series of continuous or discontinuous time segments.

Topography

The physical form, shape, or exact mechanical movement involved in executing an action.

Number of Errors

An objective performance metric quantifying incorrect, deficient, or non-criterion responses produced during a learning task.

Interobserver Reliability

The degree of agreement calculated between two independent observers, with $80\%$ being standard and $90\%+$ considered optimal.

Descriptive Research

A scientific methodology that systematically observes and documents behavior and natural circumstances without manipulating variables.

Experimental Research

A scientific approach that demonstrates cause-and-effect relationships by manipulating independent variables and measuring dependent variables.

Group Design

A research framework manipulating one or more independent variables across distinct cohorts to evaluate average group performance.

Single-Subject Design

An experimental strategy demonstrating functional control within individual subjects across repeated baseline and treatment phases.

Simple-Comparison Design

A single-case design comparing baseline behavior (Phase A) to treatment (Phase B), unable to rule out extraneous historical events.

Reversal Design

A single-case experimental design involving repeated alternations between baseline phases (A) and treatment phases (B) to verify functional relationships.

Reversal Design with More Than One Treatment

A single-case protocol (such as an ABCAC sequence) used to compare the relative efficacy of distinct interventions against baseline.

Multiple-Baseline Design

A single-case design where treatment is implemented sequentially across people, settings, or behaviors without requiring withdrawal.

Criterion-Changing Design

A single-case design where the treatment effect is confirmed as behavior systematically matches successively adjusted performance benchmarks.

Behavioural Excesses

Undesirable target actions that occur at an excessively high frequency, intensity, or duration, leading to functional impairment.

Behavioural Deficits

Beneficial or adaptive actions that occur too infrequently, weakly, or completely fail to occur in relevant settings.

Behavioural Modification

The systematic application of learning principles to improve an individual's thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Effectiveness of Behavioural Modification

The clinical outcome achieved through precise operational definitions, environmental adjustments, immediate rewards, and objective data collection.

Operationalizing Behaviour

Defining a target action in concrete, observable, and measurable terms to ensure consistent identification and replicability across observers.

Animal Research

The experimental investigation of nonhuman subjects, leveraging biological continuity to discover general principles of behavior.

Elicited Behaviours

Automatic, involuntary responses drawn out of an organism by the direct presentation of a preceding stimulus.

Reflexes

Simple, automatic, and unlearned motor responses to environmental stimuli that promote immediate physiological survival.

Neonatal Reflexes

Inborn, involuntary motor responses observed in human infants, such as the Moro, grasp, crawling, and stepping reactions.

Reflex Arc

A neural structure underlying simple reflexes, consisting of a sensory neuron, an interneuron in the spinal cord, and a motor neuron.

Fixed Action Patterns

Hardwired, unlearned sequences of species-specific responses triggered automatically by a specific environmental releaser.

Sign Stimulus / Releaser

The specific environmental feature or perceptual cue that automatically triggers a fixed action pattern.

Stereotypical Behaviour

Unvarying, repetitive patterned behavior irrelevant to the current situation, often arising from captivity stress or frustration.

Habituation

A simple learning process characterized by a decrease in the strength of an elicited response following repeated presentations of a stimulus.

Short-Term Habituation

A fast reduction in responsiveness caused by closely spaced stimulus presentations, which recovers quickly in the absence of stimulation.

Long-Term Habituation

A gradual reduction in responsiveness caused by widely spaced stimulus presentations that persists over extended periods.

Sensitization

An increase in the strength of an elicited response following repeated presentations of an arousing or threatening stimulus.

Dishabituation

The sudden recovery of a habituated response following the introduction of a novel, extraneous stimulus.

Maximizing Habituation

Conditions promoting rapid response decrement, including presenting low-intensity, non-threatening stimuli continuously at short intervals.

Minimizing Habituation

Conditions that hinder response decrement, including presenting high-intensity, threatening stimuli at widely spaced intervals.

Neuroplasticity

The nervous system's capacity to modify its structural architecture and synaptic strength in response to learning or experience.

Learning

A relatively permanent change in behavioral capability or knowledge that results directly from environmental experience.

Memory

The biological persistence of acquired learning over time, encompassing encoding, storage, and retrieval processes.

Aplysia

A marine sea slug utilized by Eric Kandel as a neurobiological model for investigating the synaptic mechanisms of learning.

Evolutionary Perspective of Habituation and Sensitization

The adaptive survival strategy that conserves energy by ignoring safe, repetitive events while priming defensive reactions toward threats.