Generalisation and Discrimination (Week 6)

Generalisation

• The tendency for the effects of a learning experience to be transferred to other situations or environments

• not always desirable

Four types of generalisation

• Across people (vicarious)

• Across time (response maintenance)

• Across behaviours (response generalisation)

• Across situation (stimulus generalisation)

Generalisation gradient

shows the tendency for a behaviour to occur in situations that differ systematically from the training situation

Little Albert experiment

demonstrated that fear has a high generalisability

Operant conditioning and generalisation

• train dog in such a way for the command to cause the behaviour from anyone and anywhere

• Drawn to things that have been reinforced in the past

Increase generalisability

• providing training across a variety of settings

• vary the consequences

• reinforce generalisation

Applications of generalisation

• fears/phobias

• Assumptions about people/stereotypes

• Toilet training

• Marketing

Discrimination

• the tendency for behaviour to occur in a certain situation not others

Classical conditioning discrimination

• one CS is paired with the US and another CS regularly appears alone

• Pavlov one bell sound paired with meat. Present another bell sound paired with nothing so they discriminate to one sound

Operant conditioning discrimination

• one stimulus is associated with reinforcing consequences, and another is not

• get food for ringing specific bell

Simultaneous discrimination

• the discriminative stimuli are presented at the same time

Successive discrimination

the alternate usually randomly

Stimulus control

• Discriminative stimulus signals availability of reinforcement to increase the probability of response

• Stimulus control describes the relationship through which a discriminant stimulus reliably affects the probability of the behaviour

• Appropriate behaviour

Behavioural contrast

change in rate of reinforcement on one part of multiple schedule results in opposite change in rate of response

Positive contrast effects

Decrease in rate of response on one leads to increase in rate of response on other components

Negative contrast effects

Increase in rate of response other behaviours decreases while this one increases

Anticipatory contrast

change the rate of responding in anticipation that will be a change in the rate of response

Delay of gratification

intrinsic internal thing that some people have and some don’t

Ainslie-Rachlin Model

• We focus on smaller sooner rewards than larger later rewards it shifts over time

• reward value increases rapidly the closer we get to it

• change the function for the larger late reward

Small but cumulative effects model

each single choice on self control tasks have small but cumulative effects on probability of obtaining the larger later reward

Self-control

• Ability to regulate behaviour

• Delay gratification and achieve goals or long term rewards

Skinner self control

• manage conflict between short term and long term goals

• Controlling response that secures to alter the frequency of a controlled response

• change the environment

• physical restraint

• depriving and satiating

• doing something else

self-reinforcement

• may be effective but the consequence needs to be tied to the behaviour

• more effective if others are aware to hold you accountable

Temporal issue

immediate consequences are generally more powerful than delayed consequences

Learned helplessness

A decrement in the ability to learn that results from repeated exposure to uncontrollable aversive events

Escape learning

learning of a response that allows a subject to escape an aversive stimulus

Avoidance learning

organism learns to perform a behavior to prevent an unpleasant, aversive stimulus from occurring