Week 7 - learning, memory & metacognition

Week 7

Learning

A fairly permanent change in behaviour due to past experience.

• Emphasises relationship between experience and behaviour

• Learning allows us to adapt our environment

Habituation

Response to stimulus declines with repeated exposure to stimulus.

• Highly adaptive - diminished attention to old stimuli allows infants to pay attention and learn new stimuli

• Foetuses show habituation to vibroacoustic stimuli as early as 30 weeks gestational (Dirix et al., 2009)

Pavlovian conditioning

Classical conditioning - learning of an association between two stimuli (conditioned stimuli and unconditioned stimuli)

Unconditioned stimulus (UCS)

A stimulus that elicits a reflexive response

Unconditioned response (UCR)

The reflexive response (physiological, emotional)

Conditioned stimulus (CS)

Neutral stimulus which later elicits desired response after pairing with UCS

Conditioned response (CR)

The response to the pairing of CS and UCS

Two processes in classical conditioning

Acquisition and extinction

Classical conditioning in infants

• Association between mother, security and warmth

• Learning to feed - UCS = breast, UCR = sucking, CS = breast/bottle, CR = sucking

• Limited to biologically programmed reflexes in newborns

Lipsitt & Kaye (1964)

Neutral tone paired with breast = 2-3 day old infants made sucking motions at sound of tone, before breast was presented

Blass et al. (1984)

Infants show extinction as young as 2-24hrs

Evaluative conditioning

Changing the liking of something (CS) (e.g. vegetables) through the pairing with a positive stimulus (UCS) (e.g. chocolate)

Watson & Rayner (1920)

Fear conditioning - Little Albert

• Smashed steel bar behind head while presenting a white rat

• Elicited a fear of the white rat

• This generalised to other white fluffy objects

Instrumental conditioning

Operant conditioning - relationship between the behaviour and the reward (reinforcement) or punishment it produces

Reinforcers

Changes in environment that follow a behaviour and increase probability of behaviour reoccurring

• Positive reinforcement - bringing good things to the person

• Negative reinforcement - taking bad things away from the person (e.g. removing pain, hunger)

Punishments

Changes in environment that follow a behaviour and decrease probability of the behaviour reoccurring

• Positive punishment - presenting aversive stimulus after response (e.g. electric shock to induce pain)

• Negative punishment - taking good things away from the person

Instrumental conditioning in infants

Sucking

• Newborns suck to obtain a sugar solution (Lipsitt et al., 1966)

• 5-12 week olds suck to keep movie in focus (Kalnins & Bruner, 1973)

Head turning

• Infants young as 4 days will turn head to obtain sucrose water

Mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm

• Ribbon connected to baby’s ankle and mobile

• Infants naturally kick legs and learn contingency between kicking legs and movement of mobile

• 6 month olds with push a lever to make train move along track

Observational learning

Bandura (1965) - observational learning and modelling, watching the behaviour of others

• No reinforcement needed to learn - mere exposure

• But whether behaviour is repeated depends on observed consequences (vicarious reinforcement)

Bandura’s bobo doll

• Nursery school children watched adult hit bobo doll

• Adult was rewarded or punished

• Children’s actions were determined by the model’s actions and consequences

Imitation

Form of observational learning

• Some studies suggest newborns can imitate but this has been disputed

• By 6 months, infants show clear and complex imitation

Challenges with measuring infant memory

• Infant cannot give verbal responses until 1 year

Visual vs. auditory recognition

• Foetuses recognise their mother’s voice 1-2 weeks before birth (Kisilevsky et al., 2003)

• Infants show novelty preference - prefer to look at new things

• Infants presented with novel stimulus, it is then hidden, then when re-presented reduced looking is indicative of recognition memory

Fantz (1964)

Visual paired comparison task

• Two identical pictures presented side by side for a brief viewing period (e.g., 5 sec)

• After delay (e.g., 5 min), one of the previously viewed pictures is presented along with a new picture

• Novelty response seen at postnatal day 3 within 2-min retention interval (Pascalis & de Schonen)

• Time needed ro familiarise to original stimulus decreases with age (stimulus encoding gets faster) (Morgan & Hayne, 2006)

• Retention over longer intervals increases with age (internal representation of stimulus is viable for longer)

Mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm - memory

• Infant presented with either same mobile from acquisition phase or different one

• More kicking during rest than baseline suggests recognition

• Useful as features of test mobile can be varied to determine which features were encoded, and retention interval can vary to measure retention times

Rovee-Collier & Boller (1995)

3-month olds remembered the kicking-reinforcement relationship up to 1 week later. Retention duration increase with age.

• Remembering can be reinstated after long delays in very young infants with reminders of contingency

• Reveals spacing effect - two practice trials spaced apart produces better retention than two practice trials close together

• Reveals misinformation effect - exposure to second mobile reduced likelihood that infant would remember first mobile

Memory efficiency

Theory as to why memory improves in early childhood - memory processes improve with age (working memory capacity increases, learning becomes more efficient)

• Digit span increases from 2-6 (Kali, 1991)

Memory strategies

Theory as to why memory improves in early childhood - children learn effective memory strategies (e.g. elaboration, rehearsal) as they get older

• Children young as 18 months verbally rehearse location of hidden object more than visible object (De Loache et al., 1985)

• Young children do not spontaneously use elaborative encoding, but older children do

Infantile amnesia

Adults don’t usually remember events from first three years of life and few from next two

Episodic memory

Infants have something similar to episodic memory, but they forget these memories as they age, explaining infantile amnesia

• Can also be seen in rats

• Exact cause unknown but may be due to development of brain regions crucial for learning and memory (e.g. hippocampus)

Memory in older children

Memory becomes adult-like around 14-15, working memory capacity increases and children integrate meaning into episodic memory.

Incorporating meaning leads to richer memory trace, but can make older children more susceptible to memory illusions (Holliday et al., 2008)

Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) procedure

Participants presented with lists of semantically related words

• They often falsely remember a "lure word" that was not actually presented but is strongly associated with the presented words

Metacognition

Understanding of our own minds

Metamemory

Our knowledge and awareness of our own memory processes

Development of metacognition

From age 5, children know which material is easy/difficult to learn

• This can be seen through judgements of learning (JOLs)

Judgements of learning (JOLs)

Self-assessments of how well an individual believes they have learned something

• These judgements can influence memory and learning processes

Overconfidence

Children are overconfident, even with practice

Shin et al. (2007)

• Children consistently overestimated the number of pictures they would recall across multiple lists

• Children with higher levels of overconfidence showed greater gains in recall than children with lower levels of overconfidence

• Consistent with the ‘adaptivity’ hypothesis

Adaptivity hypothesis

Bjorklund & Green (1992) - overconfidence helps to keep children engaged in difficult activities

Metacognitive control

Young children use their metacognitive knowledge to influence their learning

• By 7/8, children choose to restudy items they gave lower JOLs than items they gave higher JOLS (Schneider & Loffler, 2016)

Which memory paradigm suggests that children begin to incorporate meaning into their episodic memory as they age?

The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm

What is true about Pavlovian extinction

Pavlovian extinction necessarily follows Pavlovian acquisition.

Pavlovian extinction refers to the decrease in a conditioned response when a conditioned stimulus is no longer followed by an unconditioned stimulus.

Which methods have researchers used to measure instrumental conditioning in infants?

Mobile conjugate task

Head turning

Sucking

The Little Albert study showed that young children are capable of:

Pavlovian conditioning

Fear conditioning

Who disputed the idea that newborns can imitate others?

Oostenbroek et al (2016)

What effect describes how infants forget original information after seeing conflicting new stimuli?

Misinformation effect

What is one of the clearest delays in the development of blind children according to Fraiberg (1977)?

Walking

At which age does inhibitory control improve in children? 

3-6 yrs