Mind & Body

What is cognition?

• Encompasses the activities of the mind.

• Involves acquisition and use of knowledge.

• Includes mental processes: perception, attention, memory, decision-making, reasoning, problem-solving, imagining, planning and executing actions.

What is the perceptual-cognitive cycle?

• Our current experience is a product of integrating the perceptual present and the cognitive past.

• An active, embodied, emotional agent embedded in the physical and socio-cultural world.

• Sequential-cyclical process simplifies a deeper embedding and inter-dependence of brain, body, world and mind.

What is a cognitive agent?

• Mentally represents their world.

• Can represent to itself a goal like obtaining an object from a location that is not in its immediate environment.

What is learning?

• The set of biological, cognitive and social processes through which organisms make meaning from their experiences, producing long-lasting changes in their behaviour, abilities, and knowledge.

• Helps us to recognise important things from past experiences and predict the future.

What are the foundations of learning?

Two fundamental forms of non-associative learning are shared by all species: sensitisation and habituation.

What is sensitisation?

A temporary state of heightened attention and responsivity that accompanies sudden and surprising events.

• The learner remains alert to potentially threatening stimuli and has an increased response to subsequent stimuli.

What is habituation?

The gradual diminishing of attention and responsivity that occurs when a stimulus persists without being associated with threatening or rewarding consequences (e.g. it is safe to ignore and to fade into the background noise.)

What is conditioning in relation to learning associations that predict the future?

• It is important to learn associations between stimuli that reliably predict biologically significant events, and to learn to respond adaptively.

How do biologically significant stimuli relate to survival?

• Stimuli that naturally cause either defensive (fight, flight, freeze) or appetitive (approach) reflex responses.

• Stimuli that are inherently punishing (aversive) or rewarding (appetitive).

• The effects of such stimuli on our physiology is not learned.

• In classical conditioning, these stimuli are called “unconditioned stimuli”.

What is unconditioned stimuli?

Naturally produce an autonomic (involuntary) response — an autonomic reflex.

What is conditioning?

• Involves learning the causal structure of the environment.

• “if X (conditioned stimulus), then Y” (unconditioned stimulus").

• Y is conditional on X.

• Conditioning is also called associative learning.

What is associative learning?

Learning associations (relationships) between stimuli, and/or between stimuli and behavioural responses.

What kind of association is learned in classical conditioning (CC)?

• Learning a predictive relationship between an originally neutral event and a biologically significant event that itself naturally causes an autonomic reflex response, so that the previously neutral event becomes a meaningful stimulus that can then produce the autonomic reflex response on its own.

• In short, a CC response is a learned reflex response to a stimulus that would not usually cause it.

What are the three-phases of classical conditioning?

Before learning, during conditioning and after conditioning.

1. The conditions that exist before conditioning (before learning):

a. The neutrality of stimuli that have not yet been associated with appetitive or aversive stimuli.

b. The innate reflex responses of the learner that occur to stimuli that are naturally rewarding (appetitive) or punishing (aversive or threatening).

2. During conditioning (learner associations):

Experiencing a predictive relationship (association) between a neutral stimulus and a biologically relevant stimulus.

3. After conditioning:

The previously neutral stimulus can now produce a learned reflex response in preparation for a biologically relevant stimulus.

What happens in before conditioning?

A stimulus that does not produce the reflex = Neutral Stimulus (NS).

UCS + UCR = Reflex.

What happens during conditioning?

NS + UCS = UCR.

What happens after conditioning?

CS = CR.

What if we use a different sounding bell after learning.

• Stimulus generalisation.

• Pavlov demonstrated that the classically conditioned salivation response would generalise to other similar stimuli.

What if I want the dog only to salivate to the sound of a particular bell?

• Stimulus discrimination.

What if I want the dog to stop salivating to the sound of a bell?

• Extinction trials.

Can a classically conditioned response come back after extinction?

• Spontaneous recovery.

• If you rest the dog after a series of extinction trials and then present the bell again, the conditioned response will return.

• Extinction spaced over multiple sessions will gradually prevent spontaneous recovery.

What if I wanted to teach the dog the association again after sustained extinction?

• The dog would re-learn the conditioned salivation response more quickly than the first time.

• This is called rapid reacquisition.

What is operant conditioning?

• Behaviour is shaped by the learner’s history of experiencing rewards and punishments for their actions.

What is reinforcement?

• A behaviour is reinforced whether a desirable outcome is the consequence.

• Behaviours that are reinforced are more likely to be repeated.

• A reinforcer is any consequence of a behaviour that makes that behaviour more likely to recur in the future — can be positive or negative.

What is positive reinforcer?

• Something pleasant that is added to increase behaviour.

What is negative reinforcer?

• Something unpleasant that is removed to increase behaviour.

Continuous vs. Partial reinforcement:

• Continuous reinforcement rarely occurs in natural environments.

• Behaviour is usually reinforced on a partial “schedule”.

What is partial reinforcement?

• Leads to more persistent learning because the learner becomes accustomed to reinforcement occurring on some occasions and not others.

What is continuous reinforcement?

• Leads to rapid extinction once reinforcer is withheld.

Extinction of a reinforced behaviour:

• Extinction of an operantly conditioned behaviour occurs when reinforcement is withheld.

• Not immediate - sometimes there is a brief increase in responding referred to as an extinction burst followed by decrease in trained behaviour.

Shaping behaviour:

• Shaping reinforces successive approximations to the desired behaviour (reinforcing small steps).

Punishment:

• A behaviour is punished (weakened) whenever the learner experiences an undesirable consequence for that behaviour.

• Behaviours that are followed by punishment are less likely to be repeated.

• A punisher is any consequence of a behaviour that makes that behaviour less likely to recur in the future.

• Can be positive or negative.

What is positive punishment?

• An unpleasant stimulus that weakens behaviour when added as consequence of the behaviour.

What is negative punishment?

A pleasant stimulus that weakens behaviour when removed as a consequence of the behaviour.

When is punishment effective? - The three Cs:

Contingency, contiguity, consistency.

What is contingency?

The relationship between the behaviour and the punisher must be clear.

What is contiguity?

The punisher must follow the behaviour swiftly.

What is consistency?

The punisher needs to occur for every occurrence of the behaviour.

What are the drawbacks of punishment?

• Positive punishment rarely works for long-term behaviour change - it tends to only suppress behaviour.

• It does not teach a more desirable behaviour.

• Produces negative feelings in the learner, which do not promote new learning.

• Harsh punishment may teach the learner to use such behaviour to others (social learning).

• If the threat of punishment is removed, the behaviour returns.

What are the alternatives to punishment?

• Stop reinforcing the problem behaviour (extinction).

• Reinforce an alternative behaviour that is both constructive and incompatible with the undesirable behaviour.

• Reinforce the non-occurrence of the undesirable behaviour.

Controlling and predicting ‘voluntary’ behaviour:

• Learners pay attention to the stimuli that predict when rewards and punishment will occur.

• They learn to recognise the antecedents to reward or punishment.

• They learn that the rewarding or punishing outcome is contingent on producing a particular behaviour.

• This can be leveraged to control when a learner will produce a behaviour.

The ABC model of operant conditioning:

• Antecedent - Behaviour - Consequence.

• The antecedent is an formerly neutral stimulus that becomes a conditioned stimulus through its association with the rewarding consequences.

Discriminant stimuli:

• An antecedent becomes a discriminative stimuli when it signals which of two or ore behaviours is appropriate in a particular context.

• Learning the relationship between the discriminant stimuli and the unconditioned stimuli is based on a classically conditioned CS-UCS association.

• Producing the correct behaviour in response to the correct stimulus context is operantly conditioned through reward, shaping and extinction of incorrect responses.

What is a cognitive map?

• A cognitive map is a mental representation of the spatial characteristics of a familiar environment.

What is a latent learning?

• Learning could occur in the absence of directly experienced rewards and punishments.

• Latent learning = hidden learning.

• Rewards affect whether the learned behaviour will be demonstrated, not whether the learning has occurred.

Social-cognitive Learning Theory:

• Observational learning is another example of how learning can occur without direct experience of reinforcement or punishment.

• Learning takes place socially and vicariously through observing others (models).

• Albert Bandura.

• Observational learning takes place through active judgement and constructive processes — that is, it involves cognitive processes of mental representation.

What is memory?

• A set of storage systems and processes for encoding, storing, and retrieving information acquired through our senses and for relating this information to previously acquired knowledge and experience.

• The mental representation of knowledge within memory systems stored within neural networks of the brain.

What is encoding?

• The process involved in attending to and acquiring information from experiences and mental processes.

• Attention to elements of an experience.

• Interpretation and integration of experience with prior knowledge.

What is storage?

• Memory traces are stored in networks of neurons throughout the brain.

• Different kinds of memories are stored in different networks.

• Storage capacity and duration differ between the different memory systems.

What is retrieval?

• Remembering, knowing and doing (personal reminiscence of past experiences, remembering facts, executing practiced motor skills, conditioned responses).

• Explicit and implicit retrieval processes.

• Retrieval is a reconstructive and error-prone process.

• Memory updates after retrieval through reconsolidation.

What is sensory memory?

• A temporary, sensory-based representation of input received through sensory channels.

• Only some of the information stored in sensory memory will be retained.

• Iconic (visual) and echoic (auditory) memory (brief duration, large capacity).