Chapter 7: Learning

Robert Rescorla

and Allan Wagner showed that an animal can learn the predictability of an event.

Spontaneous Recovery

: the reappearance, after a pause, of an extinguished conditioned response.

Robert Rescorla

and Allan Wagner showed that an animal can learn the predictability of an event.

Spontaneous Recovery

: the reappearance, after a pause, of an extinguished conditioned response.

Instinctive Drift

: the tendency of learned behavior to gradually revert to biologically predisposed patterns.

Arthur Schopenhaue

said that important ideas are first ridiculed, then attacked, and finally taken for granted.

Palvov

started an experiment from seeing that seeing food, the food dish, or the person serving the food, caused a dog to instinatiously salivate.

Variable interval schedules

tend to produce slow, steady responding.

Pavolv

tried to understand the acqusition, intial learning, by asking "How much time should elapse between presenting the NS (the tone, the light, the touch) and the US (the food) ?.

Preparedness

: a biological predisposition to learn associations, such as between taste and nausea, that have survival value.

Skinner box

A rat in a(n) learns that a light reliably signals a food delivery, the rat will work to turn on the light.

Habits

form when we repeat behaviors in a given context.

Intellectual history

is often made by people who risk going to extremes in pushing ideas to their limits.

Early behaviorists

believed that rats and dogs learned behaviors could be reduced to mindless mechanisms, so there was no need to consider cognition.

Reinforcement

: in operant conditioning, any event that strengthens the behavior it follows.

Ivan Pavlov

conducted famous experiments in the twentieth- century.

Businesses

use behavior modeling to help new employees learn communications, sales, and customer service skills.

discrimination

In operant conditioning, occurs when an organism learns that certain responses, but not others, will be reinforced.

Humans

have brains that support empathy and imitation.

nonverbal organisms

Shaping can also help us understand what perceive.

Pavlovs dogs

also learned to respond to the sound of a particular tone and not to other tones.

Salvation

in response to the tone is learned and is called conditioned response (CR)

ratio schedules

Fixed- reinforce behavior after a set number of responses.

CR

Conditioned Response (): in classical conditioning, a learned response to a previously neutral (but now conditioned) stimulus (CS)

shock

If a(n) always is preceded by a tone, and then may also be preceded by a light that accompanies the tone.

CS

Conditioned Stimulus (): in classical conditioning, an originally neutral stimulus that, after association with an unconditioned stimulus (US), comes to trigger a conditioned response (CR)

Skinner

believed that thoughts and emotions were behaviors that follow the same laws as other behaviors.

Unpredictable reinforcement

is what makes gambling and fly fishing so hard to extinguish even when they dont produce the desired results.

Extinction

: the diminishing of a conditioned response; occurs in classical conditioning when an unconditioned stimulus (US) does not follow a conditioned stimulus (CS); occurs in operant conditioning when a response is no longer reinforced.

Stimulus

: any event or situation that evokes a response.

Law of Effect

: Thorndikes principle that behaviors followed by favorable consequences become more likely, and that behaviors followed by unfavorable consequences become less likely.

Generalization

: the tendency, once a response has been conditioned, for stimuli similar to the conditioned stimulus to elicit similar responses.

Physical punishment

may increase aggression by modeling violence as a way to cope with problems.

classical conditioning

Unconditioned Response (UR): in , an unlearned, naturally occurring response (such as salivation) to an unconditioned stimulus (US) (such as food in the mouth)

Criminal behavior

is influenced more by swift and sure punishers than by the threat of severe sentences.

Cognitive Learning

: the acquisition of mental information, whether by observing events, by watching others or through language.

Mirror Neurons

: frontal lobe neurons that some scientists believe fire when we perform certain actions or observe another doing so.

variable ratio schedules

Because reinforcers increase as the number of responses increases, produce high rates of responding.

Complex animals

can learn to associate their own behavior with its outcomes.

positive reinforcer

A(n) is any stimulus that, when presented after a response, strengthens the response.

Rewards

are most likely to increase productivity if the desired performance is both well defined and achievable.

Extrinsic Motivation

: a desire to perform a behavior to receive promised rewards or avoid threatened punishment.

Childrens brains

enable their empathy and their ability to infer anothers mental state, an ability known as theory of mind.

B F Skinner

(1904- 1990) was a college English major and aspiring writer.

Skinners response

was that External consequences already haphazardly control peoples behavior Applications of Operant Conditioning.

Intrinsic Motivation

: a desire to perform a behavior effectively for its own sake.

response rates

Overall, are higher when reinforcement is linked to the number of responses (a ratio schedule) rather than to time (an interval schedule)

Behaviorism

: the view that psychology (1) should be an objective science that (2) studies behavior without reference to mental processes.

particular taste

When a(n) accompanies a drug that influences immune responses, the taste by itself may come to produce an immune response Operant Conditioning.

better predictor

Although the light is always followed by the shock, it adds no new information; the tone is a(n) .

Food cravings

: Classical conditioning makes dieting difficult.

Negative reinforcement

increases the frequency of a preceding behavior.