PSY 100 UofT Midterm #2

Reflex

inevitable, involuntary response to stimuli. occurs without conscious thought. Are in place for survival, automatic local responses.

ex. pulling hand away from hot surface

Instincts

Automatic behaviours you are born with that are triggered by a stimulus in your environment. A program, involves brain/hormones.

ex. Yawn (triggered by fatigue, or seeing someone else yawn)

Learning

Relatively permanent change in behaviour due to experience 

Associative Learning

Occurs when we form associations between 2 stimuli

Classical conditioning

Forming associations between 2 stimuli that occur sequentially through time 

ex. child sees a bee for first time, gets stung, associates bee with pain, fears bee.

Operant conditioning

Forming associations between behaviours and their consequences

ex. park illegally and get ticket, pay attention more next time when parking

Nonassociative learning

Changes in strength of your responses 

Habituation

Reduces reactions to stimulus that have already been experienced and proven to be unchanging & harmless 

Ex. Nursing student got used to blood and vomit no longer reacts with disgust 

Sensitisation

Increases our reactions to a range of stimuli following exposure to one strong stimulus. occurs in response to stronger stimuli

Ex. After an earthquake people experience exaggerated responses to movement, light, or noise. 

Observational learning

One organism learns by watching the behaviour of another organism

Implicit learning

learning that occurs in the absence of awareness.

ex. children learn grammar rules without being taught formal rules

• “He goed home”

Explicit learning

the individual is consciously aware of the learning and can generally report on what has been learned

Conditioned Stimulus (CS)

environmental event whose significance is learned 

ex. metronome

Unconditioned Stimulus (UCS)

has innate meaning to the organism 

ex. food

Conditioned response (CR)

learned reaction 

• Ex. Salivating at sight of a metronome 

Unconditioned response (UCR):

Appear without prior experience with a stimulus 

• Ex. Salivating at sight of food 

Aquisition

The learning phase of developing a conditioned response

pairing a CS with an UCS to recieve a CR

requires contiguity and contingency

Contiguity

proximity in time between CS and UCS, requirement for aquisition.

Contingency

How reliably the CS predicts the UCS

Ex. Rat study with sound and electric shock

Extinction

Reduction of a learned response which happens when a CS is no longer paired with an UCS, and association between the two is broken.

Spontaneous Recovery

A reappearance of a CR during breaks between extinction training.

Ex. Day 1: dog stopped associating metronome with food. Day 2: Dog salivates to metronome a little.

Excitatory Conditioning

Classic classical conditioning, a stimulus predicts something will occur

Inhibition

A stimulus predicts something will not occur

Ex. Sound + light = no shock (sound = inhibitory signal)

Generalization

The tendency to respond to stimuli similar to the CS

Ex. fearing wasps bc bee stung you

Higher-Order Conditioning

• Happens when a stimulus associated with the CS starts producing the conditioned response on its own 

• Ex. Dog = pain, Doghouse = dog, Doghouse = dog = pain, eventually just doghouse elicits fear 

Latent Inhibition

Learning occurs slower when a CS is already familiar vs. Unfamiliar 

Taste Aversion

Occurs when the sight, smell, or flavour of the food (CS) has been paired in the past with illness (UCS). Taste aversion is the resulting CR.  

Operant Conditioning

The association between and action and its consequences

Thorndike’s law of effect

behaviours followed by good consequences become more likely to happen again, and behaviours followed by bad consequences become less likely to happen again. 

Premack Principle

whatever behaviour an organism spends the most time and energy doing is likely to be important to that organism. 

• A preferred activity can be used to reinforce a less preferred activity 

primary reinforcers

reinforcers with natural roles in survival 

• Ex. Food

conditioned/secondary reinforcers

Reinforcers whose value must be learned 

• Ex. Money, gold medals 

Continuous reinforcement

Reinforcing a behaviour every time it occurs

Partial Reinforcement

The reinforcement of the desired behaviour on some occasions but not others 

Ratio Schedules

Reinforcement depends on the number of times a behaviour occurs 

Fixed Ratio Schedule

Reinforcement happens after a set number of actions 

Variable Ratio Schedules

You get a reward after a number of behaviours, but the number changes each time. However, it averages out to a certain number

Interval Schedules

reinforcement happens after a certain amount of time has passed, and the behaviour occurs

Fixed Interval schedule

reward becomes available after a specific amount of time has passed, but the organism must still perform the behaviour once to get it

Variable Interval Schedules:

Reinforcement becomes available after a varying amount of time, but the average time is predictable 

Shaping

Reinforcing similar behaviours to the one we want to train until it reaches the goal

Latent Learning

Learning that occurs in the absence or reinforcement, but knowledge appears later when there is motivation to use it

Ex. Tolman’s maze rats

Biological constraints:

limits on learning that come from an organism’s biologyn or evolutionary history 

• Ex. Birds easily learn to peck for food, but struggle to learn to peck to avoid a shock, because pecking is naturally linked to feeding 

Instinctive drift

An animals natural instincts interfere with a learned behaviour 

Observational learning (Social Learning Theory):

learning that happens by watching others and observing the consequences of their behaviour 

• Ex. Bandura’s bobo doll 

Multistore model of memory

Model of how data flows through a series of seperate stages of memory