Ch 4 - Classical Conditioning

Factors Influencing Slope of Curve

• Timing → how long they are & when they’re ran

• Strength & frequency of conditioned response

• Steepness - shallowed out when not too contingent on e/o

• Aversive stimuli = more aggressive

  • Training resulting in strong cr after 1 trial (ex → poison avoidance)

Extinction

reduction & eventual elim of CR

• X more reinforcement

• CS presented w/o US

• repeat trials of CS alone = less to X CR

• ex → metronome (NS) : food (US) → salivation (UR)

  • metronome (CS) → salivation (CR)

  • metronome (“NS”) → X response (-)

Spontaneous Recovery

time delay b/w sessions often results in CR strength returning

• multiple sessions required to fully extinguish relationship

What is extinction?

practiced buildup of a new inhibition response

Disinhibition

new stim causes a diminished CR to return

• more complex associative larning

• ex →metronome (CS) → salivation (CR, weak)

  • metronome (CS) & new beeping noise → salivation (CR, og strength)

Why is disinhibition evolutionarily important?

Disinhibition is evolutionarily important because it allows an organism to quickly respond to new stimuli that may signal critical changes in the environment, thereby enhancing survival by facilitating a return of conditioned responses

A & B Process w/ Extinction

• A process strong/fear on initial one, B process= training it through extinction, teaching organism should be stronger to overcome a process, 

  • w/ each session, b process grows in taking over until = calmness takes over the anxiety

  • Never presenting the US again, rather just regulating better 

How does extinction work?

• Even w/o adding shock in, no US, conditioned response reappears, back down to no response, present cs w/o us and response has returned, not as strong as before but continues to return

  • transiently increased response that peters itself down

Nature of Extinction is a New Behavior

our understanding of extinction is that the organism is learning a new behavior

• X forgetting/unlearning

• new behavior suppresses prev learned association

• extinguished associations → can be relearned faster as well

• learning is a new competing beh being strengthened, competing/suppressing prev beh

Exposure Therapy & Extinction

expose pt to feared object w/o any danger to help overcome anxiety

• reduce fear responses

• facilitate extinction of conditioned responses assoc w/ that fear

Generalization

offers evolutionary advantage in protecting from potential threats

• tendency to respond to stimuli similar to the conditioned stimulus, potentially leading to misinterpretation of threats. This ensures adaptability in uncertain environments.

• assoc w/ 1 stimuli may bleed out to other related stimuli

• stim X trained gets assoc only bc it becomes similar

• relates to phobias → often overgeneralized

Discrimination

useful for telling apart coincidentally similar stimuli