Psych 111 chapter 6

Learning

Process by which an organism’s experience produces enduring changes in both brain and behaviour; often involves adapting our behaviour to the environment

Associative learning

Making connections between different events and our behavioural responses to them

Nonassociative learning

Involves changes in how much or how little we respond to a single event or stimulus with experience

Habituation

Organism’s reflexive response to a repeated stimulus becomes weaker; brain decreases attention to stimuli in our environment that it learns are harmless or unimportant

Dishabituation

Recovery of a response that has undergone habituation usually as a result of the presentation of a novel stimulus

Sensitization

Organism’s reflexive response to a repeated stimulus becomes stronger

Associative learning

Occurs when a connection is made between two events

Conditioning

Changes in behaviour that are conditional on specific associations being made. Two types: classical/ operant

Classical conditioning

Passive; involuntary response (ex. reflex) becomes associated with a new stimulus (pavlov and work on the physiology of digestion in dogs)

Pavlov

Introduced terminology of US, UR, CS, CR

Unconditioned stimulus (US)

Stimulus that produces a response without prior learning (ex. food)

Unconditioned response (UR)

Response automatically generated by the unconditioned stimulus (ex. salivation)

Conditioned stimulus (CS)

Neutral stimulus with no positive or negative association comes to elicit a response after being associated with the unconditioned stimulus (ex. a bell)

Conditioned response (CR)

Response that occurs after the association has been made between the unconditioned stimulus and conditioned stimulus (ex. salivation)

Acquisition

Initial learning of the US-CS link; learning of CR is not immediate but increases

Generalization

Tendency to respond to stimuli that are similar to the CS; greater the similarity between two stimuli the more likely they are generalized; can sometimes overgeneralize

Discrimination

Occurs when we learn to respond to a particular stimulus but not to others

Extinction

Active learning process whereby the CR is weakened in response to the CS if it is frequently presented in the absence of the US; NOT forgetting, just brain learning not to respond as the association is not reliable

Spontaneous recovery

Extinct behaviour reappears after a delay; residual plasticity hypothesis = networks of learning persist even after extinction, helps with rapid relearning

Blocking

prior association with a CS prevents learning of an association with another stimuli because the second one adds no predictive value; helps to limit the false associations we might otherwise learn; compromised/absent in people who experience hallucinations

Hyperassociative tendencies

Making connections that are not based in reality -

Counterconditioning

Procedure used to counteract undesired association by conditioning new responses to stimuli; used frequency in therapy for anxieties, PTSD

Preparedness

Species-specific biological predisposition to learn some associations more quickly than other associations (ex. phobias)

Vicarious classical conditioning

Involves learning a conditioned response by observing another organism’s experience

Conditioned taste aversion

Strong tendency to associate nausea (UR) with food (CS) rather than with other environmental factors; very strong in situations where you eat something unfamiliar and become sick

Drug use

users form associations with environmental stimuli present when the drugs are administered; environmental stimuli become a CS; brain’s CR prepares to protect the brain and body adjusting NT levels to directly counteract the drug’s impact - leads to drug cravings, tolerance, and risk of overdose

Persuasion

Associations built between a brand and good feelings; new brand of drink (NS) + attractive people having fun (US); viewers build an association between the brand and good feelings

Operant conditioning

Learner makes associations between a voluntary behaviour and its consequences and makes a behavioural change as a result; operating on the environment to produce desired outcomes

The ABCs

Antecedent, Behaviour, and Consequence

Antecedent

Stimulus that precedes the behaviour and signals a context where certain behaviours lead to certain consequences

Consequence

Stimulus after the behaviour that either increases or decreases the likelihood that the behaviour will be repeated

Reinforcement

Increased likelihood of a behaviour being repeated

Primary reinforcers

Innately satisfying because they meet some biological need and are effective

Secondary reinforcers

Learned, acquiring value through experience because of association with primary reinforcers

Premack principle

Activites someone frequently engages in can be used to reinforce activities that the person is less inclined to do; preferred behaviour is one that is naturally more reinforcing and engaging in more frequently (ex. can’t eat dessert until you eat your vegetables)

Skinner Box/ Operant Chamber

Allowed for free operant responses - no clear end point/goal, can respond at any time as often as needed

Role of shaping

Process of gradually changing random behaviours into desired target behaviours by reinforcement of successive approximations

Instinctive drift

Animal’s reversion to evolutionarily derived instinctive behaviours instead of demonstrating newly learned responses

Continous reinforcement schedule

Behaviour is rewarded every time it is preformed (ex. chocolate every time you finish reading a chapter, rapid acquisition and rapid extinction)

Partial reinforcement schedule

Behaviour is rewarded only some of the time; effective motivators (ex. slot machine)

Fixed partial schedule

Behaviour reinforced after a set number of responses (ratio) or after a set amount of time (interval)

Variable partial schedule

Behaviour reinforced after an average but variable number of responses (ratio) or approximate amount of time (interval); more resistant to extinction

Fixed-ratio schedule

Specific number of behaviours before a reward is given

Variable-ratio schedule

Average number of behaviours

Fixed-interval schedule

First behaviour made after a fixed amount of time

Variable-interval schedule

A response is reinforced based on an average amount of time elapsing (ex. checking social media for notifications because a good one could come at any time)

Superstitious conditioning

Behaviour is learned because it’s coincidentally reinforced, but has no relationship with reinforcement

Latent learning

Can occur even when no behaviour is reinforced (ex. cognitive maps of our surroundings)

Operant conditioning

Follows a learning curve where we acquire knowledge or skill incrementally through trial and error

Insight learning

Learning that occurs without trial and error and without clear reinforcement

Observational learning

Learning that occurs when a person observes and imitates a behaviour from a model

Social learning theory

Describes the process of observational learning; attention + retention +motor reproduction + reinforcement

Attention

If a person admires/ respects the model, more likely to be attentive to their behaviour

Retention

Storing information in the mind so it can be used by the learner in the future; assisted by verbal descriptions or images

Motor reproduction

Helps reinforce a skill as the learner physically imitates the model’s actions

Reinforcement

Being praised for a newly acquired behaviour or skill increases likelihood that a person will repeat it

Vicarious learning

Tendency to model reinforced behaviours and avoid punished behaviours

Mirror neurons

Neurons that are active both when preforming an action and when the same action is observed in others

Cultural transmission

Transfer of information from one generation to another that is maintained by learning not genes

Vertical cultural transmission

Transmission across generations; knowledge/ skills are transferred from adults to children

Horizontal cultural transmission

Social learning within the same generation

Diffusion chain

Process in which individuals learn a behaviour by observing a model and then serves as models from whom other individuals can learn

Cumulative cultural evolution

Cultures evolve by continuously building on the accumulate skills/ knowledge of prior generations

Dual inheritance (Gene-culture coevolutionary theory)

Cultural learning may have driven brain/ cognitive specialization (including anatomy)