5.5: Contemporary Views of Operant Conditioning

Cognitive Aspects of Operant Conditioning

  • Edward C. Tolman (1898-1956) firmly believed that cognitive processes played an important role in the learning of complex behaviors — even in the laboratory rat

  • He believed that although such cognitive processes couldn’t be observed, they could still be experimentally verified and inferred by careful observation of outward behavior

  • Much of his experiments involved rats in mazes. The “goal” box had food

  • The rats had learned a sequence of responses such as “first corner—turn left; second corner—-turn right,” and so on

  • However, Tolman argued that the rats had learned more than simply the sequence of responses. He believed that they built up a cognitive map of the maze

Cognitive map: Tolman’s term for the mental representation of the layout of a familiar environment

  • Tolman concluded that reward—or reinforcement- is not necessary for learning to take place

Learned Helplessness: Expectations of Failure and Learning to Quit

Learned helplessness: a phenomenon in which exposure to inescapable and uncontrollable aversive events produces passive behavior

  • Learned helplessness was discovered by accident

  • Psychologists were trying to find out if classically conditioned responses would affect the process of operant conditioning in dogs

  • In the setup, the dogs were unable to escape or avoid shock. But the next part of the experiment involved a procedure in which the dogs could escape the shock.

  • However, when the conditioned dogs were placed in the box and became elctrified, they didn’t try to jump over te barrier. They just laid down and whined.

  • Martin Seligman explained that the dogs had learned that shocks were inescapable. No matter the behavior they engaged in such as whinimg, barking, would allow them to avoid the shock.

  • How can it be overcome?

    • Seligman discovered if they forcibly dragged the dogs over the barrier when the floor became electrified, the dogs would eventually overcome it and jump

Operant Conditioning and Biological Predispositions: Misbehaving Chickens

  • Psychologists studying operant conditioning found that an animal’s natural behavior patterns could influence the learning of new behaviors

Instinctive Drift: the tendency of an animal to revert to its instinctive behaviors that can interfere with the performance of an operantly conditioned response