6.1 What is Learning?

• Instincts and reflexes are innate behaviors that organisms are born with.

  • Reflexes: a motor or neural reaction to a specific stimulus in the environment.

    • They tend to be simpler than instincts

    • They involve the activity of specific body parts and systems, and more primitive centers of the central nervous system.

  • Instincts: innate behaviors that are triggered by a broader range of events.

    • They’re more complex patterns of behavior

    • They involve movement of the organism as a whole and higher brain centers.

• Both reflexes and instincts help an organism adapt to its environment and don’t have to be learned.

• Learning allows an organism to adapt to its environment.

  • Unlike instincts and reflexes, learned behaviors involve change and experience

• Learning: a relatively permanent change in behavior or knowledge that results from experience.

  • Learning involves acquiring knowledge and skills through experience.

• Any complex learning process involves a complex interaction of conscious and unconscious processes.

• Associative learning: when an organism makes connections between stimuli or events that occur together in the environment.

• Classical conditioning tends to involve unconscious processes

  • Organisms learn to associate events or stimuli that repeatedly happen together.

• Operant conditioning tends to involve conscious processes

  • Organisms learn to associate a behavior and its consequence (reinforcement or punishment).

    • A pleasant consequence encourages more of that behavior in the future, whereas a punishment deters the behavior.

• Observational learning adds social and cognitive layers to all the basic associative processes, both conscious and unconscious.

  • The process of watching others and then imitating what they do.

6.2 Classical Conditioning

• Pavlov: a Russian scientist best known for his experiments in classical conditioning

  • Through his experiments, Pavlov realized that an organism has two types of responses to its environment:

    • Unconditioned (unlearned) responses, or reflexes

    • Conditioned (learned) responses.

• Classical conditioning: a process by which we learn to associate stimuli and anticipate events.

• Unconditioned stimulus (UCS): a stimulus that elicits a reflexive response in an organism.

• Unconditioned response (UCR): a natural (unlearned) reaction to a given stimulus.

• Neutral stimulus (NS): a stimulus that doesn’t naturally elicit a response.

  • A neutral stimulus is presented immediately before an unconditioned stimulus.

• Pairing a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus while turn the neutral stimulus into a conditioned stimulus.

• Conditioned stimulus (CS): a stimulus that elicits a response after repeatedly being paired with an unconditioned stimulus.

• Conditioned response (CR): the behavior caused by the conditioned stimulus

• Higher-order conditioning, or second-order conditioning: pairing a new neutral stimulus with the conditioned stimulus

  • It’s hard to achieve anything above second-order conditioning.

General Processes in Classical Conditioning

• Acquisition: the initial period of learning

  • When an organism learns to connect a neutral stimulus and an unconditioned stimulus

  • The neutral stimulus begins to elicit the conditioned response and eventually becomes a conditioned stimulus capable of eliciting the conditioned response by itself.

  • There should only be a brief interval between presentation of the conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus.

• Taste aversion: a type of conditioning in which an interval of several hours may pass between the conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus.

• Extinction: the decrease in the conditioned response when the unconditioned stimulus is no longer presented with the conditioned stimulus; a gradual weakening and disappearance of the conditioned response.

• Spontaneous recovery: the return of a previously extinguished conditioned response following a rest period.

• Stimulus discrimination: when an organism learns to respond differently to various stimuli that are similar

• Stimulus generalization: when an organism demonstrates the conditioned response to stimuli that are similar to the condition stimulus

• Habituation: when we learn not to respond to a stimulus that is presented repeatedly without change. As the stimulus occurs over and over, we learn not to focus our attention on it.

Behaviorism

• John B. Watson is the founder of behaviorism.

• Behaviorism: focuses on outward observable behavior that can be measured.

• According to Watson, human behavior is primarily the result of conditioned responses.

• Little Albert experiment: Little Albert was conditioned to fear certain things.

  • Initially he was presented with various neutral stimuli, including a rabbit, a dog, a monkey, masks, cotton wool, and a white rat. He wasn’t afraid of any of these things

  • . Then Watson conditioned Little Albert to associate these stimuli with fear. Watson paired a loud sound with a white rat, and Little Albert eventually became frightened by the white rat alone.

  • Little Albert later demonstrated stimulus generalization—he became afraid of other furry things: a rabbit, a furry coat, etc.

    • Watson demonstrated that emotions could become conditioned responses.

6.3 Operant Conditioning

• Operant conditioning: organisms learn to associate a behavior and its consequence

• A pleasant consequence makes that behavior more likely to be repeated in the future.

• B. F. Skinner believed that behavior is motivated by the consequences we receive for the behavior: the reinforcements and punishments.

• Law of effect: behaviors that are followed by consequences that are satisfying to the organism are more likely to be repeated, and behaviors that are followed by unpleasant consequences are less likely to be repeated.

• Skinner conducted scientific experiments on animals to determine how organisms learn through operant conditioning.

  • He placed these animals inside an operant conditioning chamber, which has come to be known as a Skinner box

• Operant conditioning vocabulary:

  • Positive: adding something

  • Negative: taking something away

  • Reinforcement: increasing a behavior

  • Punishment: decreasing a behavior.

• Reinforcement and punishment can be positive or negative.

• All reinforcers (positive or negative) increase the likelihood of a behavioral response.

• All punishers (positive or negative) decrease the likelihood of a behavioral response.

Reinforcement

• Positive reinforcement: a desirable stimulus is added to increase a behavior.

• Negative reinforcement: an undesirable stimulus is removed to increase a behavior.

Punishment

• Positive punishment: an undesirable stimulus is added to decrease a behavior.

• Negative punishment: a pleasant stimulus is removed to decrease behavior.

Shaping

• Shaping: reward successive approximations of a target behavior.

• Shaping is needed because it’s unlikely that an organism will display behaviors spontaneously.

• In shaping, behaviors are broken down into many small, achievable steps:

  • Reinforce any response that resembles the desired behavior.

  • Reinforce the response that more closely resembles the desired behavior.

  • Begin to reinforce the response that even more closely resembles the desired behavior.

  • Continue to reinforce closer and closer approximations of the desired behavior.

  • Only reinforce the desired behavior.

• An important part of shaping is stimulus discrimination.

Primary and Secondary Reinforcers

• Rewards can be used to reinforce learning.

• Primary reinforcers: reinforcers that have innate reinforcing qualities. These kinds of reinforcers are not learned.

  • Examples: water, food, sleep, shelter, pleasure, sex, and touch

• Secondary reinforcers: reinforcers with no inherent value and only have reinforcing qualities when linked with a primary reinforcer.

  • Examples: Praise linked to affection, money when it can be used to buy something, and tokens

• Tokens can be traded in for rewards and prizes. Entire behavior management systems, known as token economies, are built around the use of these kinds of token reinforcers. Token economies have been found to be very effective at modifying behavior in a variety of settings such as schools, prisons, and mental hospitals.

Reinforcement Schedules

• Continuous reinforcement: when an organism receives a reinforcer each time it displays a behavior.

  • This reinforcement schedule is the quickest way to teach someone a behavior, and it is especially effective in training a new behavior.

• Partial reinforcement: the person or animal does not get reinforced every time they perform the desired behavior.

  • There are several different types of partial reinforcement schedules: fixed or variable, and as either interval or ratio.

    • Fixed: the number of responses between reinforcements, or the amount of time between reinforcements, which is set and unchanging.

    • Variable: the number of responses or amount of time between reinforcements, which varies or changes.

    • Interval: the schedule is based on the time between reinforcements

    • Ratio: the schedule is based on the number of responses between reinforcements.

• Fixed interval reinforcement schedule: when behavior is rewarded after a set amount of time

  • An individual will perform the desired behavior when they get close to being rewarded

• Variable interval reinforcement schedule: when the behavior is rewarded after varying amounts of time, which are unpredictable.

  • An individual will always perform the desired behavior because they never know when they’ll be rewarded

• Fixed ratio reinforcement schedule: there are a set number of responses that must occur before the behavior is rewarded.

  • Fixed ratios are better suited to optimize the quantity of output, whereas a fixed interval, in which the reward is not quantity based, can lead to a higher quality of output.

• Variable ratio reinforcement schedule: the number of responses needed for a reward varies.

  • This is the most powerful partial reinforcement schedule.

• Extinction of a reinforced behavior occurs at some point after reinforcement stops, and the speed at which this happens depends on the reinforcement schedule.

  • Among the reinforcement schedules, variable ratio is the most productive and the most resistant to extinction. Fixed interval is the least productive and the easiest to extinguish.

Cognition and Latent Learning

• Behaviorist Edward C. Tolman’s experiments with rats demonstrated that organisms can learn even if they do not receive immediate reinforcement

• Latent learning: learning that occurs but is not observable in behavior until there is a reason to demonstrate it.

6.4 Observational Learning (Modeling)

• Observational learning: learn by watching others and then imitating, or modeling, what they do or say.

• Models: the individuals performing the imitated behavior

• Psychologist Albert Bandura proposed a brand of behaviorism called social learning theory, which took cognitive processes into account.

• According to Bandura, internal mental states must also have a role in learning and that observational learning involves much more than imitation. In imitation, a person simply copies what the model does. Observational learning is much more complex.

• There are several ways that observational learning can occur:

  • You learn a new response.

  • You choose whether or not to imitate the model depending on what you saw happen to the model.

  • You learn a general rule that you can apply to other situations.

• Bandura identified three kinds of models: live, verbal, and symbolic.

  • Live model: demonstrates a behavior in person

  • Verbal model: doesn’t perform the behavior, but instead explains or describes the behavior

  • Symbolic model: fictional characters or real people who demonstrate behaviors in books, movies, television shows, video games, or Internet sources.

Steps in the Modeling Process

• Attention: you must be focused on what the model is doing.

• Retention: you must be able to retain, or remember, what you observed

• Reproduction: you must be able to perform the behavior that you observed and committed to memory

• Motivation: you need to want to copy the behavior, and whether or not you are motivated depends on what happened to the model.

  • Vicarious reinforcement: if you saw that the model was reinforced for their behavior, you will be more motivated to copy them.

  • Vicarious punishment: if you observed the model being punished, you would be less motivated to copy them.

• Bandura researched modeling behavior, particularly children’s modeling of adults’ aggressive and violent behaviors. He conducted an experiment with a five-foot inflatable doll that he called a Bobo doll.

  • Bandura concluded that we watch and learn, and that this learning can have both prosocial and antisocial effects.