Unit 3: Learning

Classical Conditionaing

• Unconditioned Stimulus → naturally triggers response

• Unconditional Response → triggers naturally by stimulus

• Conditioned Stimulus → does not naturally trigger the response but changed to trigger it

• Conditioned Response→ triggered by the conditioned stimulus

Types of Classical Conditioning →

• Aversive

Pavlov’s Dog Experiment

Acquistion → initial paring of the conditioned stimulus

Extinction → the breakdown of the conditioned stimulus and the conditioned response

Spontaneous Recovery → random reappearence of the conditioned stimulus after extinction

Generalization → similar stimuli cause the same response

Discrimination → a similar stimuli does not cause the same response

First-Order Conditioning → original classical conditioning, what is additionally used to cause a response

• Food → Drool + Bell = Bell → Drool

Second-Order Conditioning → Using the conditioned stimuli to condition a new stimuli

• Bell → Drool + Light = Light → Drool

John B. Watson → Founder of “Behaviorism”

• an approach to psychology that will dominate throughout the later half 20th century

• Conditioning and behavior modification and still widley used in therapy and behavioral training to help clients change problematic behaviors and develop new skills

Baby Albert Study → 1920

• can you classicly condition emotions? Fear

• Set-up

  • first exposed Albert to stimuli

    • white lab rat, rabbit, monkey, dog, fur coat, etc.

  • not fearful of any stimuli

  • everytime the white rat comes near Albert, they are going to take a big steel rod and smack it with a hammer evertime the rat comes near to cause fear

  • when they brought the other stimuli in front of him, he had the same fear reaction

Baby Albert Update →

• died at age 6

Aversive Conditioning → special type of classical conditioning

• Taste Aversion → why you don’t like certain foods

• Alcoholism →

  • therapist offers client appealing drinks laced with a drug that produces severe nausea

    • undesired behavior + unpleasent stimulus = stop with the undesired behavior

• form of therapy

• Goal = replace positive response to a harmful stimulus with a negative response

  • association between unwanted behavior and unpleasant feelings

• Weins & Menustik (1983) →

  • meta analysis of aversive conditioning

  • studied 685 alcoholics who had undergone aversion therapy

  • 1 year later, 63% were successful

  • After 3 years, only 33% remained abstinent

• Does it work? → in short term, maybe

  • problem = people know that outside therapist’s office, they can drink without fear of nausea

  • person’s ability to discriminate between aversive conditioning situation and all others limits effectiveness

Operate Conditioning → Behavior traning protocol for voulentary behaviors

• Negative Punishment → removing something to discourage a bahavior

• Positive Punishment → adding something to discourage a behavior

• Positive Reinforcment → adding something to encourage a behavior

• Negative Reinforcment → removing something to encourage a behavior

B.F. Skinner → Skinner Boxes

• studied operant conditioning using isolated behaviors

  • uses pigeons and rats

• Discovered reinforcers and punishments

• Behavior Shaping → reward steps towards the goal

• Behavior Chaining → putting a bahavior together with other behaviors to reach the desired goal

Schedules of Reinforcement →

• Continuous Reinforcement → response is reinforced every time it occurs

  • extremley rare in real life

  • extinction happens quickly → overjustification

    • start to do an action simply for the reward

• Partial Reinforcement → responses sometimes rewarded, sometimes not

  • greater resistance to extinction

Ratio → # of instances (occurances)

• Fixed → behavior is reinforced after a given number of responses

• Variable → behavior is reinforced after an unpredictable number of responses

  • fly fishing

Interval → amount of time

• Fixed → behavior is reinforced after a fixed period of time

  • pay checks

  • higher response at the end of the interval

• Variable → behavior is reinforced after a varying amount of time

  • fishing

Observational Learning →

Albert Bandura’s Bobo Doll Study →

• Set-up → does watching someone perform violent acts provide you with catharsis (process of releasing and therby providing releif from strong emotions)

  • 1961

  • 36 boys and 36 girls approximately 3-6 years old

  • Stanford University

  • organized kids into 3 groups:

    • Experimental group #1 → children watched adults play with toys normally

    • Experimental group #2 → children watched adults play with toys violently

    • Control group → children were sent to play with no modeling

  • Does the child’s gender impact the way that they played in the room?

    • no

• Results →

  • increased attraction to guns when exposed to an agressive model

    • guns were never modeled

  • “novel hostile language” → kids were talking smack while beating the doll

  • “creative embellishment” → new ways that the children devised to hit the doll

    • “weapon of assult”

• After →

  • recorded the agressive model and showed it on a TV

  • also recorded one version but with the person dressed up as a cat

  • findings were dynamite as the children still imitated the violent behavior seen on TV

• Legacy →

  • Social Learning Theory: a theory of learning and social behavior which propses that new hehaviors can be acquired by observinng and imitating others

    • Ham Example

Latent learning → learning without knowing you learning

• becomes obvious only once a reinforcement is given for demonstration

• Edward Tolman

  • three groups of rats placed into maze

    • one group always got a reward for completing the maze → faster

    • one group never got a reward → slower

    • one group was not rewarded during the first half of the trial but was rewarded the second half → first half they preformed like group two but in the second half they preformed like group one

      • Building a Cognitive Map

Wolfgang Kohler → pychologist that suspended a banana from the ceiling out of reach from the chimpansees