Module 26 - How We Learn and Classical Conditioning

What is learning? Learning - the process of acquiring new and relatively enduring information or behaviors.

What is the difference between habituation and sensory adaptation?

• Sensory adaptation occurs when one of your sensory systems stops registering the presence of an unchanging stimulus

• Habituation, like sensory adaptation, involves a diminished response, but in this case, it’s a form of learning rather than a function of the sensory system

Classical Conditioning - A learning process that occurs through associations between an environmental stimulus and a naturally occurring stimulus

Operant Conditioning - A learning process that involves reinforcing or punishing voluntary behaviors to shape future actions

• Differences Between Classical and Operant Conditioning: While classical conditioning pairs an involuntary response with a stimulus, operant conditioning relies on the consequences of voluntary behavior to influence future actions.

Cognitive Learning - A type of learning that involves understanding, knowing, anticipating, or applying information, often occurring without direct reinforcement or punishment. Think observational learning.

Associative Learning - Learning that certain events occur together. The events may be two stimuli (classical conditioning) or a response and its consequences (operant conditioning)

Classical Conditioning

A learning process that occurs through associations between an environmental stimulus and a naturally occurring stimulus

Ivan Pavlov & John B. Watson - Behaviorism

Pavlov’s Experiments

• Called the salivation from dogs when given food psychic secretions UNTIL he realized it was a basic form of learning

• Involved classical conditioning, the dogs learned to salivate at the sound of a bell

• Vocab

  • Neutral Stimuli (NS) - a stimulus that elicits no response before conditioning

  • Unconditioned Stimuli (UCS) - a stimulus that unconditionally—naturally and automatically—triggers a response

  • Unconditioned Response (UCR) - an unlearned, naturally occurring response (such as salivation) to an unconditioned stimulus (such as food in the mouth)

  • Conditioned Stimuli (CS) - an originally irrelevant stimulus that, after association with an unconditioned stimulus, comes to trigger a conditioned response

  • Conditioned Response (CR) - a learned response to a previously neutral (but now conditioned) stimulus.

  • Acquisition - In CC, the initial stage, when one links a NS to an UCS so that the NS begins triggering the CR. In OC (operant conditioning), the strengthening of a reinforced response.

  • Higher Order Conditioning - a procedure in which the conditioned stimulus in one conditioning experience is paired with a new neutral stimulus, creating a second (often weaker) conditioned stimulus. For example, an animal that has learned that a tone predicts food might then learn that a light predicts the tone and begin responding to the light alone

  • Extinction - the diminishing of a conditioned response; occurs in CC when an US does not follow a CS; occurs in operant conditioning when a response is no longer enforced

  • Spontaneous Recovery - the reappearance, after a pause, of an extinguished conditioned response

  • Generalization - the tendency, once a response has been conditioned, for stimuli similar to the conditioned stimulus to elicit similar responses

  • Discrimination - the learned ability to distinguish between a conditioned stimulus and stimuli that do not signal an unconditioned stimulus

• Pavlov’s legacy

  • Judged with today’s biopsychosocial approach, his ideas were incomplete

  • Found that virtually all organisms can learn to adapt to their environment (using classical conditioning)

  • Showed us how a process such as learning can be studied objectively

  • Applications of classical conditioning

    • Former drug users often feel a craving when they are again in the drug-using context. Thus, counselors advise addicts to avoid these environments

    • Works on the body’s disease-fighting immune system. When a particular taste accompanies a drug that influences immune responses, the taste by itself may come to produce an immune response.

John B. Watson

• Little Albert experiment

• Banged a steel bar with a hammer behind an infant’s head when a white rat was presented

• The infant generalized the fear of anything white

• Ethically unacceptable today