Learning and Cognition Vocabulary

Introduction to Learning & Cognition

Lecture Series Overview

• The lecture series explores how psychologists measure and explain human behavior and psychological processes, ranging from behaviorist to cognitive perspectives.
• The series covers:
  • Introduction to MBB-1 and the first assignment.
  • Classical and operant conditioning.
  • Social-cognitive learning and introduction to memory.
  • Short-term, working, and long-term memory, including amnesia.

What is Cognition?

• Cognition encompasses activities of "the mind" involving the acquisition and use of knowledge.
• Includes mental processes: perception, attention, memory, decision-making, reasoning, problem-solving, imagining, planning, and executing actions.
• "The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals" (Goldstein).

Mental Representation

• Central to the study of cognition, referring to how information is encoded, stored, and reconstructed in our minds.
• Representations can be mental imagery or abstract forms expressing complex relationships between concepts, using spatial relationships or symbolic languages.
• Cognitive capacities: used for acquiring and processing information (learning) and storing it to inform future behavior (memory).
• Cognitive states: attending, perceiving, remembering, intending, etc.
• Cognitive psychology: study of cognitive states and their explanation of human behavior and mental experience.
• Cognitive neuroscience: study of the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive capacities; increasingly intertwined with cognitive psychology.
• Mind-body/mind-brain problem: Explaining how mental processes are created by physical neural states is a central challenge.

The Perceptual-Cognitive Cycle

• Neisser (1976) defines cognition as "the activity of knowing: the acquisition, organization, and use of knowledge."
• The perceptual-cognitive cycle explains how mental representations (schemas) are updated as we explore the world.
• Experience integrates the perceptual present and cognitive past, implying an active, embodied, emotional agent embedded in the physical and socio-cultural world.
• The sequential-cyclical process involves interdependence of brain, body, world, and mind.
• Abstraction from reality and emotions is a key issue in AI.

Cognizers and Mental Representation

• Cognizers mentally represent their world.
• Example: mentally representing a goal to obtain an object from a location not in the immediate environment.
• Example: A dog salivating upon hearing the sound of its treats being opened, representing a mental representation of food.

Measuring the Mind

• Methods to measure internal mental states:
  • Subjective questionnaires.
  • Objective measures of behavioral responses to controlled stimuli to infer cognitive processes.
  • Correlating subjective ratings with objective behavioral responses.
• Learning and Cognition explores the shift from Behaviorism to Cognitivism in psychology.

Classical Conditioning: From Pavlov to Watson

• The lecture series traces the history of experimental psychology from theories focused on learned responses to environmental stimuli to a contemporary approach that includes internal mental processes.
• A "both and" approach is needed.
• Classical conditioning is a fundamental form of learning.
• Ivan Pavlov's work influenced John Brodus Watson, who saw it as a model for studying human psychology using objective science by controlling observable stimuli and their effects.
• Behaviorism eschewed internal mental processes, viewing learning as driven by external stimuli shaping behavioral responses.
• Subsequent lectures consider the limitations and further developments in studying the mind beyond Behaviorism.

Learning Outcomes

• Define learning, including non-associative and associative forms.
• Understand classical conditioning terminology:
  • Habituation and sensitization.
  • NS, UCS, UCR, CS, CR.
  • Stimulus generalization, stimulus discrimination.
  • Extinction, spontaneous recovery, rapid re-acquisition.
• Apply knowledge to analyze new scenarios, generate hypotheses, and interpret graphs depicting classically conditioned responses.

Learning: Definition

• Learning is demonstrated in the behavior of the learner; inferred from enduring changes in response to the environment based on past experiences.
• Central to adaptation and survival, such as distinguishing edible from inedible foods or friends from enemies.
• Learning is about prediction — predicting the future from past experiences to guide behavior.
• Learning is the set of biological, cognitive and social processes through which organisms make meaning from their experiences, producing long-lasting changes in their behaviour, abilities, and knowledge
• Learning helps us to predict the future from our past experiences and use these predictions to guide adaptive behaviors.

Foundations of Learning

• Two fundamental forms of non-associative learning shared by all species: sensitization and habituation.
  • Sensitization: temporary state of heightened attention and responsivity to sudden events, creating an increased response to subsequent stimuli.
  • Habituation: gradual diminishing of attention and responsivity when a stimulus persists.
• Aplysia is a sea slug used in Nobel prize-winning work by Eric Kandel.
• Aplysia has defensive mechanisms: gill withdrawal reflex and inking reflex.
• Reflexes are the basis for classical conditioning.
• Kandel studied habituation and sensitization in Aplysia and described the neural basis of classical conditioning.
• Aplysia learned to associate stimuli with electric shocks, preemptively withdrawing its gill.
• Kandel mapped the neurophysiology of learning in Aplysia's nervous system (about 20,000 neurons).

Pavlov and Classical Conditioning

• Pavlov was a Russian Physiologist studying digestion in dogs in the late 19th and early 20th century.
• Classical conditioning is important for survival as it is shared by all living species.
• At the heart of classical conditioning is its ability to allow us to predict the future.
• "The normal animal must respond not only to stimuli which themselves bring immediate benefit or harm, but also to those that only signal the approach of these stimuli; though it is not the sight and sound of the beast of prey which is in itself harmful…..but its teeth and claws."

Conditioning: Learning Predictive Relationships

• Classical conditioning is one form of associative learning.
• Learning how events are related is key to learning beyond habituation and sensitization and is important for survival.
• Conditioned learning processes are conserved across species.
• It is critical to learn associations between stimuli that reliably predict biologically significant events and to learn adaptive responses to predictive stimuli.
• Biologically significant stimuli relate to survival: defensive or appetitive reflex responses, stimuli that are inherently punishing (aversive) or rewarding (appetitive).
• Unconditioned stimuli naturally produce an autonomic (involuntary) response, causal structure of the environment. "if X (conditioned stimulus), then Y" (unconditioned stimulus)
• Conditioning is also called associative learning: learning associations (relationships) between stimuli, and/or between stimuli and behavioral responses.

Classical Conditioning Explained

• Classical conditioning involves learning a predictive relationship between an originally neutral environmental event and a biologically significant event that naturally causes an autonomic reflex response.
• The previously neutral event becomes meaningful, producing the autonomic reflex response on its own.
• A classically conditioned response is a learned reflex response to a stimulus that would not usually cause it.
• Example: salivation to the sound of a bell is a learned reflex response due to its association with food.

Pavlov's Dogs

• Pavlov studied digestion in dogs, focusing on saliva production.
• Dogs started to produce saliva automatically before food presentation, which intrigued Pavlov.
• Dogs seemed to predict food presentation, with the salivation reflex occurring before the food stimulus.
• Pavlov shifted his interest to how dogs learned to predict the future, hypothesizing that they associated signals that preceded the meat presentation.

Classical Conditioning Demonstration

• Using a dog, Ollie, as an example to explain Pavlov's processes.
• Pavlov controlled the stimuli before food, using a metronome's bell sound as a neutral stimulus.
• The bell sound was presented before the food, which naturally causes a salivation reflex.
• Pavlov aimed to see if the bell could cause salivation on its own through repeated association with food during learning, describing three phases.

Three Phases of Classical Conditioning

• Before Conditioning:
  • A neutral stimulus that has not yet been associated with appetitive or aversive stimuli.
  • The innate reflex responses of the learner that occur to stimuli that are naturally rewarding (appetitive) or punishing (aversive or threatening).
• During Conditioning:
  • Experiencing a predictive relationship between a neutral stimulus and a biologically relevant stimulus.
• After Conditioning:
  • The previously neutral stimulus becomes able to produce a learned reflex response in preparation for (or expectancy of) a biologically relevant stimulus.

The Neutral Stimulus

• Before conditioning, the sound of a bell does not cause salivation. The bell is initially neutral, not biologically significant.
• We want to see if we can teach a dog to salivate to the sound of the bell on its own.

Unconditioned Stimulus and Response

• Before conditioning, a dog has a natural reflex salivation response to the presentation of food.
• Food is an unconditioned stimulus (UCS), and salivation is an unconditioned response (UCR).
• The unconditioned stimulus is a biologically significant stimulus that naturally causes a reflex response.
• The reflex response is an unconditioned response, which is unlearned or innate.
• UCS + UCR = reflex

Conditioning Process

• Conditioning involves 'acquisition trials': ring the bell, then present a treat.
• Presenting the NS before the UCS is repeated over several trials.
• Establishing a conditioned response requires presenting the bell sound just before giving food to produce the UCR, repeating trials in one session, and again after a delay.

Conditioned Response

• Test whether conditioning has occurred by ringing the bell alone and measuring salivation.
• A dog has established a conditioned salivation response when it salivates to the sound of the bell alone.
• The bell becomes the conditioned stimulus (CS), and the salivation response to the bell is a conditioned response (CR).

Classical Conditioning Outcomes

• The initially neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus.
• The unconditioned response becomes a conditioned response.
• Classical conditioning has occurred when:
  • The reflex salivation response occurs in response to the formerly neutral stimulus when presented on its own

Acquisition of a Classically Conditioned Response Graph

• Each data point represents the strength of the conditioned salivation response when the bell is presented on it's own, as a function of the number of conditioning trials that have occurred.
• On the Y axis we are measuring mls of saliva.
• On the X axis is represented the number of conditioning trials prior to each test of the CS on its own.

Classical Conditioning Review

• Learning a predictive relationship between an originally neutral environmental event and a biologically significant event that itself naturally causes an autonomic reflex response, so that the previously neutral event becomes a meaningful stimulus that produces the autonomic reflex response on its own.
• Learning a predictive relationship between a neutral stimulus and an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) and its unconditioned response, so that the neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus that can cause a conditioned response (conditioned reflex) on its own.

Stimulus Generalization

• Pavlov demonstrated that the classically conditioned salivation response would generalize (transfer) to other similar stimuli.
• He called this stimulus generalization.

Stimulus Discrimination

• Given that stimulus generalization occurs naturally – how could you then train an animal to produce the response only to a specific stimulus – say a particular tone of bell?
• How could you train a dog to only salivate to the sound of one specific bell, and not to others?
• That is, how could you train stimulus discrimination?

Extinction

• How could you extinguish a dog’s conditioned salivation response?
• What would the graph of extinction trials look like?

Spontaneous Recovery

• Yes, we call this spontaneous recovery.
• If you rest a dog after a series of extinction trials and then present the bell again, the conditioned response will return.
• Extinction spaced over multiple sessions will gradually prevent spontaneous recovery (at least in contexts similar to the extinction context).

Rapid Reacquisition

• A dog would re-learn the conditioned salivation response more quickly than he did the first time.
• We call this rapid reacquisition.

Extinction Process Implications

• What do spontaneous recovery and rapid reacquisition suggest about the extinction process?