(10) Conditioning and Learning Flashcards
What is Learning?
Relatively permanent change in behaviour due to experience
What is Reinforcement?
Any event that increases the probability that a response will occur again. The process whereby an event increases the probability that a response will occur again
What is a Response?
Any identifiable behaviour
What is classical conditioning?
- Discovered by accident
- Ivan Pavlov: Russian physiologist studying digestion
- Studied salivation in dogs when they were presented with meat powder
- Food elicited reflex (salivation in this case): Automatic, non-learned, response
- Pavlov’s key discovery: An arbitrary (or neutral) stimulus (e.g., sound of a bell) paired with the meat powder began to elicit the reflex (salivation)
- Known as Pavlovian conditioning
-NS =
Neutral stimulus
-US =
Unconditioned stimulus
-UR =
Unconditioned reflex or response
-CS =
Conditioned stimulus
-CR =
Conditioned reflex or response
What is Spontaneous recovery?
- Reappearance of a conditioned response (CR) following its (apparent) extinction
- Without further pairings of the CS with US, CR not recovered to full strength however
What is Stimulus generalisation?
- A tendency to produce the conditioned response (CR) to stimuli that are similar to the conditioned stimulus (CS)
- E.g. association with playing a note of the piano with pain, playing a similar note will produce some anxiety
What did Rescorla (1967) find about presenting tones and shocking dogs?
- Exposed dogs to electric shock. On some trials, shock (US) was preceded by a tone (CS)
- Two groups (A and B) presented with same number of temporally contiguous US-CS pairs.
- But only in Group A was a shock ALWAYS preceded by a tone
- Group A learned the association quickly, Group B did not
- Shocks were independent of the tone
What is Vicarious Classical Conditioning?
Learning to respond emotionally to a stimulus by observing another’s emotional reactions e.g. child watching parent
What is Desensitisation?
Exposing phobic people gradually to feared stimuli while they stay calm and relaxed
What is Aversive therapy?
-Treatment of abnormal behaviour: Pair an unacceptable response with a punishment to produce a new, ‘acceptable’, response
What did Briggs (1954) find about classical conditioning in humans?
- (Human) participants learned paired associate words (A1-B1, A2-B2…etc)
- Concrete example: ‘pineapple – dog’, ‘desk – cushion’, …etc…
- Then new list of paired associates but first word of previous pairs was presented again i.e., A1-C1, A2-C2,…etc) e.g., ‘pineapple – hammer’, ‘desk – scissors’
- Then presented an A item; participant to say the pair that “came to mind” (-B or -C).
- Due to RI, fewer B item responses than C item responses
- But…24 hours later, participants tested again; now, B item responses more frequent than C item responses (i.e., spontaneous recovery of initial association)
- After classical conditioning the conditioned stimulus elicits the _______________ response.
- Conditioned response
- When an animal is trained on one stimulus and responds to a similar stimulus, we call it ________________.
- Stimulus generalisation
- The period during which a response is being learned is called __________________.
- Acquisition
- Before conditioning has started, the unconditioned stimulus elicits the _________________.
- Unconditioned response
- When a response comes back after a rest period, it’s called _________________.
Spontaneous recovery
Operant conditioning
-Definition: Learning based on the consequences of responding; responses are associated with their consequences
What is the Law of Effect (Thorndike)?
The probability of a response is altered by the effect it has; responses that lead to desired effects are repeated, those that lead to undesired effects are not. Stamped into the mind
-Thorndike studied how cats learned to open a latch to get food through positive reinforcement
What did B.F. Skinner (1938) do?
- Built a Conditioning Chamber (or Skinner Box): Apparatus designed to study operant conditioning in animals
- Used Response-Contingent Reinforcement: Reinforcement given (only) after a desired response
Positive Reinforcement:
When a response is followed by a positive stimulus that makes that response more likely
Negative Reinforcement:
When a response is followed by the removal of an aversive stimulus that makes that response more likely, e.g. stopping a shock by pressing a leaver
-Punishment:
When a response is either: i) Followed by an aversive stimulus that makes that response less likely ii) Followed by the removal of a positive stimulus that makes that response less likely
Primary Reinforcer:
Non-learned and natural; satisfies biological needs (e.g., food, water, sex)
-Intracranial Stimulation (ICS):
Natural primary reinforcer; involves direct activation of brain’s “pleasure centers”
-Secondary Reinforcer:
Learned reinforcer (e.g., money, grades, approval, praise)
-Token Reinforcer:
Tangible secondary reinforcer (e.g., money, gold stars, poker chips)
-Social Reinforcer:
Provided by other people (e.g., learned desires for attention and approval)
Operant extinction
- Definition: When learned responses that are NOT reinforced gradually fade away
- Negative Attention Seeking: Using misbehaviour to gain attention!
- Not giving attention can extinguish the behaviour (e.g., Williams, 1959)
- Reward in the form of attention, no attention can extinguish undesirable response
-Stimulus generalisation
e.g., child petting other dogs following positive reinforcement of petting the family dog
-Stimulus discrimination
e.g., Through selective reinforcement of petting only family dog. E.g. can pet the family dog but not other dogs
Why is timing important in learning?
- E.g., Rats in a Skinner box show a rapid drop in learning as delay between the response and the reinforcer increases
- E.g. pressing the lever and nothing happening, then later being presented with food. Confusing as to what caused the food to come
What is the token economy?
- Ayllon and Azrin (1965): Shaping desirable behaviour on a mental hospital ward
- Access to desirable things e.g. cigarettes etc by doing things to gain them, e.g. tidying room etc
The ethological challenge
- Laws of learning not the same in all species
- Ethologists emphasise biological (genetic) predispositions over learning
- Evidence for ethological view:
- Chicken’s instinctive food-gathering behaviour competed with the desired learned response (Breland & Breland, 1961)
- The selectivity of associability in classical conditioning: rats learned an association between taste and sickness but not between a tone and sickness (Garcia & Koelling, 1966)
- E.g. poison (US) > feeling sick (UR) – vanilla (NS) > poison (US) > feeling sick (UR) – vanilla (CS) > feeling sick (CR)
What is imprinting?
- There is a critical period for developing attachment behaviours
- Bird songs: Birds have inborn template for acquiring their own species’ song
What is the cognitive challenge?
- Learning and intelligence relies on the animal’s inner mental representations of the world
- Kohler (1920s): ‘Insight’ in apes, doesn’t discover by chance
- Mental note-taking in rats (e.g., Olton & Samuelson, 1976) – maze to get food, doesn’t go back to places where they’ve already collected food from
