26.5 - Learning and Conditioning

Question 1

Describe how Pavlov’s conditioning procedure works.

Answer 1

(Pavlov, 1927):

• Conditioned dogs to salivate upon hearing a bell
• By playing a tone before the food is given to the dog, the dog begins to associate the tone (conditioned stimulus) with the food (unconditioned stimulus) regardless of whether the tone is played

Question 2

What is extinction? What causes it?

Answer 2

• The loss of conditioning (e.g. a dog no longer associating a bell with food).
• It occurs gradually when the conditioned stimulus is presented without the unconditioned stimulus.

Question 3

What is spontaneous recovery (in conditioned stimuli)?

Answer 3

• When a conditioned stimulus (e.g. bell sound) is presented without the unconditioned stimulus (e.g. food), the strength of a conditioned response is weakened
• However, spontaneous recovery is the way in which the strength of the conditioning recovers slightly following an interval after the CS is presented alone
• The first diagram shows that there is a short-term habituation-like process that causes a decline in response between the two trials on that day. Then there is spontaneous recovery between the days. There is a gradual long-term decline due to extinction.

Question 4

What are paraphilias and how can they occur? Give some experimental evidence.

[EXTRA]

Answer 4

Rachman (1966):

• A coloured photographic slide was repeatedly projected on a screen immediately prior to the presentation of slides of sexually arousing nude women.
• This conditioned the participants to find the boot itself sexually arousing within around 10 trials.

Question 5

What is contingency learning?

Answer 5

The idea that humans gain knowledge by gathering associations between a certain behaviour and a specific consequence:

• It may seem as though conditioning only happens when a conditional stimulus becomes associated with an unconditional stimulus (e.g. a bell sound becomes associated with food being given)
• However, the brain takes into account times when either or both of these stimuli are not presented
• So we can calculate:
  
  • Fraction of times when the unconditioned stimulus is present in situations where the conditioned stimulus has occurred (e.g. the proportion of times when there is food given that there has been a bell sound)
  • Fraction of times when the unconditioned stimulus is present in situations where the conditioned stimulus has NOT occurred (e.g. the proportion of times when there is food given that there has been NO bell sound)
• We can substract one fraction from the other to essentially tell us how strong the conditioning will be
• If the number is greater than zero, then there will be positive conditioning
• If the number is zero then the conditioned event (e.g. the bell) doesn’t seem to predict whether the unconditioned event will occur, so there will be no conditioning

For example, if you ring a bell 10 times and 7 of these times you also give the dog food, then this equates to a fraction of 0.7. If you don’t ring a bell 10 times and 7 of these times you also give the dog food, then this also equates to a fraction of 0.7. There will be no conditioning since 0.7-0.7=0, or in other words the presence of the bell does not predict whether there will be food given.

Question 6

Describe the learning curves for conditioning in situations where:

• Conditioned stimulus is correlated with the unconditioned stimulus (i.e. the occurrence of the stimulus is a decent predictor of the occurrence of the unconditioned event)
• Conditioned stimulus is not correlated with the unconditioned stimulus (i.e. the occurrence of the stimulus is NOT a predictor of the occurrence of the unconditioned event)

[SEE PREVIOUS FLASHCARD FOR MORE INFO]

Answer 6

• When there is a positive correlation, the conditioning gradually develops and the response to context fades away.
• When there is no correlation, there is no conditioning based on the conditioned stimulus because the brain recognises that it doesn’t predict whether the unconditioned event will occur. Thus, the response to the conditioned stimulus fades away. However, the response to context (e.g. the room the animal is in, etc.) is strengthened gradually.
• In other words, these are reciprocal judgements

Question 7

Give an example of a condition where contingency learning is impaired.

Answer 7

• Contingency/causal learning is a marker for mental health
• People with symptoms of low mood or depression are insensitive to learning about absent events and serotonin treatments influence this type of causal learning.

Question 8

Describe the importance of conditioning in drug tolerance.

[IMPORTANT]

Answer 8

(Siegel, 1977):

• It was thought that tolerance to drugs like morphine occurred over time due to physiological changes (like changes in distribution of the drug in the body)
• However, Siegel thought that it might be instead due to conditioning of the context in which the drug is taken
• When rats were injected with morphine, over time their tolerance increased
• When the mice are injected with a high dose of morphine in the same context (room/lighting/etc.) as usual, then they survive
• But when the mice are injected with a high dose of morphine in a different context (room/lighting/etc.) to usual, then they often die
• The explanation for this is that the rats are conditioned to associate the context with the drug taking, which triggers protective and compensatory mechanisms, allowing a higher dose to be taken. When the context is changed, this doesn’t happen and the rat overdoses.
• This explains why many drug takers overdose in places where they haven’t taken drugs before.

Question 9

Describe the concept of overshadowing in conditioning and learning.

Answer 9

When two conditional stimuli are presented alongside an unconditional stimulus, then the learning about each of the conditional stimuli is reduced.

Question 10

Describe the concept of blocking in conditioning and learning. Who studied it?

[IMPORTANT]

Answer 10

(Kamin, 1969):

• Conditioned rats to associate a conditional stimuli with an unconditioned stimulus
• After this, attempted to condition the rats to associate a second conditional stimuli with the unconditioned stimulus
• However, the learning of this second conditional stimulus was weakened
• This is the concept of blocking

Question 11

How does schizophrenia relate to conditioning and learning?

[IMPORTANT]

Answer 11

• Schizophrenia patients appear to have deficits in blocking (see previous flashcard)
• This means that they forms lots of associations between stimuli, which normal people do not since there are already existing associations
• This can lead to a range of symptoms such as paranoia, etc.
• Treatments include dopamine antagonists, which are thought to help blocking and inhibit the learning of new associations

Question 12

What is conditioning related to phobias?

Answer 12

• Early work on conditioning used child learning as model for human phobias (i.e. showed that phobias are often created by conditioning)
• There has also come about the idea of biological preparedness, which explains why people tend to develop phobias towards some things more than others (e.g. spiders)

Question 13

How can we treat phobias created by conditioning?

Answer 13

Extinction can be induced by presenting the conditional stimulus without the unconditional stimulus.

Question 14

Describe how a phobia of pickles may develop.

Answer 14

A person may have a bad childhood experience where they associate the sight of a pickle (conditional stimulus) with the horrible taste of a pickle (unconditional stimulus).

Question 15

What is ANV?

Answer 15

Anticipatory nausea and vomiting:

• Chemotherapy (unconditional stimulus) produces nausea (outcome)
• Over time, just the sight or thought of the clinic (conditional stimulus) can elicit AVN
• The evidence for this being due to conditioning:
  
  • AVN only occurs in those who have had at least one chemotherapy session (Stockhorts, 1998)
  • Severity of ANV depends on severity of initial reaction to drugs

Question 16

What is the white coat effect?

Answer 16

• It is the increase in blood pressure in many individuals whenthe reading is taken in a clinical setting rather than at home.
• It is explained by the sight of the white coat triggering anxiety in patients

Question 17

What are the two types of placebo effect?

Answer 17

• Positive effect (placebo) -> When a sugar pill is given and the patient is told it will give them positive effects, so they experience them
• Negative effect (nocebo) -> Whem a sugar pill is given and the patient is told it will give them negative effects, so they experience them

Question 18

Describe the placebo effect in analgesia and Parkinson’s treatment. What evidence is there that conditioning is involved?

Answer 18

• Placebo analgesia drives endogenous opioid release (Benedetti, 1999)
• Placebo response in Parkinsonism drives dopamine release (see Price, 2002)
• However, these events are dependent on having previously taken the actual medication, so that the individual is conditioned to release opioid/dopamine

Question 19

What are the two types of associative learning (conditioning)?

[IMPORTANT]

Answer 19

• Classical conditioning (Pavlovian) -> When an conditioned stimulus is associated with an unconditioned stimulus
• Operant conditioning -> When a certain behaviour is associated with a reward or outcome

Question 20

What is learned helplessness and who came up with the concept?

[IMPORTANT]

Answer 20

Seligman:

• Learned helplessness is behaviour exhibited by a subject after enduring repeated aversive stimuli beyond their control.
• It was initially thought to be caused from the subject’s acceptance of their powerlessness: discontinuing attempts to escape or avoid the aversive stimulus, even when such alternatives are unambiguously presented.
• Over the past few decades, neuroscience has provided insight into learned helplessness and shown that the original theory actually had it backwards: the brain’s default state is to assume that control is not present, and the presence of “helpfulness” is what is actually learned.

Question 21

What is agoraphobia?

[IMPORTANT]

Answer 21

• An anxiety disorder characterized by symptoms of anxiety in situations where the person perceives their environment to be unsafe with no easy way to escape.
• These situations can include open spaces, public transit, shopping centers, or simply being outside their home.
• Being in these situations may result in a panic attack.
• Those affected will go to great lengths to avoid these situations.
• In severe cases people may become completely unable to leave their homes.

It is somehow related to learning and conditioning?

Question 22

Describe how OCD may be partly explained by maladaptive learning and conditioning.

Answer 22

• Mary recalled that as a seven-year-old child she developed a fear of contracting cancer from an aunt with terminal carcinoma who came to live with her family.
• The aunt had a favorite chair she always sat in that Mary associated with her fear of cancer, so that eventually simply the site of the chair provoked dread in the child.
• Thus, by means of classical conditioning the chair became a conditioned stimulus for fear and anxiety.
• However, in OCD, the conditioning does not stop with just one association of a neutral and feared stimulus. It continues by means of higher order conditioning to include more and more situations, objects, and events.
• Continuing with Mary’s example — other people sat in the aunt’s chair; and by means of higher order conditioning they too became conditioned stimuli for fear.
• Furthermore, the aunt sat on other furniture and touched other objects in the house. So a kind of fear conditioning contagion took place that transformed many non-fearful situations, events, circumstances, people, etc. into conditioned stimuli for fear.