7 - Learning

Question 1

What happens after military nurses return home after serving reflects the operation of a kind of learning based on what?

Answer 1

Association – sights, sounds, and smells become associated with negative emotions in a way that creates an enduring bond, so that encountering similar sights, sounds, and smells at home elicit similarly intense negative feelings

Question 2

Learning

Answer 2

the acquisition of new knowledge, skills, or responses from experience that results in a relatively permanent change in the state of the learner

Question 3

Key Ideas of Learning

Answer 3

Learning is based on experience
Learning produces changes in an organism
The changes are relatively permanent

Question 4

Habituation

Answer 4

a general process in which repeated or prolonged exposure to a stimulus results in a gradual reduction in responding

Question 5

Sensitization

Answer 5

presentation of a stimulus leads to an increased response to a later stimulus

Question 6

Which period did most fundamental work on learning theory take place?

Answer 6

During the Behaviourism period, between 1930s and 1950s

Question 7

Classical conditioning

Answer 7

When a neutral stimulus produces a response after being paired with a stimulus that naturally produces a response

Question 8

US

Answer 8

unconditioned stimulus, something that reliably produces a naturally occurring reaction in an organism

Question 9

UR

Answer 9

unconditioned response; a reflexive reaction that is reliably produced by an unconditioned stimulus

Question 10

CS

Answer 10

conditioned stimulus; a previously neutral stimulus that produces a reliable response in an organism after being paired with an US

Question 11

CR

Answer 11

conditioned response; a reaction that resembles an unconditioned response but it produced by a conditioned stimulus

Question 12

Phases of classical conditioning

Answer 12

acquisition, extinction, first spontaneous recovery, second spontaneous recovery

Question 13

Acquisition

Answer 13

the phase of classical conditioning when CS and US are presented together

Question 14

Describe the increase of learning during acquisition

Answer 14

starts low, rises rapidly, slowly tapers off

Question 15

Second order conditioning

Answer 15

conditioning where a CS is paired with a stimulus that became associated with the US in an earlier stimulus

Question 16

Classical Conditioning and Drug Overdoses

Answer 16

Phenomenon of addicts dying from drug overdose even though they are experienced drug users, the dose isn’t usually higher than usual, and deaths occur in unusual settings. When taking drugs in the same place a lot, their brain gets conditioned for the compensatory physiological reactions and drug tolerance as a protective function. Thus when the drug user takes drugs in a new environment, the usual dose becomes an overdose because the body doesn’t protect itself.

Question 17

Extinction

Answer 17

the gradual elimination of a learned response that occurs when the CS is repeatedly presented without the US

Question 18

Describe the decrease of learning during extinction

Answer 18

abrupt decline and continues to drop until eventually the object ceases to respond with the UR to the CS.

Question 19

Spontaneous recovery

Answer 19

the tendency of a learned behaviour to recover from extinction after a rest period

Question 20

Generalization

Answer 20

the CR is observed even though the CS is slightly different from the CS used during acquisition

Question 21

Discrimination

Answer 21

the capacity to distinguish between similar but distinct stimuli

Question 22

Little Albert

Answer 22

John Watson (and Rosalie Rayner) experiment with the white rat and the baby

Question 23

What did Watson want to investigate through the Little Albert experiment?

Answer 23

1. Show that a relatively complex reaction could be conditioned using Pavlovian techniques
2. Show that emotional responses such as fear and anxiety could be produced by classical conditioning and therefore need not be the product of deeper unconscious processes or early life experiences
3. Confirm that conditioning could be applied to humans as well as other animals

Question 24

Examples of classical conditioning in real life?

Answer 24

listening to a song eliciting a positive emotional response because of listening to it with a significant other
advertising using attractive women for products targeted at young males

Question 25

Expectation

Answer 25

Rescorla-Wagner model of classical conditioning, CS serves to set up an expectation. The expectation in turn leads to an array of behaviours associated with the presence of the CS

Question 26

What does the Rescorla-Wagner model account for?

Answer 26

variety of classical conditioning phenomena that were difficult to understand from a simple behaviourist view, ex: that conditioning is easier when the CS is unfamiliar because familiar events already have expectations associated with them

Question 27

Eyelid conditioning

Answer 27

following the tone, a puff of air in eyes, leads to blinking when a tone is heard

Question 28

What part of the brain is known to be critical for emotional conditioning?

Answer 28

Amygdala, particularly the central neucleus

Question 29

Rats and freezing

Answer 29

Freezing is a fear response in rats, when they freeze, their autonomic nervous system goes to work. When the connections linking the amygdala and the midbrain are disrupted, rat doesn’t freeze, and if the connections linking the amygdala and the hypothalamus are severed, the autonomic responses associated with fear cease.

Question 30

Food aversion and cancer patients

Answer 30

Cancer patients tend to develop aversion to foods they eat before they undergo chemo, so to fix it, they are told to eat unusual foods like coconut flavoured candy before the treatment, and this spared them from aversion to more typical or common foods.

Question 31

Biological preparedness

Answer 31

a propensity for learning particular kinds of associations over others. (rats respond to taste/smell cues over visual cues, and birds are the other way around)

Question 32

Operant conditioning

Answer 32

a type of learning in which the consequences of an organism’s behaviour determine whether it will be repeated in the future

Question 33

Instrumental behaviours

Answer 33

behaviours that require an organism to do something, solve a problem, or otherwise manipulate elements of its environment

Question 34

Thorndike’s puzzle box

Answer 34

food was placed outside a box where a cat could see it. If the cat triggered the appropriate lever, it would open the door and let the cat out.

Question 35

The law effect

Answer 35

behaviours that are followed by a “satisfying state of affairs” tend to be repeated and those that produce an “unpleasant state of affairs” are less likely to be repeated

Question 36

Operant behaviour

Answer 36

term coined by Skinner, refers to behaviour that an organism produces that has some impact on the environment

Question 37

Skinner Box

Answer 37

operant conditioning chamber, allows researcher to study the behaviour of small organisms in a controlled environment

Question 38

Reinforcer

Answer 38

any stimulus or event that functions to increase the likelihood of the behaviour that led to it

Question 39

Punisher

Answer 39

any stimulus or event that functions to decrease the likelihood of the behaviour that led to it

Question 40

Positive (in context of reinforcement and punishment)

Answer 40

Something is added

Question 41

Negative (in context of reinforcement and punishment)

Answer 41

Something is taken away

Question 42

Negative reinforcement

Answer 42

something bad is taken away (a good thing)

Question 43

Positive punishment

Answer 43

something bad is added (a bad thing)

Question 44

Positive reinforcement

Answer 44

something good is added (a good thing)

Question 45

Negative punishment

Answer 45

something good is taken away (a bad thing)

Question 46

Primary reinforcers

Answer 46

help satisfy biological needs

Question 47

Secondary reinforcers

Answer 47

derive their effectiveness from their associations with primary reinforcers through classical conditioning

Question 48

The longer the gap between the behaviour and the punishment/reinforcement…

Answer 48

the less effective the punishment/reinforcement will be

Question 49

Three term contingency

Answer 49

Skinner; discriminative stimulus, response, reinforcer

Question 50

Research on stimulus control

Answer 50

Group of pigeons were trained to respond to Picasso paintings, and they then responded to other paintings by Picasso and other Cubists, while pigeons trained to respond to Monet paintings then responded to other paintings by Monet and French Impressionists.

Question 51

What does the research on stimulus control (pigeons and paintings) show?

Answer 51

Stimulus control is effective even if the stimulus has no meaning to the respondent

Question 52

Unlike ___ conditioning, where the ___ of learning trials is important, in ____ conditioning, the ____ with which reinforcements appear is crucial

Answer 52

classical, number; operant, pattern

Question 53

Schedules of reinforcement

Answer 53

Skinner, two most important are interval schedules and ratio schedules

Question 54

Interval schedules

Answer 54

Based on time intervals between reinforcements

Question 55

Ratio schedules

Answer 55

Based on the ratio of responses to reinforcements.

Question 56

FI

Answer 56

fixed interval schedule; reinforcers are presented at fixed time periods, provided that the appropriate response is made

Question 57

VI

Answer 57

variable interval schedule; behaviour is reinforced based on an average time that has expired since the last reinforcement

Question 58

FR

Answer 58

fixed ratio schedule; reinforcement is delivered after a specific number of responses have been made

Question 59

Continuous reinforcement

Answer 59

reinforcement after each response

Question 60

VR

Answer 60

variable ratio schedule; delivery of reinforcement is based on a particular average number of responses

Question 61

List reniforcement schedules from least to most effective

Answer 61

Variable interval, fixed interval, variable ratio, fixed ratio

Question 62

intermittent reinforcement

Answer 62

when only some of the responses made are followed by reinforcement

Question 63

intermittent reinforcement effect

Answer 63

the fact that operant behaviours that are maintained under intermittent reinforcement schedules resist extinction better than those maintained under continuous reinforcement

Question 64

Shaping

Answer 64

learning that results from the reinforcement of successive steps to the final desired behaviour

Question 65

successive approximation

Answer 65

each step of behaviour that gets incrementally closer to the overall desired behaviour

Question 66

Superstitious behaviour

Answer 66

when subject behave as though there is a correlation between their responses and reward when in fact the connection is merely accidental.

Question 67

One of the first researchers to question Skinner’s strictly behaviourist interpretation of learning

Answer 67

Edward Chace Tolman, strongest early advocate of a cognitive approach to operant learning

Question 68

What did Tolman suggest?

Answer 68

That an animal establishes a means-ends relationship, that is, the conditioning experience produced knowledge or a belief that, in this particular situation, a specific reward (end state) will appear is a specific response (means to that end) is made.

Question 69

Similarities between Tolman and Rescorla-Wagner

Answer 69

Both theories say that stimulus does not directly evoke a response, rather it establishes an internal cognitive state, which then produces the behaviour

Question 70

Latent learning

Answer 70

something is learned, but it is not manifested as a behavioural change until sometime in the future

Question 71

Latent learning and rats

Answer 71

rats in a control group didn’t receive any reinforcement improved through 17 days in the maze but not by much. rats received regular reinforcements showed fairly clear learning, their error rate decreased steadily over time. Rats in the latent learning group were treated like control rats for the first 10 days, then were regularly rewarded for the last 7. Their dramatic improvement on day 12 shows that they learned a lot about the maze and location of the goal box even though they never received reinforcements. Also, in the last 7 days, they performed better than the regularly reinforced group.

Question 72

Cognitive map

Answer 72

a mental representation of the physical features of an environment

Question 73

Cognitive maps and rats

Answer 73

1. rats were trained to run from a start box to a goal box
2. rats were placed in the maze and the main straightaway that they usually used to get to the goal box was blocked. Instead of taking the next closest path, they chose the one that led most directly to where the goal box had been during their training
   .:. the rats had formed a cognitive map or their environment and knew where they needed to end up spatially compared to where they began.

Question 74

Trust Game

Answer 74

Player given $1, has option to give it up so that their partner would receive $3, who then had an option of splitting this prize with the player. Players were given descriptions of their partner either trustworthy, neutral, or suspect. It was seen through fMRI that the signals in the part of the brain that distinguished between positive and negative feedback were evident only when the player played a neutral partner.

Question 75

Pleasure centres

Answer 75

the nucleus accumbens, medial forebrain bundle, and hypothalamus

Question 76

Parkinson’s disease and reward learning

Answer 76

Parkinson’s is involved with the overproduction of dopamine, which results in impaired reward-related learning

Question 77

Evolutionary elements of operant conditioning

Answer 77

when running a t-maze with food in right arm, rats will often run the left arm of the maze the next time. it makes sense because their evolutionary preparedness as foragers would make them search for food and rarely return to where food has already been found. So it makes sense that they would search the left arm after the right arm.

Question 78

Complex T maze and rats

Answer 78

Like many other foraging species, rats placed in a complex t maze will systematically travel from arm to arm in search of food, never returning to the arms they have already visited.

Question 79

Misbehaviour of organisms

Answer 79

Pigs are biologically predisposed to root out their food, and racoons to wash their food. Trying to train this out of them can be futile.

Question 80

Observational Learning

Answer 80

learning takes place by watching the actions of others; isn’t quite accountable by behaviourism

Question 81

Beating up Bobo

Answer 81

Children who were exposed to an adult model who behaved aggressively towards a Bobo doll were likely to behave aggressively themselves. When they observed this adult being punished/praised for their actions, they reacted accordingly.

Question 82

Diffusion chian

Answer 82

individuals initially learn a behaviour by observing another individual perform that behaviour, and then serve as a model from which other individuals learn the behaviour.

Question 83

enculturation hypothesis

Answer 83

being raised in a human culture has a profound effect on the cognitive abilities of chips, especially their ability to understand the intentions of others when performing tasks such as using tools, which in turn increases their observational learning capabilities.

Question 84

mirror neurons

Answer 84

type of cell found in brains of primates that fire when an animal performs an action and when an animal watches someone else perform the same specific action

Question 85

Implicit learning

Answer 85

learning that takes place largely independent of awareness of both the process and the products of information acquisition

Question 86

Implicit learning tends to be (less or more) affected by age than explicit learning.

Answer 86

less

Question 87

Artificial grammar and implicit learning

Answer 87

participants were exposed to rules of an artificial grammar and later tested on new letter strings. Participants show reliable accuracy at distinguishing the valid, grammatical strings from the invalid, nongrammatical strings even though they usually can’t state explicitly the rule they were following when making such judgements.

Question 88

Implicit/explicit learning and areas of the brain

Answer 88

research participants were scanned with fMRI while engaged in either implicit or explicit learning about the categorization of dot patterns. They performed equally well, but the occipital region showed decreased activity after implicit learning. The left temporal lobe, right frontal lobe, and parietal lobe showed increased activity during explicit learning.

Question 89

Artificial grammar and brain regions

Answer 89

Broca’s area is activated while learning artificial grammar

Question 90

Why does a difficult practice test have the greatest benefit?

Answer 90

increases verbatim learning of the exact material, enhanced the transfer of learning from one situation to another

Question 91

JOLs

Answer 91

judgements of learning; people’s judgements of what they have learned, which plays a critical role in guiding further study and learning. ie: People typically devote more time to studying items that they judge they have not learned very well.

Question 92

Why are JOLs sometimes inaccurate?

Answer 92

after rereading material, something may seem learnt even though it’s the result of low-level processes like perceptual priming, and not the kind of learning that will be required for the test.