Challenges for the behaviourist approach Flashcards
How is conditioning linked to evolution?
Survival prospects can be enhanced by conditioning aka. prediction of events/dangerous situations
What did behaviourists assume?
Behaviourists assumed that anything could be taught using principles of conditioning.
Animals are hardwired to learn certain associations much better than others, this is known as _____.
Preparedness
Learning is best with a short ____-_____ time _____.
cs, ucs, time interval
what did Garcia show?
animals could reliably learn the food-nausea associations much better than others
Garcia called the food-nausea associative learning- _____________.
Taste Aversion
What animal did the Garcia and Koelling (1966) experiment involve?
rats
Rats were simultaneously exposed to _____, ______ and ________. Then _____ to cause ______.
sweet water, light, buzzer. Irradiated, nausea.
Rats who were irradiated to cause nausea- what stimuli did they dislike?
They disliked the sweet water, didn’t mind the light or buzzer though.
When the rats were given an electric shock to all the stimuli, what stimuli did they become adverse to?
The light and buzzer, they didn’t mind the sweet water.
What did Garcia’s experiment show about how our behaviours are linked to nature?
In nature, it is food and drink that makes us ill so it makes sense for a food-illness association to be learned quickly and strongly.
Changes in light and sound are more associated with ______ harm.
physical
Broberg and Bernstein (1987) used this practically. What did they do?
They gave child cancer patients a strange tasting sweet before chemo, so this sweet was associated with nausea rather than other foods or hospital.
What objects do we tend to be scared of and can be paired easily with an electric shock?
snakes, spiders and angry faces
Flowers, houses and happy faces are not easily paired with an _____ ______ as they tend not to cause _____ _____.
electric shock, physical, pain
Define Instinctive Drift.
Some instinctual behaviours are too strong and simply “override” learning
What did behaviourists believe happened when presented with a stimulus?
There would automatically be a response.
Some argue there is a stage between stimulus and response, what is this stage?
The Organism’s Cognitive Representation
What is it said that Kohler’s chimps used in order to stack the boxes to reach the bananas?
Insight- problem solving rather than trial and error.
_____ and rats in a maze.
Tolman
In Tolmans trained rats along one ____ which leads to _____.
path, food
Tolmans rats were then exposed to _____.
many paths
What do Tolmans do when they are exposed to more than the one path?
They explore a few inches of each path and then head down the same one as they were trained to (the same spatial location as the earlier path).
What was Tolmans explanation for the rats finding the 1st path?
They had a cognitive map.
Tolman also found that rats could learn these cognitive maps with no _____.
reinforcer.
in Tolmans second rat experiment with no reinforcer, learning only became evident when _________.
There was a reason (food incentive) to navigate quickly through the maze. Eg. when there was FOOD.
In both with or without a reinforcer, what did Tolmans rats construct?
They constructed a cognitive map
What did Rescorla 1968 investigate?
Expectancy
Name the different responses of the 3 groups:
- Rat presented with tone and shock
- Rats presented with tone but no shock, sometimes presented tone with shock.
- Fear response, froze in place
2. no fear response to any tone
What does expectancy show?
We only condition to stimuli that consistently act as predictors.
Give the equation to do with expectancy.
delta V = a ( max value a could reach - V)
What does a stand for in the equation?
rate of learning
what does V stand for?
V= the strength of association
- Rat gets light and shock
- Then gets light, noise and shock
- Rats haven’t learned noise as a predictor, this association has been blocked by the earlier light-shock association.
Name this effect.
Kamin Blocking Effect
Pre-exposure to a conditioned stimulus (CS) causes a ______ of the association between the CS and a later UCS. What is this known as?
weakening
Latent inhibition
Rescorla-Wagner predicts no conditioning will take place if there is ______ _____, as the shock will be just as surprising if the stimulus has already been presented.
latent inhibition
Latent inhibition= ______ to the CS presented on its own. Later when the CS is paired with the UCS the organism pays _____ attention to the CS and so conditioning is _____. This is an example of an ____ model.
habituation, less, weakened, attentional
What topic was Bandura’s (1965) Bobo doll experiment based on?
Observational learning
In the bobo doll experiment- Children who saw ______ adult when they hit the doll, had less _____ behaviour towards the doll. What does this show?
punished, aggressive.
This shows observational learning.
