Chapter 4 - Section 1 Classical Conditioning

Question 1

What is the definition of learning?

Answer 1

Any process through which experience at one time can alter an individual’s behavior at a future time. (p. 101)

Question 2

What does experience in the definition of learning refer to?

Answer 2

Any effects of the environment that are mediated by the individual’s sensory systems (vision, hearing, touch, and so on). (p. 101)

Question 3

What does behavior at a future time in the definition of learning refer to?

Answer 3

Any subsequent behavior that is not part of the individual’s immediate response to the sensory stimulation during the learning experience. (p.101)

Question 4

What is a reflex?

Answer 4

A simple, relatively automatic, stimulus-response sequence mediated by the nervous system. (p. 102)

Question 5

What is classical conditioning?

Answer 5

A learning process that creates new reflexes. (p. 102)

Question 6

What is habituation?

Answer 6

A decline in the magnitude of a reflexive response when the stimulus is repeated several times in succession. (p. 102)

Question 7

When did Ivan Petrovich Pavlov live?

Answer 7

1849-1936 (p. 102)

Question 8

How did Pavlov discover the conditioned response?

Answer 8

In his early experiments, Pavlov learned that dogs produce different salivary secretions in response to different foods. Later, he found that the dogs could be conditioned to produce these secretions in response to stimuli that reliably precede food. (p. 103)

Question 9

After his initial discovery, how did Pavlov systematize the process of conditioning, and what names did he give to the relevant stimuli and responses?

Answer 9

Classical conditioning procedure, or Pavlovian conditioning: A neutral stimulus initially does not elicit a response. After it is paired for several trials with an unconditioned stimulus, however, it becomes a conditioned stimulus and does elicit a response.

Pavlov referred to the stimulus (the bell sound, in this case) as a conditioned stimulus, and he referred to the response to that stimulus (salivation) as a conditioned response.

Likewise, the original stimulus (food placed in the mouth) and response (salivation) are referred to as an unconditioned stimulus and unconditioned response, respectively. (p. 103)

Question 10

How can a conditioned response be extinguished? The phenomenon labeled extinction.

Answer 10

Each trial without the unconditioned stimulus (food), the conditioned stimulus (bell) elicited less and less conditioned response (salivation). (p. 103)

Question 11

What evidence led Pavlov and others to conclude that extinction does not return the animal to its original, untrained state?

Answer 11

The conditioned stimulus in this case was the sight of meat powder, presented repeatedly out of the animal’s reach at 3-minute intervals. Extinction was complete by the fifth and sixth presentations, but when 2 hours were allowed to elapse before the seventh presentation, the response was partially renewed.

This phenomenon is called spontaneous recovery.

Moreover, a single pairing of the conditioned stimulus with the unconditioned stimulus can fully renew the conditioned response, which can be extinguished again only by another series of trials in which the conditioned stimulus is presented without the unconditioned stimulus. (p. 104)

Question 12

What is generalization?

Answer 12

Pavlov and his colleagues found that, after conditioning, animals would show the conditioned response not just to the original conditioned stimulus but also to new stimuli that resembled that stimulus. (p. 105)

Question 13

How can generalization in classical conditioning be aboloshed through discimination training?

Answer 13

By reinforcing the response to one stimuli while the response to the other is extinguished. (p. 105)

Question 14

How can discrimination training be used to assess an animal’s sensory capacities?

Answer 14

Researches can train with stimuli which are increasingly alike and investigate until when the animal is able to discriminate one from the other.

Question 15

How have researchers shown that the meaning of a stimulus, not just its physical characteristics, can provide a basis for generalization in classical conditioning?

Answer 15

Gregory Razran (1939) used college students as subjects, printed words as conditioned stimuli, and a squirt of lemon juice into the mouth as the unconditioned stimulus.

The conditioned response generalized more to printed words that resembled the original conditioned stimuli in meaning than to those that resembled the originals in physical appearance or sound. Thus, the true conditioned stimuli in this case were not the physical sights or sounds of the words but the subject’s interpretations of them. (P. 105)

Question 16

What were the characteristics of early North American behaviorism?

Answer 16

Early in the twentieth century some psychologists argued that their science (of psychology) should avoid terms that refer to mental entities, such as thoughts, emotions, motives and so on, because such entities cannot be directly observed.

They believed that psychology should focus on the relationship between observable events in the environment (stimuli) and observable behavioral reactions to those events (responses). However, this does not mean that behaviorism does not address complex human behavior such as cognition and language, only that it is addressed from a behavioral perspective.

Question 17

Why were Pavlov’s findings on conditioning particularly appealing to behaviorists?

Answer 17

In contrast to the empiricist philosophers (discussed in chapter 1), who talked about learning in terms of unseen associations occurring in the mind, Pavlov seemed to provide an objective, stimulus-response way of studying and understanding learning.

(“In a system of psychology completely worked out, given the response the stimuli can be predicted, and given the stimuli the response can be predicted.” (P. 106)

Question 18

How did Pavlov’s S-S theory of classical conditioning differ from Watson’s S-R theory? How does an experiment involving habituation of the unconditioned stimulus support the S-S theory?

Answer 18

According to the S-R theory, conditioning produces a direct bond between the conditioned stimulus and the response. According to the S-S theory, conditioning produces a bond between the conditioned stimulus and a mental representation of the unconditioned stimulus, which, in turn, produces the response.

Support for the S-S theory comes from experiments showing that weakening the unconditioned response (through habituation), after conditioning, also weakened the conditioned response. (P. 106)

Question 19

9: How does the cognitive construct of expectancy help explain the ways in which conditioned responses differ from unconditioned responses?

Answer 19

The S-S theory is cognitive because it holds that the observed stimulus-response relation is mediated by an inner, mental representation of the original unconditioned stimulus.

Cognitive theorists have argued that this mental representation may be best understood as an expectation of the unconditioned stimulus. According to this view, Pavlov’s dog learned to expect food when it heard the bell.

Expectancy theory helps make sense of the observation that a conditioned response is often quite different from the unconditioned response. Consider again a dog being conditioned to a sounding bell that precedes food. In response to food, the dog not only salivates but also chews (if it is solid food) and swallows. Salivation becomes conditioned to the bell, but chewing and swallowing usually do not. (P. 107-108)

Question 20

10: What are three conditions in which the pairing of a new stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus does not result in classical conditioning?

How do these observations support the idea that classical conditioning is a process of learning to predict the onset of the unconditioned stimulus?

Answer 20

Three conditions:
1 The conditioned stimulus does not precede the unconditioned stimulus.
2 The conditioned stimulus does not signal heightened probability of occurrence of the unconditioned stimulus.
3 When the animal has already already a good predictor (blocking effect: the already conditioned stimulus blocks conditioning to the new stimulus that has been paired with it)

From a functional, evolutionary perspective, classical conditioning is a process by which individuals learn to prepare themselves, reflexively, for biologically significant events that are about to happen.

A conditioned stimulus preceding a painful or startling event can elicit fear and bodily reactions that help brace the individual for that event. (P. 109-110)

Question 21

11: How did Watson demonstrate that the emotion of fear can be conditioned?

Answer 21

Watson (1924) and Rayner conditioned an 11-month-old baby named Albert to fear laboratory rats.

To condition the fear, the experimenters struck a steel bar with a hammer to produce a loud sound just after the rat was placed in front of Albert. After these pairings Albert exhibited fear in response to the rat alone and the fear generalized to other furry objects, such as a rabbit. (P. 110)

Question 22

What is evaluative conditioning?

Answer 22

Changes in the strength of liking or disliking of a stimulus as a result of being paired with another positive or negative stimulus. (P. 111)

Question 23

12: How can the appetizer effect and sudden cravings for specific foods be explained in terms of classical conditioning?

Answer 23

A signal that reliably precedes food becomes a conditioned stimulus not just for salivation, but for a whole set of responses that help prepare the body for food and induce a state of hunger: the secretion of digestive juices into the stomach, the secretion of certain hormones into the bloodstream, and so on. (P. 111)

Question 24

13: How has sexual arousal been conditioned in humans and other animals? What is the evidence, from experiments from nonhuman animals, that such conditioning promotes success in reproduction?

Answer 24

Typically, a previously neutral stimulus is used as the conditioned stimulus and an erotic, sexually arousing film clip or sexually arousing vibration applies mechanically to the genitals is used as the unconditioned stimulus.

In an experiment with quail for example, the conditioned stimulus apparently mobilised the sperm-release mechanism prior to the presentation of the hen so that more sperm were available at the time of copulation. (P. 112)

Question 25

14: Why is the conditioned response to a drug-related stimulus often the opposite of the direct effect of the drug?

Answer 25

The explanation of such effects rests on the fact that only responses that occur in a reflexive manner, involving the central nervous system (spinal cord and brain), can be conditioned. The direct effects of some drugs are not reflexes and therefore cannot be conditioned, but the counteractive effects are reflexes.

The body protects itself with counteractive reflexes to all sorts of interventions (such as shoves and drugs) that disrupt its normal functioning. The conditioning of such reflexes is normally useful because it allows the counteraction to begin even before the potentially harmful stimulus strikes. (P. 112-113)

Question 26

15a: How does classical conditioning contribute to the development of drug tolerance?

Answer 26

To some degree, tolerance is a result of long-term buildup of physiological systems in the body that help to counteract the drug’s effects.

However, it is also to some degree the result of conditioning. Because of conditioning, stimuli that normally precede drug intake cause the conditioned compensatory reaction to begin before the drug is actually taken, and that reaction counteracts the direct effect of the drug. For example, a conditioned increase in heart rate would counteract the effect of a drug whose direct effect is to slow the heart. (P. 113)

Question 27

15b: Why is it dangerous for a drug addict to take his or her usual drug dose in an unusual environment?

Answer 27

If an addict takes the usual drug dose in a novel environment, where the conditioned cues aren’t present, the full impact of the drug kicks in before a counteractive reaction begins, and the result is severe illness or death. (P. 113)

Question 28

16: How does classical conditioning help explain drug relapse after an addict returns home from a treatment center?

Answer 28

When they return to their own homes and neighborhoods, they are once again surrounded by many cues that, for them, are associated with drug use.

These cues elicit compensatory drug reactions, which feel like withdrawal symptoms and elicit a strongly felt need for the drug-a felt need that is all too often irresistible. (P. 113)

Question 29

What is drug tolerance?

Answer 29

The decline in physiological and behavioral effects that occur with some drugs when they are taken repeatedly. (P. 113)