Chapter 7 Flashcards
What is learning?
the process of acquiring through experience new and relatively enduring information or behaviors.
What is classical conditioning?
Learning to expect something such as pain or food through establishing associations between different stimuli.
What is operant conditioning?
A form of learning in which behaviour is modified by consequences (learning to repeat behaviours that avoid pain or result in rewards).
How long does it take for behaviours to become habitual?
About 66 days.
What is associative learning?
learning that certain events occur together. The events may be two stimuli (as in classical conditioning) or a response and its consequence (as in operant conditioning).
What is conditioning?
The process of learning associations.
What is a stimulus?
Any event or situation that evokes a response.
What is respondent behaviour?
behavior that occurs as an automatic response to some stimulus.
Learning to associate two stimuli and thus anticipate events is called:
Classical conditioning.
Learning to associate a response (behaviour) with a consequence is called:
Operant conditioning.
What are operant behaviours?
behavior that operates on the environment, producing a consequence.
What is cognitive learning?
the acquisition of mental information, whether by observing events, by watching others, or through language.
What is observational learning?
A form of cognitive learning in which we learn by observing others’ experiences.
Why are habits, such as having something sweet with that cup of coffee, so hard to break?
Habits form when we repeat behaviors in a given context and, as a result, learn associations—often without our awareness.
What is behaviourism?
the view that psychology (1) should be an objective science that (2) studies behavior without reference to mental processes. Most research psychologists today agree with (1) but not with (2).
Who were two important behaviourists?
John B. Watson and Ivan Pavlov
What is behaviorism’s view of learning?
psychology should be an objective science that studies behavior without reference to mental processes. The behaviorists believed that the basic laws of learning are the same for all species, including humans.
What is a neutral stimulus (NS)?
in classical conditioning, a stimulus that elicits no response before conditioning.
What is an unconditioned response (UR)?
in classical conditioning, an unlearned, naturally occurring response (such as salivation) to an unconditioned stimulus (US) (such as food in the mouth).
What is an unconditioned stimulus (US)?
in classical conditioning, a stimulus that unconditionally—naturally and automatically—triggers an unconditioned response (UR).
What is a conditioned response (CR)?
in classical conditioning, a learned response to a previously neutral (but now conditioned) stimulus (CS).
What is a conditioned stimulus (CS)?
in classical conditioning, an originally neutral stimulus that, after association with an unconditioned stimulus (US), comes to trigger a conditioned response (CR).
What is acquisition?
in classical conditioning, the initial stage—when one links a neutral stimulus and an unconditioned stimulus so that the neutral stimulus begins triggering the conditioned response. (In operant conditioning, the strengthening of a reinforced response.)
Will conditioning occur if the NS is presented after the US?
Likely not. Conditioning is nature’s way of helping us prepare for events.
Why is conditioning important?
Conditioning helps an animal survive and reproduce—by responding to cues that help it gain food, avoid dangers, locate mates, and produce offspring
What is higher order conditioning?
a procedure in which the conditioned stimulus in one conditioning experience is paired with a new neutral stimulus, creating a second (often weaker) conditioned stimulus. For example, an animal that has learned that a tone predicts food might then learn that a light predicts the tone and begin responding to the light alone. (Also called second-order conditioning.)
Is it possible to establish a new NS as a new CS without an US?
Yes, through higher-order (or second-order) conditioning.
What is extinction?
In classical conditioning, the diminished response that occurs when the CS (tone) no longer signals an impending US (food).
What is spontaneous recovery?
In classical conditioning, the reappearance, after a pause, of an extinguished conditioned response.
The first step of classical conditioning, when an NS becomes a CS, is called:
Acquisition.
When a US no longer follows the CS, and the CR becomes weakened, this is called:
Extinction.
What is generalization?
In classical conditioning, the tendency to respond to stimuli similar to a CS as if it were the CS (such as one of Pavlov’s dogs hearing a slightly different tone).
What is an example of how generalization is adaptive?
When a toddler who learns to avoid moving cars also learns to avoid moving trucks and motorcycles.
What is discrimination?
In classical conditioning, the ability to distinguish between a CS and other, irrelevant stimuli.
What are the five processes involved in classical conditioning?
Acquisition, generalization, discrimination, extinction, and spontaneous recovery.
Why does Pavlov’s work remain so important?
Pavlov taught us that significant psychological phenomena can be studied objectively, and that classical conditioning is a basic form of learning that applies to all species.
Dogs have been taught to salivate to a circle but not to a square. This process is an example of:
Discrimination.
After Watson and Rayner classically conditioned Little Albert to fear a white rat, the child later showed fear in response to a rabbit, a dog, and a furry coat. This illustrates:
Generalization.
Behavior that operates on the environment to produce rewarding or punishing stimuli is called:
Operant behaviour.
What is Thorndike’s law of effect?
Thorndike’s principle that behaviors followed by favorable consequences become more likely, and that behaviors followed by unfavorable consequences become less likely.
What is an operant chamber?
in operant conditioning research, a chamber (also known as a Skinner box) containing a bar or key that an animal can manipulate to obtain a food or water reinforcer; attached devices record the animal’s rate of bar pressing or key pecking.
What is reinforcement?
in operant conditioning, any event that strengthens the behavior it follows.
What are successive approximations?
In operant conditioning, behaviours that approximate the desired behaviour and get successively closer to the correct behaviour.
What is shaping?
an operant conditioning procedure in which reinforcers guide behavior toward closer and closer approximations of the desired behavior.
How can shaping help us understand what non-verbal organisms perceive?
By training them to respond to one stimulus and not another, we know they can perceive the difference.
What is a discriminative stimulus?
In operant conditioning, a stimulus that is shaped to be responded to among other stimuli.
What is negative reinforcement?
A type of reinforcer in operant conditioning that promotes behaviour that removes or reduces an unpleasant stimulus (like taking painkillers to ease a headache).
What is reinforcement?
Any consequence that strengthens behaviour.
What is a primary reinforcer?
an innately reinforcing stimulus, such as one that satisfies a biological need.
What is a conditioned reinforcer?
a stimulus that gains its reinforcing power through its association with a primary reinforcer. (Also known as a secondary reinforcer.)
What are the basic types of reinforcers?
Primary reinforcers and conditioned (or secondary) reinforcers.
What is a reinforcement schedule?
a pattern that defines how often a desired response will be reinforced.
What is continuous reinforcement?
reinforcing the desired response every time it occurs.
What is the advantage of continuous reinforcement?
Learning occurs more rapidly.
What is the disadvantage of continuous reinforcement?
Learning is more vulnerable to extinction.
What are partial (or intermittent) reinforcement schedules?
When a response is sometimes reinforced, but not every time.
What is the advantage of partial reinforcement?
Learning is less vulnerable to extinction.
What is the disadvantage of partial reinforcement?
Learning happens more gradually.
Fixed-ratio schedules:
Reinforce a behaviour after a set number of responses (like a store’s rewards program - get the tenth purchase free). “Every so many.”
Variable-ratio schedules:
Reinforce a behaviour after a variable number of responses (like slot machines).
Fixed-interval schedules:
Reinforce a behaviour after a fixed time, like weekly senior discounts or mail delivery. “Every so often.”
Variable-interval schedules:
Reinforce a behaviour after a variable amount of time, like checking our phones for a message. Produces a slow, steady response because there is no knowing when waiting will be over. “Unpredictably often.”
Are response rates higher on a ratio schedule or an interval schedule?
A ratio schedule.
Are responses more consistent on a fixed schedule or a variable schedule?
A variable schedule.
People who send spam email are reinforced by which schedule?
Variable ratio (after sending a certain number of emails).
People checking to see when baking cookies are done are reinforced by which schedule?
Fixed interval.
What is punishment?
A consequence that decreases the frequency of a behaviour.
How does punishment differ from negative reinforcement?
Negative reinforcement increases the frequency of a behaviour by withdrawing something negative. Punishment decreases the frequency of a behaviour.
What is more effective at deterring crime: swift or severe sentences?
Swift ones.
How do different reinforcement schedules affect behavior?
They define how often a response will be reinforced.
Why did Skinner’s ideas provoke controversy?
Because he insisted that external factors, not internal thoughts or feelings, shape behaviour, which some people found dehumanizing. He encouraged people to use operant conditioning to influence other people, and believed psychology didn’t need neuroscience.
Whose work did Thorndike’s law of effect influence?
BF Skinner’s work on operant conditioning.
One way to change behavior is to reward natural behaviors in small steps, as the organism gets closer and closer to a desired behavior. This process is called:
Shaping.
Reinforcing a desired response only some of the times it occurs is called:
Partial (or intermittent) reinforcement.
What are the psychological influences on learning?
Discrimination, generalization, previous experiences, predictability of associations.
What are the biological influences on learning?
Genetic predisposition, unconditioned responses, adaptive responses, neural mirroring.
What are the social-cultural influences on learning?
Culturally learned preferences, motivation affected by the presence of others, modeling.
What is preparedness?
a biological predisposition to learn associations, such as between taste and nausea, that have survival value.
What is an example of how preparedness limits conditioning?
Taste aversion. Even if the food and the sickness are hours apart, the association develops, and the animals avoid the food. The CS will also be the taste in animals that have evolved taste aversion, regardless of other stimuli present at the time of eating the food.
How did Garcia and Koelling’s taste-aversion studies help disprove Gregory Kimble’s early claim that “just about any activity of which the organism is capable can be conditioned … to any stimulus that the organism can perceive”?
Garcia and Koelling demonstrated that rats may learn an aversion to tastes, on which their survival depends, but not to sights or sounds.
What is instinctive drift?
the tendency of learned behavior to gradually revert to biologically predisposed patterns.
What is an example of how cognition affects conditioning?
Spiking alcohol with nausea-inducing drugs causes people to associate nausea with the drug, not the alcohol, making it ineffective as a treatment for alcoholism.
What is a cognitive map?
a mental representation of the layout of one’s environment. For example, after exploring a maze, rats act as if they have learned a cognitive map of it.
What is latent learning?
learning that occurs but is not apparent until there is an incentive to demonstrate it.
How do biological influences limit classical conditioning?
Natural predispositions constrain what stimuli and responses can easily be associated.
How do biological influences limit operant conditioning?
Organisms most easily learn behaviors similar to their natural behaviors; unnatural behaviors instinctively drift back toward natural ones.
How do cognitive influences affect classical conditioning?
Organisms develop an expectation that a CS signals the arrival of a US.
How do cognitive influences affect operant conditioning?
Organisms develop an expectation that a response will be reinforced or punished; they also exhibit latent learning, without reinforcement.
Instinctive drift and latent learning are examples of what important idea?
The success of operant conditioning is affected not just by environmental cues, but also by biological and cognitive factors.
What is observational learning?
Learning by observing and imitating others, rather than by direct experience.
What is modeling?
the process of observing and imitating a specific behavior.
What are vicarious reinforcement and vicarious punishment?
When we observe someone receiving a reward or punishment and experience those outcomes vicariously
What are mirror neurons?
frontal lobe neurons that some scientists believe fire when we perform certain actions or observe another doing so. The brain’s mirroring of another’s action may enable imitation and empathy.
At what age do infants begin to imitate novel gestures?
8-16 months
At what age do infants begin looking where an adult looks?
12 months
At what age do children begin imitating what they see on TV?
14 months
What does it mean that children age 2-5 overimitate?
They imitate even irrelevant adult actions, like stroking the lid of a jar before opening it.
How may observational learning be enabled by neural mirroring?
Our brain’s frontal lobes have a demonstrated ability to mirror the activity of another’s brain, which may enable imitation and observational learning. Some scientists argue that mirror neurons are responsible for this ability, while others attribute it to distributed brain networks.
What is prosocial behaviour?
positive, constructive, helpful behavior. The opposite of antisocial behavior.
When is the violence-viewing effect strongest?
When the perpetrator is attractive, the violence seems justified and realistic, the act goes unpunished, and the viewer does not witness the victim’s pain.
What is the impact of prosocial modeling and of antisocial modeling?
Children tend to imitate what a model does and says, whether the behavior being modeled is prosocial (positive, constructive, and helpful) or antisocial. If a model’s actions and words are inconsistent, children may imitate the hypocrisy they observe.
What is the violence-viewing effect?
Media violence can contribute to aggression. This violence-viewing effect may be prompted by imitation and desensitization. Correlation does not equal causation, but study participants have reacted more cruelly to provocations when they have viewed violence (instead of entertaining nonviolence).
Garcia and Koelling studied:
Taste aversion.
ste-aversion research has shown that some animals develop aversions to certain tastes but not to sights or sounds. Which of Darwin’s principles does this support?
This finding supports Darwin’s principle that natural selection favors traits that aid survival.
Rats that explored a maze without any reward were later able to run the maze as well as other rats that had received food rewards for running the maze. The rats that had learned without reinforcement demonstrated
Latent learning
Evidence that cognitive processes play an important role in learning comes in part from studies in which rats running a maze develop a:
Cognitive map.
What is respondent behaviour?
Respondent behavior is a behavioral process (or behavior) that happens in response to some stimuli, and is essential to an organism’s survival. This behavior is characterized by involuntary action. For example, the pupil starts to flicker when exposed to direct sunlight.
Megan’s profane language increases in frequency when it leads to her friend’s approving laughter but decreases in frequency when it leads to her parent’s criticism. This best illustrates
The law of effect.
B. F. Skinner believed that teaching machines could promote effective learning because they allow for both
Shaping and immediate reinforcement
Jordan is frightened by the sound of a train whistle. The sound is a:
Stimulus
Primary reinforcers could best be described as
Innately satisfying stimuli. They do not have to be learned to be reinforced.
What is a discriminative stimulus?
a type of stimulus that is used consistently to gain a specific response and that increases the possibility that the desired response will occur. For example, in an experiment where a rat is being taught to navigate a maze it is easiest to train the rat with a highly desirable treat (such as peanut butter) rather than a less desirable reward such as a piece of broccoli.
The disruptive effect of new learning on the recall of previously learned information is called:
Retroactive interference.
The sea slug Aplysia will withdraw its gills if it is squirted with water. If the squirts continue, as they do in nature, the withdrawal response will diminish. But if the sea slug receives an electric shock after being squirted, the withdrawal of the gills will grow stronger. This is an example of:
Associative learning.
B. F. Skinner’s work elaborated what E. L. Thorndike had called
The law of effect.
Mark owns his own business and wants to make sure that his employees arrive on time each day and take breaks as specified. He has decided to provide a monthly reward of extended break times to each employee who arrives on time and takes breaks as specified. What principle is he using to reward his employees?
Operant conditioning.
After spending two decades studying the digestive system, ________ realized that certain “psychic secretions” pointed to a fundamental form of learning.
Ivan Pavlov
Brandon is trying to train his dog to sit and roll over. He will be most successful if he rewards his dog based on
Successive approximations
Three-year-old Jonathan saw fireworks that were repeatedly followed by loud fear-producing explosive sounds. The mere sight of fireworks first began to trigger a learned fear reaction in Jonathan during the process of
Acquisition
A child who is punished for swearing at home but reinforced for swearing on the school playground is most likely to demonstrate a patterned habit of swearing that is indicative of
Discrimination.
Nikki has learned to expect the sound of thunder whenever she sees a flash of lightning. This suggests that associative learning involves
Cognitive processes
