Comp 2 Flashcards
What are the forms of learning?
Associative learning (two or more elements with stimuli & resposnse in which one evokes the other (Papini, 2008).
NonAssociative (experiencing a single event)
Cognitive (knowing)
Discuss the types of associative learning
Classical condition, most famously researched by Pavlov with neutral stimuli causing a neutral response, leading to a conditioned stimuli causing a conditioned response.
Operant condition most researched by Thorndike, wtih his cats learning to get out of a cage using trial and error with tools. They had positive and negative reinforcements.
Should we expect animals to efficiently learn from their environment?
Learning helps to increase the chances of survival and the reproductive success, so hopefully.
How are new skills aquired?
Continuity view of learning = learning progresses gradually, with trial and error (Thorndike, 1911, more quickly gradualy in time: cats learn to operate devices).
Insight learning = learning progresses abruptly. (Wolfgang Kohler, 1925, an abrupt change in behaviour that helps solve a problem - a chimp tried differemt strategies to get a fruit hanging from the ceiling without success. Suddenly he pulled a box beneath the fruit and stood upon it.). Hanus (2011): Spontaneously using water to solve a problem.
Learning via trial and error = Understanding of causal relationship, folk physic = a common-sense appreciation of the causal properties of objects within their environment.
Discuss folk physics and problemts solving
Folk physics is a common-sense appreciation of the causal properties of objects within their environment. Weir et al (2002) found the new caledonian crows could deliberate tool making from wire.
Trap-tube tasks is a common method used to understand problem solving - where the animal gets a stick for getting food, but pushing the stick from the wrong direction causes the food to fall, and Povinelli (2000) but 1 of 4 chimps after many trials.
Discuss how infants face different challenges
Young animals live in different environments (ontogenetic niche). They must be equipped with traits that help to promote survival and devlopment until sexual maturity (ontogenetic adaptations). Especially that they depend on their parents!
All mammals nurture their young with milk (from mammary glands), primates undergo a particularly long developmental period.
Non-mammals including birds are nurtured by their parents, allowing for opportunities for learning more complex behaviours.
So learning helps neonates to communicate, perceiving social cues for example mothers voices causing infants to modify their sucking rates. As well as responding to social cues as human neonates already imitate as soon as theyre born, but only for the first few months.
Discuss the research on human brain development
Tanner (1978) found 6 month olds brains weighed 50% of an adult brain, and by 2 years olf it weighed 75%. It may not be 100% because they have to fit through the birth canal which is limited in width.
Povinelli 2000 and Tomasello 1998 both found children at 3-4 years of age seem to have a better understanding of causality than adult chimpanzees.
How did culture emerge and how does it effect learning?
Humans are unique in having reached cultural heights in terms of arts and politics.
It is often easier to learn a new skill from others (social learning) than to learn it by ourselves (individual learning, through trial and error). We can learn from others through observation, imitiation and practice - social tranmsission, which has been seen in Japanese macaques through the use of washing sweet potatoes - is this actually useful?
Behaviours need to be socially learning, shown by community members and persistent throughout time in order to be a component of rudimentary culture.
What is the support of the culture hypothesis?
We can test this hypothesis through population comparisions. Only 3 populations of chimpanzes use sticks to collect ants whereas others do not.
Lycett et al., 2007 did a phylogenetic analysis from tool use across 7 chimp populations, and found it was socially learnt.
Rawlings, Boysen & Davila-Ross (2014) found cross-colony differences in extractive foraging techniques.
Why should an understanding of learning systems help improve how we critcally analyse empirical research in nonhuman and human behaviours?
Learned behaviour is guided by acquired expectancies (anticipatory internal states that prefigure incentives). Monkeys respond aversively when they get unexpected food if it is less preffered.
Pigeons have the ability to combine seperately learned behaviours to solve a problem (Epstein, 1987). They found it looks like pigeons solved the problem, but it was actually just the reinforcement that was used to teach the pigeons of the different responses when they tried trial and error - which is associative learning.
