Course 1 Flashcards
What is learning?
Learning is the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience
Typically learning is revealed by a change in behavioural,
physiological, and/or neural reactions/responses
Why is learning important?
Learning allows an animal to adapt to their environment.
―notice important events and learn to ignore events that occur without consequence (non-associative learning)
―learn what stimuli predict events and what behaviours are associated with certain consequences (reward or punishment) to better predict/prepare for or seek/avoid such consequences (associative learning)
How are Not all changes are a result of learning?
Behavioural, physiological, and/or neural changes can occur that are not the result of learning e.g., changes that occur due to:
― fatigue
― illness
― drugs
How can you tell if a behavioural change is not related to learning?
― It is NOT a consequence of experience
― Often temporary – learning is typically long-lasting and can only be changed though experience (e.g., through extinction or the learning of an alternative behaviour)
What is the difference between Associative and Non-associative learning?
• Associative Learning: any learning process in which a new response becomes associated with a particular stimulus.
This can occur via the creation of associations between:
― 1) Two stimuli.
― 2) A behaviour and it’s consequence (response).
• Non-associative Learning: Learning that results in a change in the frequency or amplitude of a behaviour/response after repeated exposures to a single stimulus
― 1) increase in response (sensitisation)
― 2) decrease in the response (habituation)
What is habituation?
• People and animals notice novelty from birth
• When something new happens, we pay attention to it and show an orienting response
―Orienting response: Move toward/attend to new event
§ Look in the direction of and/or lean toward
• However……after repeated exposure to the stimulus we habituate.
― Habituation: A (progressive) decrease in response amplitude or frequency as a consequence of repeated experience with a stimulus
― Habituation is typically stimulus-specific
― Habituation can be short- or long-term, lasting hours, days, or weeks
― This typically occurs to a stimulus judged to be of little or no importance
― We engage in this type of learning so we can tune out
unimportant stimuli and focus on what matters
What is the difference between habituation and sensory adaptation?
Sensory adaptation is the tendency of sensory receptors to fatigue and stop responding to an unchanging stimulus – they change their sensitivity to the stimulus.
• This is a physical, bottom-up process
With Sensory Adaptation you can’t recapture the initial stimulus
With Habituation, you can recapture the stimulus
What is dishabituation?
Dishabituation: Recovery in responsiveness to an already habituated stimulus
But the addition of a novel stimulus reorients the perceiver to the habituated stimulus
What is sensitisation?
―An increase in response amplitude or frequency as a consequence of repeated experience with a stimulus
―Sensitisation is typically NOT stimulus-specific
―Often occurs when we are anticipating an important stimulus so that we are prepared for important cues
―Sensitisation (and habituation) are commonly studied using the startle response and orienting response
What is desensitisation?
A decrease in response amplitude or frequency back down to baseline as a consequence of repeated experience with a stimulus.
What were the results of the infant study on habituation and desensitisation?
Looking time steadily decreased over trials as the infant habituated to the simpler 4x4 stimulus.
Looking time first increased to the complex 12x12 stimulus (sensitisation) before it decreased (habituation)
Results show that attention elicited by a novel stimulus changes with familiarity
―Elicited behaviours change over exposures
• The nature of the change depends on nature of stimulus
• Simple stimulus: à progressive habituation
• Complex stimulus: à Sensitisation à habituation
• After trial 8, a tone was presented as a dishabituating stimulus along with the chequerboard pattern causing recovery of visual fixation to the pattern
When does habituation or sensitization occur?
- Intensity of the stimulus: a low intensity stimulus typically results in habituation, while a high intensity stimulus typically results in sensitisation…a stimulus of intermediate intensity often results in a period of sensitisation then habituation.
- The evolutionary (adaptive) significance of the stimulus: can often override intensity.
What is the Dual-Process theory of Habituation & Sensitisation?
• Recap: The initial increase in responsiveness to a stimulus is sensitisation.
• Sensitisation is thought to be a companion process to habituation that opposes the effects of habituation in many, but not all situations.
• Sensitisation may occur not only during first few presentations of stimulus, but also at the introduction of an unexpected stimulus from another modality (e.g., a dishabituating stimulus)
The underlying processes of habituation and sensitisation can co-occur
The observable behaviour is the sum of these two processes
The habituation effect is observed when the habituation process is greater than the sensitisation process and vice versa.
Key assumption: Response to repeated presentations of a stimulus reflect the operation of two separate processes, habituation and sensitization
Habituation produces a stimulus-specific decline in responding to repeated stimulation, and grows stronger as the number of repetitions increases.
The sensitisation process produces increases in responsiveness on early trials, which decay spontaneously over time.
These two processes are thought to sum to determine overt responding
What is associative learning?
Learning to associate one stimulus with another
What is classical conditioning?
The procedure of repeatedly pairing an initially neutral stimulus (NS) and an Unconditioned Stimulus (US) –a stimulus that reliably elicits a (Unconditioned) Response (UR)
After conditioning the neutral stimulus becomes established as a Conditioned Stimulus (CS) with the capacity to elicit a (Conditioned) Response (CR) that usually resembles the Unconditioned Response (UR)
Is learning lost if the pairing of US and CS stops?
When take food away and only have CS, theres less saliva
But you dont lose the learning, there can be spontaneous recovery, therees some residual association between the metronome and the food
After extinction theres still residual learning thats maintained
