General Learning Flashcards
What is learning?
Acquisition of new knowledge, skills or responses from an experience that result in a relatively permanent change in the state of the learner.
What did Tolman suggest?
Animals establish a means – end relationship. A specific reward (the end state) will appear if a specific response (the means to that end) is made
Latent learning
something is learned but it is not manifested as a behavioural change until sometime in the future
Cognitive map
a mental representation of the physical features of the environment
Learned helplessness
Inability to help oneself even if there are opportunities to
Experiment by Seligman and Maier
3 groups of dog (escaped, yoked and control). Escape group could terminate shocks that were administered, yoked could not. Later, when they were placed on a grid, escape group could learn to escape to the “safe side” as easily as the control group, yoked group showed impairment.
Optimism
an explanation that views the situation as other than personal, pervasive, or permanent.
How does attribution style affect learned helplessness?
People with pessimistic attribution style—which sees negative events as permanent (“it will never change”), personal (“it’s my fault”), and pervasive (“I can’t do anything correctly”)—are most likely to suffer from learned helplessness and depression.
Observational learning
learning takes place by watching the actions of others
Diffusional chain
individuals initially learn a behaviour by observing another individual perform that behaviour, and then serve as a model from which other individuals learn the behaviour
Bandura’s Study on Observational Learning
Three groups of children observed adults with toys. First group watched adults being aggressive with Bobo dolls and tended to imitate that behaviour. Group of children watching adult that ignored the Bobo doll were less aggressive with their toys than even the control group
Learning and psychopathy
Psychopaths have emotions but don’t attend to them
Difficulty re-directing attention
Insensitivity to contextual information – reinforcers and punishers
Decreased inhibition on Stroop tasks
Dysfunctions in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala
Implicit learning
learning that takes place largely independent of awareness of both the process and the products of information acquisition
Habituation
a general process in which repeated or prolonged exposure to a stimulus results in a gradual reduction in responding
Implicit learning and individual characteristics
Implicit learning unrelated to IQ
Minimal changes across the lifetime
Evident in infants
