Instrumental conditioning Flashcards
Who first discovered instrumental conditioning?
- Thorndike - Cat in the puzzle box
2. Skinner - Skinner box = Free-operant paradigm
What is a negative contrast?
When a subject is switched from a preferred reinforcer to a less preferred reinforcer, the response will be much weaker
How can responses be taught?
- Shaping - Reinforcing successive approximations of the desired responses
- Chaining - Gradually training to execute a chain of events
Why is punishment less efficient?
- Discriminative stimuli can encourage cheating
- Concurrent reinforcement can undermine the punishment
- Initial intensity matters
What are the different schedules of reinforcement?
- Continuous reinforcement
- Fixed-ratio schedule
- Fixed-interval schedule
- Variable-ratio schedule
- Variable-interval schedule
What is the matching law of choice behaviour?
The rate of response is proportional to the rate of reinforcement
What is the Premack principle?
- The opportunity to perform a highly frequent behaviour can reinforce a less frequent behaviour
- Linked to the response deprivation hypothesis - Once a response has been restricted, it can be used as a reinforcer
How does it work?
- Stimulus (lever)
- Sensory cortex
- Motor system:
- Motor cortex
- Basal ganglia responsible for storing associations - Response R (press lever)
- Consequence C (get food)
- Taste system (brainstem) + Hunger (hypothalamus)
- Reinforcement system
- Back to (3) motor system
What is the role of the Ventral Tegmental Area?
- Self-stimulation shows that VTA controls wants, not likes
- VTA is in the brainstem
- VTA releases dopamine to the nucleus accumbens - Releases more dopamine to the dorsal striatum
- Creates wants
What is the role of dopamine?
- The anhedonia hypothesis - Dopamine gives food its ‘goodness’ - Not supported by patients with Parkinson’s disease
- Incentive salience hypothesis - Dopamine is want, not like - It provides the organism with motivation
- Reward prediction hypothesis - The neurons fire in prediction of the consequence
What gives a stimulus its hedonic value?
The opioid system controls
How can instrumental conditioning be unlearned?
- Naltrexone - A drug which blocks opiate receptors and reduces the ‘liking’ of a consequence
- Extinction
- Distancing - Avoiding the stimuli
- Reinforcement of alternative behaviour
- Delayed reinforcement - To reduce the association
What are the effects of drugs?
- Amphetamine - Presynaptic neurons release more dopamine
2. Cocaïne - Bocks dopamine re-uptake
