Learning And Ethology Flashcards
What unethical experiment did JohnWatson carry out?
Little Albert experiment - paired loud stimuli with a white rat.
What became a recognized discipline after the work of Konrad Lorenz?
Ethology - study of animals in their natural environments.
What is acquisition?
The period in which an organism is learning the association between stimuli.
What is a spontaneous recovery?
After resting after extinction, the CS will elicit a faint reaction.
Want is sensory preconditioning?
Pair two neutral stimuli, pair one neutral stimulus with UCS, present the opposite neutral stimulus = elicits response.
What is Rescorla’s contingency explanation of classic conditioning?
CS is a learning signal for the UCS, produces additional information about it.
What did blocking experiments do to enhance the contingency theory of classic conditioning.
Findings with rats not responding to lights but to hissing sounds before shocks demonstrates that CS must provide non redundant information about the UCS.
Who is Edward Thorndike?
A functionalist/early behaviouralist who developed the law of effect : we do (and continue) what we are rewarded to do.
Which four concepts did Skinner develop for operant conditioning?
Positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, punishment, extinction.
Explain escape and avoidance.
Escape - behaviour removes something undesirable
Avoidance - behaviour stops behaviour from ever happening.
Instead of classifying reinforcers and punishes as good and bad, how did Skinner classify them?
In accordance to whether or not the behaviour increased or decreased in likelihood.
What is a discriminative stimulus?
Stimulus indicating that future behaviour will have a consequence (positive reinforcement is only given to pigeons if they press the lever when the light is on).
What is the partial reinforcement effect?
Notion that extinction is harder if you’ve only been rewarded occasionally.
What are the four schedules of reinforcement?
Fixed ratio, variable ratio (highest response rate, most resistant to extinction), fixed interval, variable interval.
What is a continuous reinforcement schedule?
When an animal is rewarded for every response.
What is shaping/differential reinforcement?
Rewarding approximations of the desired behaviour until desired behaviour is attained.
What are behaviour therapies based on classic conditioning most used for?
Phobias and OCD.
Name three methods of counter conditioning.
Flooding, implosion (imagining fearful situation), systematic desensitization (Wolpe).
What are four therapies based on operant conditioning?
Behavioural contracts, time-out procedures (theory that behaviour is reinforced in environment behaviour is conducted in), token economies, Premack principle (more preferred activity can reinforce a less preferred activity).
How did Kohler disagree with Thorndike?
He said that animals could learn via insight, when not forced to use trial and error. He demonstrated this with chimps trying to get to food.
What did Edward Tolman propose?
Cognitive map with rats in mazes, when the normal route was blocked they automatically went to the next available route.
What are biological constraints?
Different species’ different predispositions.
What is the Garcia effect?
That preparedness can affect operant conditioning; rats tend to associate external cues with external behaviours (lights and shocks) and internal cues with internal behaviours (sweet water and drug).
What is instinctual drift?
Tendency for animals to revert to their animal ways (Breland and Breland).
Rather than learned behave, ethnologists are interested in ___________.
Instinctual behaviour.
Who introduced experimental methods in the field of ethology?
Niko Tinbergen.
What is the difference between sign stimuli and releasers? How do these relate to fixed-action patterns?
Sign stimuli features of a stimulus that brings about a fixed action pattern, releasers are environmental stimuli that function as signals from animal to animal. Fixed action patterns are stereotyped behaviour sequences.
What is a supernormal stimulus?
Stimulus more effective at triggering FAP than actual stimulus found in nature.
What is an innate releasing mechanism?
Mechanism that connects stimuli with the right responses.
Where are reproductive isolating mechanisms found?
In locations where similar species share common environment.
What did Karl Von Frisch (among others) find?
That honey bees do a dance to communicate the location of food.
What is altruism and inclusive fitness?
Altruism is any behaviour that decreases an animals reproductive fitness (number of offspring living to reproduce). Inclusive fitness is number of offspring and other relatives who live to reproduce.
Who is E. O. Wilson?
Sociobiologist believing in the interplay of genetics and environment.
