Learning Approaches Flashcards
The Behaviourist Approach
Introduced by John Watson in 1913, believed Psychology was a natural science that should only study observable stimulus. Response behaviours and that all behaviours are learned through interactions with the environment.
Classical Conditioning
Pavlov: Learning through association. Pairing a stimulus such as a bell ringing to an arbitrary event such as food.
Extinction
Using classical conditioning to form the link between the event and the stimulus, then removing the event. Such as ringing the bell then not supplying the food. Doing this will dull the association. Doing this enough times removes the association known as extinction.
Spontaneous Recovery
The reappearance of the previously lost conditioned response after a period of time without being exposed to the conditioned stimulus.
Operant Conditioning
Skinner (1940) When learning occurs because of the reinforcement of an event occuring. The organism learns because of the consequences of it’s behaviour.
Positive Punishment
Adding a stimulus as the punishment for a certain behaviour. This weakens the behaviour that caused the stimulus.
Negative Punishment
Removing the stimulus as the punishment. Removing the stimulus makes the punisher aware that that behaviour loses them that stimulus.
Social Learning Theory
Albert Bandura: Shares same basic principles as classical and operant conditioning such as learning from reinforcement and association. This learning however takes place with only observational learning.
Criticisms of Social Learning Theory
difficulty demonstrating cause and effect – although Bandura research controlled variables
and demonstrated behaviour was imitated it is difficult to show cause and effect in real life.
sees behaviour as environmentally determined whereas some behaviours may be innate.
Imitation
Copying the action that is being performed by another person.
Observation
Consciously noticing and understanding information being presented to you through behaviour or actions.
Modeling
Information that is understood from observing another person’s actions or behaviour that is then imitated.
Vicarious Reinforcement
When someone imitates the actions of another person when they see that person being positively rewarded for their actions.
Mediating Processes
We do not observe a behaviour and then automatically imitate it. There is thought before imitating it and this consideration is called Mediational Processes. This occurs between observing the behaviour (stimulus) and imitating it or not (response)
Attention
The behaviour is noticed by the person in question.
Retention
The behaviour is then preserved in the person’s memory.
Reproduction
The process of learning how to imitate the behaviour, doing this might require the person imitating it to learn a new skill which would also happen at this point.
Motivation
There must be a reason why the imitator is attempting to copy the actions of the other person for them to want to have this skill.
Bandura’s Bobo Doll Research
Bandura (1961): Aim was to test whether children would copy the behaviour they witnessed a role model perform. 36 boys and 36 girls with a mean age of 4 and 4 months. Matched by relative levels of similar aggression into 3 groups. 24 children were shown a video of an adult attacking a three foot Bobo Doll, 24 children were shown a video of an adult interacting with children normally, and 24 children were used as a control and not shown anything. Afterwards the children were brought into rooms alone for 10 minutes that had toys they couldn’t play with, they were then brought into another room with a mallet and a Bobo Doll as well as additional toys for 20 minutes.
Data of Bandura’s Bobo Doll Research
Children exposed to the Bobo Doll model showed more of the model’s aggressive behaviour than the other groups with acts closely resembling the model.
