Learning Pt. 1 Flashcards
What is learning?
Process of acquiring through experience, new info, or behaviors
What are the bio psychological influences on learning?
- biological: genetic predispositions, neural mirroring, adaptive responses, etc.
- psychological: previous experiences, predictability of connections, generalization, expectations, etc.
- social-cultural influences: culturally learned preferences, motivation by presence of others, modeling, etc
What is classical conditioning?
learning that one event follows another
What was Ivan Pavlov’s Discovery?
- studied salivation in dogs
- salivation occurred from eating food was caused by neutral stimuli such as:
- seeing the food, seeing the dish, seeing the person who brought the food, and hearing that person’s footsteps
- neutral stimulus = stimulus that ≠ cause a response
What are the phases of classical conditioning?
- before conditioning = unconditioned stimulus and response
- stimulus which causes a response before/ without conditioning
- e.g. unconditioned stimulus = dog food + unconditioned response = salivation
- during conditioning (acquisition)
- neutral stimulus is repeatedly presented with the unconditioned stimulus
- e.g. NS (bell) + US (food) = UR (salivation)
- after conditioning
- UR becomes a conditioned response + NS becomes a conditioned stimulus
What is acquisition?
initial stage of learning/conditioning
- NS must appear before the US
What are the trends of classical conditioning?
- extinction: decrease of a conditioned response
- occurs when a repeated presentation of a CS without a UCS the CR to decrease
- spontaneous recovery: reappearance of an extinguished CR
What are biological constraints of classical conditioning?
- animals + human are biologically prepared to learn associations
- conditioning is stronger when the CS is ecologically relevant
What is higher order conditioning?
Procedure when the CS is paired with a new NS = second, weaker CS
What is stimulus generalization?
- generalization = once a response has been conditioned, similar stimuli can elicit the same response
- can be adaptive
What is stimulus discrimination?
- ability to distinguish between stimuli
- some are predictive
- discrimination = ability to tell which is which
What is operant conditioning?
Behavior is strengthened when followed by reinforcement and diminished by punishment
What is the law of effect?
behaviors followed by favorable consequences are more likely than behaviors followed by unfavorable consequences are less likely
What is positive reinforcement?
add something pleasant to increase behavior
What is negative reinforcement?
take away something aversive to increase behavior against it
What is positive punishment?
Add unfavorable consequence to decrease a behavior
What are the types of reinforcers?
- primary = unlearned, innately reinforcing stimuli (food, attention)
- conditioned/ secondary = gains power through association with primary reinforcer (money, grades)
- immediate = occurs immediately after a behavior
- delayed = involves time delay between desired response and delivery of reward
What are punishments in relation to operant conditioning and the drawbacks?
- ≠ erase undesirable habit
- produce unwanted side effects
- can become aggression
- ineffective unless
- given after undesirable behavior
- each time behavior occurs
- identofy and positively reinforce appropriate responses
What are the biological constraints of operant conditioning?
- nature limits capacity for operant conditioning
- predispose animals to learn associations that ≠ naturally adaptive
- instinctive drift = animals revert to biologically predisposed patterns
