Lecture 1 Flashcards
What is learning?
Relatively long-lasting change in behaviour from experience
What is associative learning?
Occurs when change in behaviour results from the pairing of two+ events
What is an association?
- Hypothetical link that allows activity in one entity in the conceptual nervous system to provoke activity in another entity e.g memory of face to memory/response of name
What are they types of associations in animals?
- Pavlovian conditioning: there is a tone played and a delivery of food, animal behaves to the tone like it does to the food (animals salivate when Pavlov waled in - psychic salivation)
- Instrumental conditioning: press lever and delivery of food - dependent on animals behaviour whereas Pavlovian is not
- Only difference when food is delivered
Why do we use the associations?
- Tools for analysing the associative learning in animals - not interested in the behaviour itself
- Allows orderly changes in behaviour that provide ways of building an account of the conceptual nervous system
Why study the conceptual nervous system?
- If we look at the brain we need the behavioural output also = helps understand the real nervous system which we know little about
Why study animals?
- Wealth of information to aid understanding of learning
- Animals allow humans to have a degree of control that is not present in people
- Potential for synthesis across levels of analysis
What is the relevance to humans?
- Underlying physical similarity e.g in brain
- Confronted by similar problems in the world: food, mates, security
- Convergence between theories of human/animal learning
- Parallel effects observed in humans and other animals
What are contemporary procedures in studying animals?
- Pigeon autoshaping: Conditioned stimulus is a keylight for a while, Unconditioned stimulus is food = presented, pigeon pecks food, and then will peck keylight without needing to (not controlled from, they are from pigeon catchers - dumber)
- Appetitive conditioning in rats: bred for training, plays a tone and then food is delivered = when tone plays they approach food in anticipation
- Aversive conditioning in rats: Presentation of tone, and then shock which is aversive = can control exactly when the rat experiences the shock = tend to freeze
- Flavour aversion learning in rats: Rats avoid novel flavours, when they drink sucrose and get ill they reject sucrose. Illness can be induced by lithium chloride but this is given at a gap, they still associate it with the sucrose
What is learned during Pavlovian conditioning?
- Conditioned stimulus activates itself in the sensory register via tone etc. which activates a memory of the CS = memory lets CS turn into US = leads to observed behaviour OR CS in memory turns into a response generator through a stimulus-response link.
- Stimulus - Response: memory of stimulus associated with motor program for approaching site of food delivery
- Stimulus - Stimulus: memory of stimulus associated with a memory of food: the approach motor program is activated through the memory of food being presented
How to discriminate between these associative structures?(S-R and S-S) (Study)
- Experimental group: noise associated with food, food leads to illness, noise comes on and no food approached due to illness
- Control: same but no link between food and illness, separate sessions between food and illness, they should still go over to the food when presented with the noise
RESULTS - Animals in exp group are less likely to go over to the food compared to control over a number of sessions
What is further evidence that animals acquire S-S associations?
- Experimental: Tone = food, Light = nothing, Tone = illness, Light = nothing = Less rats eat food
- Control: tone: food, light = illness, tone = nothing, light = illness
What is sensory preconditioning? Direct evidence that animals acquire S-S associations?
1) Stage one: Sugar + Acid and Salt + Bitter
- Stage two: Acid = illness, Bitter = nothing
- Test: How much they drink of salt/sweet = drink significantly less sugar (makes them think of acid either because its aversive or linked to illness)
2) Stage 1: Banana + Salt and Almond + Sugar
3) Stage 2: Salt-free diet and injection of formalin to crave salt
4) Test: drink more banana than almond
What are associations subjected to?
- S-S associations are subject to extinction
- Compared exp and extinction group: both groups get salt and bitter then one only got bitter alone, then provided the craving of salt, then trying bitterness: only the exp condition drink more
What are contemporary procedures in instrumental conditioning?
- Key pecking in pigeons
- Lever or bar pressing in rats
- Chain pulling in rats
What is learned in instrumental conditioning?
- Stimulus- Response: memory of the sight of the level is assoaicted with motor program for pressing the lever (animal doesn’t know why its doing it just knows the stimulus = doesn’t know about the outcome of its actions)
- Response-outcome: Motor program for pressing the lever becomes associated with the outcome or the reinforcer
What was the study looking at outcome devaluation as a way of discriminating between S-R and R-O associative structures?
- Stage 1: Lever press and followed by food, Can pull a chain and they get sucrose
- Stage 2: Food followed by illness, and sucrose leads to nothing
- Testing whether rats would pull lever or chain without food or sucrose once responses are learned
- RESULTS: Chain is valued more than lever as paired with sucrose, some lever pulls mean some S-R learning, or illness might not have been so potent
