Lecture 11 - Punishment and Avoidance Flashcards
What is the difference between avoidance and punishment?
An avoidance procedure involves a negative contingency between an instrumental response and the aversive stimulus. If the response occurs, the aversive stimulus is omitted. By contrast, punishment involves a positive contingency: the target response produces the aversive outcome.
What is the difference between active and passive avoidance?
In avoidance, safety is achieved by doing something. Hence, avoidance conditioning is sometimes referred to as active avoidance. With punishment, increased safety is achieved by not doing something. Hence, punishment is sometimes called passive avoidance.
What is the difference between avoidance and classical conditioning?
In an avoidance procedure, the response affects whether the US is present.
What is discriminated, or signaled, avoidance?
Methods for studying the importance of the warning signal in avoidance procedures and the relation of the warning signal to the US and the instrumental response
What is the difference between an avoidance or escape trial?
avoidance - making the response before US is delivered
escape - instrumental response results in escape from shock
What is shuttle avoidance?
On successive trials, the animal shuttles back and forth between the two sides of the apparatus
What is the difference between two-way shuttle avoidance and one-way avoidance?
two-way shuttle avoidance
animal moves from left to right on the first trial and then back the other way on the second trial.
one-way avoidance
animal is placed on the same side of the apparatus at the start of each trial and always moves from there to the other side
What is the Two-Process Theory of Avoidance?
classical conditioning of fear to the CS
instrumental reinforcement of the avoidance response through fear reduction - negative reinforcement
Because of this, the instrumental response is reinforced by a tangible event (fear reduction) rather than merely the absence of something
What is the escape from fear (EFF) procedure?
condition fear to a CS with a pure classical conditioning procedure in which the CS is paired with the US regardless of what the animal does. In the next phase of the procedure, the participants are periodically exposed to the fear-eliciting CS and allowed to perform an instrumental response to turn off the CS (and thereby reduce fear).
EFF experiments have generally upheld the predictions of the two-process theory
What was found during Independent Measurement of Fear During Acquisition of Avoidance Behavior?
conditioned fear and avoidance responding tend to be correlated only early in training. After that, avoidance responding may persist without much fear being exhibited when the CS or warning signal occurs
Subsequent test trials indicated that the participants were not afraid of Stimulus A because they had learned to prevent shock on A trials
What is response blocking?
extensive exposure to the CS without the US where the participants cannot be permitted to terminate the CS prematurely
also called flooding
What is flooding?
response blocking
How does response blocking/flooding work?
they permit the return of fear and thereby make fear more accessible to extinction
makes it clear that failure to make the avoidance response is no longer dangerous, which should disconfirm previously acquired shock expectancies
What is nondiscriminated or free-operant avoidance?
(no external warning stimulus in the situation)
In a free-operant avoidance procedure, the aversive stimulus (e.g., shock) is scheduled to occur periodically without warning (e.g., 10 s). Each time the participant makes the avoidance response, it obtains a period of safety (e.g., 20 s), during which shocks do not occur. Repetition of the avoidance response before the end of the shock-free period serves to start the safe period over again.
Free-Operant Avoidance Learning
How is the rate of responding controlled by the length of the S–S and R–S intervals?
The more frequently shocks are scheduled in the absence of responding (the S–S interval)
Increasing the duration of safety produced by the response (the R–S interval)
The safe period produced by each response (R–S interval) has to be longer than the interval between shocks that would occur without responding (S–S interval).
