Lecture 13 Flashcards
What is non-declarative memory?
● Non-declarative memory, also known as implicit memory, is memory without conscious effort or awareness
● Can be associative or non-associative*
● *Note that these terms can be confusing for students. We will use them here because they are common in the literature but do not worry if they do not click for you.
this is the kinda learning that takes place that we aren’t necessarily aware of. Can result in a change in our attitudes or preferences but we aren’t necessarily able to conjure up what the memory was. Many textbooks use the terms associative and non-associative to refer to different types of non-declarative learning and memory. She will not test us on this difference.
What is associative learning? What is non-associative learning?
Non- associative learning
- Habituation
- Sensitization
- Perceptual
- Learning
Changes in behavior that occur in response to repeated exposure to a single stimulus
within non-associative learning we have habituation, sensitization and perceptual learning. We can consider learning and memory interchangeable in this field. In animals it is typically refered to as learning, in humans it is typically referred to memory.
Associative learning
- Classical Conditioning
- Instrumental Conditioning
- Skill Learning? (this is sometimes associative, nonassociative or niether)
Learning to associate one stimulus with another
What is an example of habituation? is this associative?
● Imagine you just moved into a new apartment in New York City. The first few nights, you remain restless because the sounds from the street are just too loud. But after about a week, you are able to fall asleep almost immediately. It is as though your brain has tuned out the noises. This is habituation.
we habituate to something through repeated exposure to that single stimulus. This is non associative
What is an example of sensitization? Is this associative?
● Imagine you are home alone one night. You sit down to watch a light hearted movie. Suddenly, you hear a loud bang coming from the upstairs as though something fell over. You startle but you brush it off, thinking it was just your cat playing in your closet again. Still, you cannot shake the feeling that something is not right. As you settle back into the movie, you hear the faint sounds of the fridge cracking, the dishwasher changing cycles, or the laundry whirling. On high alert, each faint sound—typically ignored —startles you. This is sensitization.
This is non-associative
What are the 3 types of simple learning?
● We frequently encounter the same stimuli day after day. But what happens when we encounter stimuli often? Although distinct, three types of learning help us adapt behavior to predictable environments.
Habituation: decreasing responses to a frequent but innocuous stimulus
(this is really adaptive. If something will not harm, hurt, or help us, we kinda just tune it out!)
Sensitization: increasing responses to a noxious/ arousing stimulus
Perceptual learning: becoming better at processing/ recognizing a frequent stimulus
What is habituation?
● A decrease in the strength or occurrence of a behavior due to repeated exposure to the stimulus that produces the behavior
Example: socializing cats or dogs to a neighbor;
(at first non-human animals might be weary of people who aren’t their owner but overtime they become more sociable. )
Example: orienting response in infants (this is the dependent variable in many infant studies. Infants tend to have a strong response to a novel stimulus and overtime they habituate. This is how we test learning and memory in infants.)
● Some habituate faster than others
Example: Dr. Palombo’s acoustic startle response (Dr. Palombo thinks she is a slower habituater. )
What are the characteristics of habituation?
● Habituation is ubiquitous throughout the animal kingdom.
Across organisms, there are striking similarities in the way habituation works!
○ Dis-habituation
○ Stimulus specificity
○ Spontaneous recovery
○ Innocuous (weak) stimuli work better than strong
○ Short- and long-term forms (not discussed)
○ Spaced works better than massed (not discussed)
Let’s look at some of these…
Dis-habituation: A novel/arousing stimulus can temporarily recover responses to the habituating stimulus. This fades quickly, though. (imagine a scenario where you get a stimulus. Initially you respond to that sound, then that response overtime fades. After only a few trials you go down to only 40% habituation. If you place something loud after, it will go up but not 100%)
Stimulus specificity: Generally, responses only decrease to the habituating stimulus.
(if you are doing an experiment with different tones of frequencies you are only habituating to one frequency)
Spontaneous recovery: When repeated stimulus stops, behavior gradually returns to normal. Time for recovery depends on several factors.
(when the repeated stimulus stops or there is a long break, you will need to rehabituate again. )
Weaker stimulus = more habituation: The stronger the stimulus, the less habituation develops.
* This ensures that weak/useless stimuli are ignored, but painful/important stimuli gain more attention.
(the faint sound has the strongest habituation, louder sound has a slower habituation, if it is painful, you don’t habituate. This is adaptive. )
What is sensitization?
Sensitization is an increase in the strength or occurrence of a behavior due to exposure to an arousing or noxious stimulus. A conserved mechanism to increase responses to stimuli that are important.
Initial habituation to settle animals to a stable baseline
Foot shock
applied at dashed line to purple group only
Sensitization increasing responses to a noxious/ arousing stimulus
Sensitization: increased responding to start stimulus after shock
you’ve got a habituation response to a stimulus, after some trials, you give one group (the purple group) a foot shock. Now you represent that original tone. What will happen is that the purple group is responding more strongly. They are sensitized.
Sensitization is also ubiquitous—found throughout the animal kingdom.
● Sensitization also shows a set of common characteristics:
○ Spontaneous recovery
○ Short- and long-term forms
○ Noxious (e.g., painful) stimuli work better than weak
○ More generalization, less stimulus specificity
○ Can develop with just a single stimulus
one thing that is really important to differentiate sensitization from habituation is that it is an increase in response
What is the difference between sensitization and habituation?
GO TO SLIDE 18
Does repeated stimulus exposure change your ability to detect and percieve a stimulus?
Repeated stimulus exposure also changes your ability to detect and perceive a stimulus. Such altered familiarity with the stimulus has several manifestations.
Perceptual learning: repeated experiences with a set of stimuli improve ability to distinguish those stimuli.
What is percpetual learning?
Simply encountering a stimulus makes it increasingly easier to tell it apart from other stimuli. You’ve effortlessly learned many similar things:
Coke versus Pepsi, McDonald’s versus Wendy’s, and so forth.
○ Language! Subtly different sounds with very different meanings.
perhaps the most practical example is language. Our exposure to those phonemes can shape our ability to percieve differences. There are sensitive periods in learning for this perceptual differentiation. With wine drinkers they can often differentiate different types of wine. Farmers are often good at telling apart different stimuli.
What is discrimination training?
● With feedback, one can learn to tell even subtle differences in stimuli.
● Seems impossible? With practice and feedback, humans and other
animals can learn to make such fine distinctions.
● Exposure can also lead to priming—you like familiar stimuli better (implications?)
when we have lots of repeated exposrue to stimulus, sometimes we prefer it. THis is the foundation of advertizing.
What is classical conditioning?
● Classical (Pavlovian) conditioning: a form of learning in which an animal acquires the expectation that a given stimulus predicts a specific upcoming important event
X predicts Y (associative learning)
x predicting why is really adaptive for us.
What are the basic concepts of classical conditioning?
Unconditioned stimulus (US):
a cue that in the absence of training, naturally evokes a response
Unconditioned response (UR):
the naturally occurring response to an unconditioned stimulus (US)
Conditioned stimulus (CS):
a cue that is paired with an unconditioned stimulus (US) and comes to elicit a conditioned response (CR)
Conditioned response (CR):
the trained response to a conditioned stimulus (CS) in anticipation of the unconditioned stimulus (US) that the CS predicts
How did pavlovian dogs condition to salivate?
(A) Before training, a neutral stimulus, such as a tone, evokes no response from a dog.
this tone will acquire significance through learning.
(B) During training, the tone, formerly a neutral stimulus, becomes a conditioned stimulus. (CS) when it is repeatedly paired with the food US to evoke a salivation UR
its the food it is salivating too. Not the tone. The food is the unconditioned stimulus. This is a natural response for the dog. BUT this tone is presented alongside the food.
(C) After training, the tone, now a conditioned stimulus (CS), evokes a learned response, the conditioned response (CR) of salivation.
now the tone causes the dog to salivate becuase i predicts the presence of food.
What is appetitive conditioning? What is aversive conditioning? What is extinction?
Appetitive conditioning: conditioning in which the US is a desirable event (such as food delivery)J
Aversive conditioning: conditioning in which the US is a disagreeable event (such as a shock or an air puff to the eye)
fear conditioning involves a shock to the foot and these animal models are the basis for many theories of PTSD and other mental health conditions.
Extinction reducing a learned response to a stimulus by ceasing to pair that stimulus with another (i.e., breaking the US-CS relationship)
this is reducing a learned response to a stimulus by seizing to pair that stimulus with another. You break the relationship between the tone and the food. Those don’t co-occur togehter anymore. Now the response is going to be extinguished. You see this in a lot of non-human animals but then you see spontaneous recovery becuase it has not been truly erased.
What is compound conditioning? What is overshadowing?
● Compound conditioning: conditioning in which two or more cues are present together, usually simultaneously, forming a compound CS
● Overshadowing: an effect seen in compound conditioning when a more salient cue within a compound acquires more association strength than does the less salient cue and is thus more strongly associated with the US
this means that when you have 2 cues predicting something important in the environment, sometimes both acquire predictive utility. In other cases, one of them takes precedence.
What are the characteristics of non-associative vs. associative learning?
Non- associative learning:
- Habituation
- Sensitization
- Perceptual Learning
Changes in behavior that occur in response to repeated exposure to a single stimulus
Associative learning:
- Classical Conditioning
- Instrumental Conditioning
- skill learning?
Learning to associate one stimulus with another
What is instrumental or operant conditioning?
● Instrumental or operant conditioning: the process whereby organisms learn to make or to refrain from making certain responses in order to obtain or avoid certain outcomes
○ How we learn about the consequences of our actions
there are different names for instrumental condition (also operant conditioning).
What are Thorndike’s studies of animal learning?
the cats were placed in complicate boxes and they had to escape and it was trial and error learning. They later accidentally discover that some movememnt leads to the box opening.
Hypothetical data from a cat learning to escape from the puzzle box efficiently after a few experiences.
What is operant conditioning?
● Operant conditioning can be formulated as a three-part association ○ Stimulus→ S Response R → Outcome O
■ In the puzzle box, S is the box, R is the sequence of movements needed to open the door, and O is the escape
■ The S → R association is strengthened when R is followed by a desirable outcome
so the animal is going to engage in those motor behaviorus when the outcome is desirable. If getting out of the box had a shock or something, they wouldn’t engage in that behaviour.
S Stimulus: a toddler crying
R Response: bring toddler in bed
O Outcome: a toddler stops, I sleep
What is the difference between classical and operant conditioning?
● In classical conditioning, the animal experiences an outcome (the unconditioned stimulus, or US) regardless of whether they perform the conditioned response (CR)
● Yet, in operant conditioning, the outcome O depends on whether the organism performs the response R
the outcoems is dependent on the behaviour. This is not the case in classical condi
Classical: environment operates on the animal.
Operant: Animal operates on the environment
What is a skinner box?
● To measure behavior more directly, Skinner devised a cage—now commonly called a Skinner box—with a trough in one wall through which food could be delivered automatically. Commonly used today.
skinner devleoped the skinner box. This is used today in different variations. These boxes are used to study and quantify behaviours. e.g. the degree of lever pressing.
Explain the different types of reinforcement
- Positive Reinforcement (Adding something pleasant to increase a behavior.) (more effective)
Example: A parent gives her son a candy for completing his math homework. - Negative Reinforcement (Removing something unpleasant to increase a behavior.) (More effective)
Example: A parent tells her son if he does his homework quickly, he does not have to take out the garbage. - Positive Punishment (Adding something unpleasant to decrease a behavior.)
Example: A parent gives her son extra chores because he hit his brother (the parent hopes this will decrease the frequency of hitting). - Negative Punishment (Removing something pleasant to decrease a behavior.)
Example: A parent takes her son’s Ipad away because he did not listen.
What are punishers? Are they effective? Why or why not?
Both Thorndike (1932) and Skinner (1938, 1953) argued that punishment is not as effective. An important topic in society (including discussions of parenting).
○ Punishment leads to more variable behavior
○ Punishment can backfire because you are giving the situation more attention
○ Punishments are often delayed (can be confusing)…
from a learning perspective there are reasons why this is not as effective. Giving a situation attention, especiallty in children who are more prone to engage in certain negative behaviours is bad.
they don’t know what they are being punished for sometimes if the punishment is delayed.
What is skill learning?
Procedural memories are skill memories,
i.e., memories for actions
* Perform procedures without being consciously aware of how to do them
* People who cannot form new declarative memories can still learn new skills (e.g., HM, Clive Wearing)
* Skill learning does not fit neatly into associative or non-associative learning
people with amnesia can do implicit learning
individuals with amnesia can learn new skills. The eample on the slide was a really important discovery at the time. This led to the understanding that declarative and non-declarative memory are different.
HM is asked to draw a star while looking in the mirror. initially, he made a lot of errors, but overtime there is a nice learning trajectory where the errors get fewer and fewer. H.M was brought into the lab on day 2 and he is actuall doing much better the second day. By day 3 HM is making pretty much 0 errors. What’s so fascinating is that he would report not having doen the taks before but there is a retention of that information. If you look at the control data, it looks pretty identical. The conclusion was that patients with damage to their hippocampus and MTL can still do non-declarative learning.
if you take a fear conditioning paradigm, what you will find is that they can acquire that relationship. The CS US pairing is in tact.
What are the neural correlates of non-declarative memory?
● The following slides are not exhaustive and are meant to give you a highlight of some key brain-behaviour mappings when it comes to non-declarative memory. But it is important to note that there is no one-to-one mapping here. Many brain regions can support a single form of non-declarative memory and a single brain region can contribute to more than one form of non-declarative memory.
Some key regions:
sensory cortices (one of the regions are sensory conrtices (the one in this picture is the somatosensory cortex).
Basal Ganglia:
the basal ganglia is a really important set of structures. It is a collection of structures that sit on top of the thalamus. When this gets impaired DIDN”T CATCH THAT
Cerebellum:
this is a complex set of structures and it is involved in a lot of fine moto movements and is implicated in many forms of conditioning.
What is the role of the amygdala in non-declarative memory?
● The amygdala is very important for non-declarative memory, especially fear conditioning.
● Note that classic conditioning does not typically rely on the hippocampus but there are certain variants of classical conditioning that do involve the hippocampus.
○ E.g., Conditioning with a delay
this is the one region where she is pointing out one form of non-declarative memory she wants to highlight. The amygdala is most known for its role in fear conditioning. Classical conditioning does not typically rely on the hippocampus but there are some versions of conditioning that seem to rely on the hippocampus (for example if there is a delay in the CS US pairing).
