Lecture 19 Flashcards
What is different between unconditioned and conditioned response and what does this mean for classical conditioning?
Unconditioned response and conditioned response are often very similar, but not necessarily identical. E.g less salivation with tone as opposed to food. This shows that classical conditioning is a learning mechanism wherein the conditioned stimulus prepares the animal for the onset of the unconditioned stimulus and unconditioned response, rather than replacing the unconditioned stimulus with the the conditioned stimulus.
What is the compensatory-reaction hypothesis and what are some examples it is involved with?
Compensatory-reaction hypothesis occurs when the unconditioned response and conditioned response can be opposites e.g insulin injections leads to blood levels going up before insulin use. This is common with medications/drugs and is involved with drug tolerance (addicts need more opiates than normal people in order to get the same response) and drug overdose(conditioned stimulus missing and hence same dose may be lethal because the body didn’t have a chance to prepare).
What are three important factors of classical conditioning?
Classical conditioning has a variety of important factors: the number of neutral stimulus and unconditioned stimulus pairings depends on how strong the unconditioned stimulus is, the stronger the conditioned response and the quicker the rate of conditioning.
The time between the conditioned stimulus and unconditioned stimulus is also effective (backwards is bad, forward is good, same time is useless and trace (CS quite early) is not very useful).
Contingency (how reliable the conditioned stimulus is at predicting the unconditioned stimulus, both as how often only the CS appears and how often it doesn’t appear before the US).
What is extinction and what is spontaneous recovery?
Extinction refers to classical conditioning disappearing (conditioned stimulus no longer produces response). It occurs when the conditioned stimulus no longer leads to the unconditioned stimulus and is no longer useful. Spontaneous recovery can occur, in which the CS suddenly may elicit the CR again (less intensely), this re-extinguishes relatively quickly. Extinction can be used to remove fear.
What is flooding and what is a problem with this? (besides the obvious)
Flooding is when you force an individual to be stuck with their fear until they are no longer afraid of it. Spontaneous recovery is a large problem with this.
