Lecture 2: learning Flashcards
What is learning?
=a change in animals behaviour as a result of experience
*necessary for animal to behave in a way that is flexible and adaptive to its environment
Non-associative learning: Habituation
-what is habituation
=a decrease in response to a stimulus
- Size of reflexive withdrawal of limb in response to a tactile stimulus (flexion reflex) reduces with repeated stimulation
- neural changes underlie habituation
Non-associative learning: sensitisation
-what is it
=an increased response to a stimulus
**neural basis
What are Pavlovs conditions for learning
- Temporal contiguity
- Contingency
- Surprise
- Biological preparedness
How does a conditioned response work?
- present a neutral stimulus
- initially no response
- present biologically relevant stimulus eg meat powder
- animal salivates
- present neutral stimulus before biologically relevant stimulus
- after few trains, the animals starts to salute during the neutral stimulus
What do each of the stimulus relate to?
- Neutral stimulus = Conditioned stimulus (CS)
- Biological stimulus = Unconditioned stimulus (US)
- Response to the biological stimulus = Unconditioned response (UR)
- Response to the initially neutral stimulus = conditioned response (CR)
How do you measure fear?
- Conditioned Freezing: it will freeze, measure how long stationary for
- Conditioned Suppression: difference how much press normally and how much less when fear related stimulus presented
- Fear potentiated startle: where if frightened will jump, will jump more than if not frightened. Put on spring which can measure displacement
- Heart Rate
What happens in eye blinking conditioning
CS presented then puff of air to eye which makes you blink (conditioned response)
Taste aversion conditioning
- CS: Give taste (flavour)
- inject something horrible
- CR: disgust
Measure= amount of CS flavour consumed
Appetitive conditioning
**
Snails
**
What must the conditions for learning be?
- The CS must be novel
- Poorer learning about familiar stimuli
- This is known as Latent Inhibition
What is overshadowing
- Loads of stimuli present at same time which one do you learn about
- Learn less about stimulus when presented in compound than when they are on their own
What is contingency?
how causal a CS is of the US
If CS is causal you get better learning
What does biological propensity suggest?
That there is a propensity to form some association over others
