Lecture 2. Perspectives on Learning: Behaviourism and Beyond Flashcards

You should be able to define: Classical conditioning, Radical behaviourism, operant conditioning, Mental schema, constuctivism

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1
Q

Psychology and education

A
  • A long history of psychologists advising educators
  • Late 19th to early 20th century, the Child study movement

–> Led by educators and education-oreintated psychologists eg. Thornrdike

–> The first Systematic study of child development

–> Child observations as ethology (naturalistic study of animal behaviour)

–> Influenced by Darwinian theory

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2
Q

The twofold significance of history

A
  1. Historical events, social change and technological advances impact on psychological knowledge and therefore advice to educators
  2. In the course of the 20th century, psychologists’ theories of learning differed across schools of thought eg. behaviourism, cognitive
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3
Q

What are the two rival philosophical traditions entering the 19th century

A
  • Associationism
  • Configurationism
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4
Q

Define Associationism

A

Learning in an associative process whereby stimulus- response bonds are established based on experience

  • foundation of behaviourism in psychology
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5
Q

Define Configurationism

A

The mind is an integral system (‘molar configuration’) controlling the functioning of its parts; learning is the reogranisation of this system based on experience

  • Foundation of Gestalt psychology and cognitve psychology
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6
Q

What does Behaviourism think Learning is

A

A causal process whereby a relatively lasting change in behaviour occurs as a result of experience

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7
Q

What does Gestalt psychology think Learning is

A

The reogranisation of behaviour as a result of an organism’s interaction with its enviroment, where the interaction brings about new forms of perception and motor coordination

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8
Q

What does Constructivism (cognitve) think Learning is

A

A mental process whereby a change in mental schemas occurs as a result of experience

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9
Q

Behaviourism

A

Behaviorism: a school of thought characterised by the view that psychology should be a systematic description of obseravble behaviour

–> dominated psychology up to the mid- 20th centyury

–> several perspectives that either complemented or disagreed with eachother

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10
Q

What are the main learning principles?

A
  • The Law of effect: Learning by trial and Error (Thorndike)
  • Classical conditioning: Learning by association (Pavlov)
  • Operant conditioning - selection of behaviour by its consequences (Skinner)
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11
Q

Law of effect

A
  • Learning by trial and error
  • First Propsed by Thorndike in 1898 in the context of his S-R bond theory
  • Thorndike’s ‘Cat in a box’ experiement
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12
Q

Classical conditioning

A
  • Learning by association
  • Demonstated in experiements by Ivan Pavlov, 1890s to early 1900s

–> The first systematic study of the basic laws of learning (hence ‘classical’)

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13
Q

Radical behaviourism: operant conditioning

A
  • Philosophical standpoint that strongly rejects mentalism
  • B.F Skinner
  • Operant conditioning
    –> builds upon Thorndike’s Law of Effect
  • Learning is due to the selection of a behaviour by its consequences
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14
Q

Who was Little Albert?

A
  • Beck et al (2009) believe they’ve discovered who little Albert was and what happened to him afterwards
  • Powell et al believe there’s a stronger evidence for identifying a different individual as Little Albert
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15
Q

Current status of Watson’s theory

A
  • The experiment was historically influential but methodologically naive by today’s standards
  • Current understanding of phobias has moved away from a single explaination
    –> specific phobias are now attributed to an evoluntionary basis compounded with enviromental factors
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16
Q

‘Are theories of learning necessary? Skinner (1950)

A

No

  • A theory explains observed facts by deferring the process to something we can’t observe (mind, brain)
  • Learning is a causal process by which a relatively lasting change in behaviour occurs as a result of experience
  • Explaining this process means accounting for observed changes in behaviour in terms of its antecedents and consequences
17
Q

Positive reinforcement

A
  • The likelihood of the behaviour increases beacuse something rewarding has happened as a consequence

–> Skinner (1948) ‘Superstition in pigeons’

18
Q

Negative reinforcement

A
  • The likelihood of behaviour increases because something unpleasent is removed or hasn’t happened as a consequence of it
  • example: Patterson’s coercion model, originally developed by Patterson (1980s) in work with antisocial boys
19
Q

Punishment

A
  • The likelihood of the behaviour decreases due to the consequences

Punishment: Learned helpness theory of depression
- uncontrollable early life
adversity leads to ‘giving up’ when problems arise later on

  • Developmed by Seligman (1960s) orginally based on animal experiemnts and behaviourist learning principles
  • Abramson, Seligman and Teasdale (1978) reformulated it with attention to cognitive patterns in humans (eg, hopelesness, self blame)
20
Q

What is the current status of behaviourism?

A
  • Most psychologists reject behaviourism
  • some practical insights remain valid eg. undertsanding gambling addiction, behaviour modification
  • Neuroscience supports behaviourist learning principles regarding reward
21
Q

What is vicarious reinforcement?

A
  • learning through observation and imitation (modelling)
  • associated with social learning theory
  • proposed by Bandura to explain how children may acquire aggressive behavioural patterns (Bobo doll )
22
Q

Current status of Vicarious reinforcement

A
  • In the media, Bandura’s findings fuelled arguments against exposing children to television and video games violence

—> Japan and Western countries revealed that exposure is associated with aggressive behaviour, aggressive congition and aggressive across cultures, gender and age (Anderson et al 2010)

  • Psychologists consider social learning as only one several underlying mechanisms
    –> Bandura (1965) himself sought to explain the experiment’s results by reference also to cognitive factors underlying individual differences
23
Q

What is Gestalt psychology ?

A
  • Emerged in the early 20th century, Germany
  • Investigated problem solving, perception, learning and thinking
  • Gestalt= form, configuration, a unified whole
  • learning is the reorganisation of behaviour as a result of an organism’s interaction with its enviroment, where the interaction brings about new forms of perception and motor coordination
  • our brains learn to recognise the world around us, and quickly fill in the infomation to paint a whole picture
24
Q

What did Kohler (1914) do?

A
  • Kohler was highly critical of behaviourism
  • He believed that physiological research provides tools for measuring covert responses (heart rate, blood pressure) towards describing a subject’s interaction with it’s environment
  • Galvanic skin response: changes in the sweat gland activity, indicates the intensity of emotional arousal
25
Q

what is one difference between behaviourists and Kohler?

A

Behaviourists believe that behaviour is triggered in the immediate situation and antecendent situations whereby the Stimulus response was stabled

Kohler believes in physiological arousal- a boldily state that mediates sensory pereption and her behavioural response

26
Q

What is the ‘cognitive revolution’

A
  • 1960s onward, advances in computer technology influence the study of human cognition

–> The computer metaphor of the mind

–> Cognitive processes were described as abstact algorithms for infomation processing

–> The synthetic approach= studying the human mind through computer-based modellling

27
Q

What is a mental schema ? - 1923 Piaget

A
  • A schema is a cognitive structure organising one’s knowldge and beliefs about a particuar domain of experience
  • The term ‘schema’ was first introduced in 1923 by Jean Piget in the context of developmental psychology
  • Learning is a mental process whereby a change in mental schemas occurs as a result of experience
28
Q

What happened in the 21st Century? - Neuroscience

A

Advances in neuroscience challenges a simplistic software/hardware analogy of infomation-processing models

  • Rise of 4Es Cognition
    –> Embodied
    –> Embedded
    –> Enactive
    –> Extended into the enviroment

Versions of the computational metaphor remain in some contexts eg, learning and infant development

29
Q

What is constructivism (Branch of Cognitive)

A

Constructivism in developmental psychology (and education) describes active embodied and socially embedded processes whereby learners construct new knowledge

constructivism focuses on the learning of knowledge

30
Q

What is Computational?
(Branch of Cognitive)

A

The computional approach describes abstact processes whereby the mind makes sense of perceptual input (extending the infomation-processing perspective)

31
Q

What is the statistical learning approach?

A
  • Language development is a piecemeal learning process, relies on general-purpose mechanisms shared by most perceptual and cognitive domains.
  • Infants learn language through pattern perception: Statistical elements provide infomation on language stucture and meaning

(word frequency, recurrent frames and other regularities)

32
Q

Summary points of lecture 2

A

Learing is conceptualised and studied in a vairety of ways

Behavioruism has focused on the learning of behaviour

Constructivism focuses on the learning of knowledge

Debates persist regarding the relationship between behavioural and intellectual learning