Lecture 2. Perspectives on Learning: Behaviourism and Beyond

Question 1

Psychology and education

Answer 1

• 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

Question 2

The twofold significance of history

Answer 2

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

Question 3

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

Answer 3

• Associationism
• Configurationism

Question 4

Define Associationism

Answer 4

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

• foundation of behaviourism in psychology

Question 5

Define Configurationism

Answer 5

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

Question 6

What does Behaviourism think Learning is

Answer 6

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

Question 7

What does Gestalt psychology think Learning is

Answer 7

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

Question 8

What does Constructivism (cognitve) think Learning is

Answer 8

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

Question 9

Behaviourism

Answer 9

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

Question 10

What are the main learning principles?

Answer 10

• 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)

Question 11

Law of effect

Answer 11

• 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

Question 12

Classical conditioning

Answer 12

• 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’)

Question 13

Radical behaviourism: operant conditioning

Answer 13

• 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

Question 14

Who was Little Albert?

Answer 14

• 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

Question 15

Current status of Watson’s theory

Answer 15

• 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

Question 16

‘Are theories of learning necessary? Skinner (1950)

Answer 16

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

Question 17

Positive reinforcement

Answer 17

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

–> Skinner (1948) ‘Superstition in pigeons’

Question 18

Negative reinforcement

Answer 18

• 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

Question 19

Punishment

Answer 19

• 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)

Question 20

What is the current status of behaviourism?

Answer 20

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

Question 21

What is vicarious reinforcement?

Answer 21

• 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 )

Question 22

Current status of Vicarious reinforcement

Answer 22

• 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

Question 23

What is Gestalt psychology ?

Answer 23

• 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

Question 24

What did Kohler (1914) do?

Answer 24

• 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

Question 25

what is one difference between behaviourists and Kohler?

Answer 25

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

Question 26

What is the ‘cognitive revolution’

Answer 26

• 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

Question 27

What is a mental schema ? - 1923 Piaget

Answer 27

• 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

Question 28

What happened in the 21st Century? - Neuroscience

Answer 28

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

Question 29

What is constructivism (Branch of Cognitive)

Answer 29

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

Question 30

What is Computational?
(Branch of Cognitive)

Answer 30

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

Question 31

What is the statistical learning approach?

Answer 31

• 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)

Question 32

Summary points of lecture 2

Answer 32

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