Lecture 3

Question 1

What is required for successful adaptation in a changing environment?

Answer 1

Predication and control

Question 2

What does instrumental behaviour refer too?

Answer 2

Those actions whose acquisition and maintenance depend upon the fact that the action is instrumental in causing some outcome

*learning that something is the cause of something else

Question 3

Hungry chick example: learns to approach a bowl

Instrumental vs Pavlovian learning

Answer 3

Instrumental= suggests the animal is sensitive to the contingency between its own behaviour and access to food

Pavlovian= suggests that predictive relationship between the bowl and food is important

Question 4

If behaviour is instrumental, what should happen if a relationship is changed?

Answer 4

Should be sensitive to the change in the relationship between a action and outcome

Question 5

How do you see what is governing behaviour?

Answer 5

-need to change the causal structure of the environment to determine what is governing behaviour

Instrumental or Pavlovian

Question 6

Free operant lever pressing

David and Bitterman (1971)

Answer 6

• trained rats to press lever
• changed contingency, either no food or delivery postponed
• postponed group reduced responding more
• sensitive to causal relationship, able to moderate behaviour of lever pressing

Question 7

Bolles, Holtz, Dunn and Hill (1980)

Answer 7

• Trained rats to press lever down and push up for food
• which action randomly determined so rats tended to alternate
• Changed causal structure, one response=shock
• stop the response that resulted in them being punished, showing sensitive to their actions

Question 8

Effect of the instrumental response

Question 9

Appetitive

Answer 9

=reinforcement

Question 10

Aversive

Answer 10

=punishment

Question 11

What is the earliest explanation for instrumental conditioning?

Answer 11

=Law of effect (Thorndike)

-association between stimulus and response, strengthened by presentation of a reinforcer

Question 12

What does Law of Effect suggest?

Answer 12

• no encoding of the consequences of the action

- instrumental action is simply a habitual response triggered by the training stimuli

Question 13

Tolman (1932, 1959)

Cognitive theory of instrumental action

Answer 13

• Belief about consequences of action (mean-end readiness), have some encoding about the outcome of what they are doing
• ‘Value’ assigned to outcome, interacts with ‘expectancy’ to produce the behaviour: when value particular outcome, with understand what the consequence of that action will be

Question 14

What happens if animals are using Stimulus-Response associations?

Answer 14

they won’t change behaviour if the value of the reward changes

Question 15

What happens if animals are using stimulus stimulus association?

Answer 15

They will change behaviour if the value of the reward changes

Question 16

Adams and Dickinson (1981)

Question 17

SL: What do animals initially learn?

Answer 17

Learn place then with training they learn response

Question 18

What happens when the hippocampus in inactivated?

Answer 18

No place learning

Question 19

What happens when the Caudate nucleus is inactivated?

Answer 19

No response learning

Question 20

Ants

Answer 20

• can keep track of movements to find their way home

- dont use environmental cues, use memory of their own motor movements

Question 21

Wasps

Answer 21

Use cues in the environment to remember where nest is

Nest surrounded by pine cones, move cones, can’t remember where nest is

Question 22

Blocking