Lecture 4: Stimulus Control

Question 1

What is Skinner’s tripartite contingency?

Answer 1

ABC - Antecedent, Behaviour, Consequence

Question 2

Define the terms encompassed by Skinner’s tripartite contingency.

Answer 2

Antecedent - the stimulus controlling behaviours. In other words the conditions prior to behaviour.

Behaviour - what is the response being reinforced?

Consequence - What is the immediate outcome of the behaviour?

Question 3

What does the tripartite contingency run parallel to?

Answer 3

A = Sd - discriminative stimulus

B = R - the response

C = Sr - the reinforcing stimulus

Question 4

What are 2 factors important for stimulus control?

Answer 4

1) learning-related

2) performance-related

Question 5

Describe the 2 factors important for stimulus control.

Answer 5

1) learning
- basic conditions which are necessary. –> principles of associative learning e.g. frequency and other factors going into it
- true of classical and instrumental conditioning

2) performance
- This is: How someone might go into a new situation and how the associations learned in the past govern what they are going to do
- behaviour in novel (but similar) situations
- factors dictating generalisation and discrmination

Question 6

What is the general gist of generalisation and discrimination

Answer 6

How is a response previously learned in a given situation transferred to a new but similar situation

Question 7

What is generalisation

Answer 7

the extent to which behaviour transfers to a new stimulus

Question 8

What is discrimination

Answer 8

the extent to which behaviour DOES NOT transfer to a new stimulus

Question 9

What is an example of instrumental response discussed in lecture

Answer 9

driving through traffic lights

Question 10

What was the general purpose of Albert experiment

Answer 10

to examine the generalisation of learned fear

Question 11

Outline the stimuli and responses for albert experiment

Answer 11

US: Loud clanging noise
UE: fear/shock

CS: white rat
CR fear elicited by the rat

Question 12

What is a Q the albert experiment raised?

Answer 12

Does the response generalise to other animals and similar objects?

Question 13

How is a fetish acquired i.e. CS/US…

Answer 13

CS: e.g. black boots
US: attractive female figure
CR: sexual arousal

Question 14

What was interesting to note about the fetish expt?

Answer 14

Spontaneous recovery after a week.

generalised to other shoes (N showing CR):
low-heeled black shoes (3/3)
high-heeled black shoes (2/3)
brown etc… (0/3)

Question 15

What about removal of sexual fetish?

Answer 15

Attempts to remove sexual fetish by aversive conditioning

CS of black shoes etc paired with US an electric shock.

• patients had a range of fetishes
• real behavioural and fantasy conditioning
• 75 % delivery of a shock

Question 16

What did removal of sexual fetish show?

Answer 16

That it was possible, but did not provide lasting effects.

Question 17

Can discrimination be learned? How?

Answer 17

Yes. Through training with different schedules of reinforcement.

Question 18

Give an instrumental example of discrimination. What is important to note?

Answer 18

In presence of high-pitched tone - response –> reinforcement
In presence of low-pitched tone - response –> no reinforcement

NB: reinforcement is contingent on both the stimulus and the response.

Question 19

Give a classical conditioning example of discrimination. What is important to note?

Answer 19

High-pitched tone CS–> food US
Low-pitched tone CS –> no food US

NB: The US is only contingent on the CS but CRs will differ anyway.

Question 20

How does discrimination learning work? Describe graph. What to note about differentiation and describe the example?

Answer 20

early on there is generalisation but steadily discrimination occurs and gets stronger.

Differentiation - shows behavioural anticipation. So when rhythm of metronome is a particular one, the monkey knows food will be delivered, when the frequency is different than that, the animal doesn’t respond. Not instrumental learning

Question 21

What are complex discriminations? What are some examples with rats and pigeons?

Answer 21

ideas that may be beyond other animal’s cognition.

It is difficult to train a rat to discriminate between doors.

Watanabe taught pigeons to discriminate. They would pair Monet with food. However, they could tell a Monet apart from a Picasso without the response to picasso even being reinforced.

Question 22

For complex discriminations, you need to reinforce correct choices made to stimuli based on which categories?

Answer 22

• same/different
• size
• shape
• number
• texture

Question 23

What did Herrnstein show?

Answer 23

discrimination learning occurs with realistic stimuli.
- e.g. leaf shapes, water/no water, tree/no tree, specific person.

This was also the case for real stimuli but those that would not normally be encountered by pigeons.
- e.g fish/no fish

Question 24

What is the relationship between exemplars and concepts?

Answer 24

Tradeoff - “desireable difficulty” for slow laborious learning with more examples which takes more days to actually learn, is that when you give new examples of those two categories, pigeons trained on many examples is much better.

Question 25

How is human generalisation complex? i.e. which factors contribute?

Answer 25

• physical attributes
• semantic similarity
• rules/analogies that link otherwise dissimilar events.

Question 26

What did Razran do

Answer 26

study using students

words (CS) paired with food (US) –> salivation CR.

Question 27

What were the exact stimuli Razran used?

Answer 27

Words:

Style Urn Freeze Surf

Question 28

What were the two ways Razran compared the original stimuli.

Answer 28

1) semantically similar - fashion, vase, chill, wave

2) stile, earn, frieze, serf

Question 29

What were the findings of Razran

Answer 29

Found that there was most CRs to items on the first list

–> more generalisations based on the semantic qualities of the words rather than the physical similarity of the stimulit