PSYC2050 - Wk1 Non-Associative Learning and Cognition

Question 1

What happens in an orienting response (3)?

Answer 1

• head turns toward stimulus
• heart rate slows
• person ‘attends’ the stimulus

Question 2

Why does prolonged exposure have an effect, without associations?

Answer 2

Habituation, the organism learns the stimulus has no special significance. Neural response decreases

Question 3

What constitutes an experience?

Answer 3

Any sensory system registering a stimulus in the environment

Question 4

Why is habituation adaptive?

Answer 4

Limits attention to only important events. Allows us to make the most of limited resources, without distractions.

Question 5

Why is habituation found in nearly every animal?

Answer 5

It is the simplest form of learning, found even in slugs and snails

Question 6

What is the opposite of habituation and why?

Answer 6

Sensitisation. This is due to things which may cause injury or death. These stimuli become more intense as they prolong.

Question 7

What concepts form the basis of behaviourism? 2

Answer 7

Stimulus and response. Skinner and Watson believed this was the basis of all behaviour

Question 8

When did the cognitive revolution emerge?

Answer 8

1950s

Question 9

What causes behaviour?3

Answer 9

• goals of organism
• environmental demands
• internal states

Question 10

Where do we see associative learning go wrong in people? 3

Answer 10

• effects of rewards and punishment
• phobias
• addictions

Question 11

What are associations?

Answer 11

Connecting stimuli with each other, and with behaviour

Question 12

How do associations help us interact with the world? 3

Answer 12

Avoid danger, find food, learn emotional responses to important situations/people/animals

Question 13

Are association fundamental in higher level cognition? Ie abstract conceptual learning and thinking?

Answer 13

Yes

Question 14

What changes in behaviour are not due to associations? 6

Answer 14

Habituation
Innate responses (reflexes, taxes, instincts)
Maturation (unaffected by practice, eg getting taller)
Fatigue (can disappear after a break)
Motivational and physiological states
Evolutionary changes (adaptive to species, not learning)

Question 15

What is cognitive psychology? 4 examples

Answer 15

Study of mental processes: eg perceiving, attending, remembering, reasoning
Science of the mind

Question 16

What was the first example of examining the mind? And what was a problem with this method?

Answer 16

Wilhelm Wundt’s introspection

Not objective

Question 17

Who found the forgetting curve? (And was the first to use empirical study of the mind)

Answer 17

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885)
 He also was one of the first to use empirical study of memory

Question 18

Why did behaviourism supersede introspective methods? What are the consequences of this?

Answer 18

Psychologists thought that behaviour was more objectively measureable. The mind was left behind

Question 19

How did behaviourists view the mind? 2

Answer 19

A ‘black box’: blank slate (rather than nativism) + equipotentiality

Question 20

In the 50 years of mindless psychology, what were notable exceptions to the mind taboo? 4

Answer 20

• cognitive development, Piaget
• insight and gestalt
• reconstructive memory
• goaldirected behaviour

Question 21

How did ethology (1950s) challenge the tabula rasa assumptions of behaviourists? 2
And what do these things show?

Answer 21

They found 1. fixed action patterns (mating behaviour, nest building) and 2. critical periods for specific learning period (imprinting- Lorenz)
This showed that different species have different genetic predispositions which determine behaviour.

Question 22

How did Chomsky challenge behaviourism?2

Answer 22

Generativity of language could not be explained by stimulus and response.
Theories of the mind are needed to explain behaviour.

Question 23

How did Chomsky view behaviourism?

Answer 23

“Like defining physics as science of meter reading”. Ie Behaviourism tells you what the mind does, but doesn’t say how it processes it.

Question 24

What is the information processing model of the mind?

Answer 24

Neurons are similar to the binary used in computers. Software and hardware mimic the mind/brain dichotomy

Question 25

How did the computer metaphor of the mind displace the “black box”?

Answer 25

Rather than behaviour being automatic, people could study how inputs were related to outputs

Question 26

What is parallel distributed processing?

Answer 26

Neurons are more integrated than computers, information is spread to multiple parts of the brain

Question 27

What are 4 approaches to studying the mind?

Answer 27

Experiments
- eg reaction time (using behaviour as inference to processing in the mind)
Neuroscientific investigations (imaging, lesion studies/malfunction)
Modeling (computer simulations)
Comparative (across species, age, clinical group)

Question 28

What is the difference between lower and higher levels of processing?

Answer 28

Low = close to input (senses) attention, memory

High = abstract, conceptual, relational (imagery, language, intelligence)

Question 29

What does lower level cognition deal with?

Answer 29

Analysing sensory input: attention, memory, perception)

Question 30

What does higher level cognition deal with?

Answer 30

Environmental input which is reprocessed in the human cognitive system

Question 31

Past conflicts between learning and cognition? 2 & 3

Answer 31

Cognitivists complained behaviourists:

• ignored basic mental processes (memory, attention, imagery)
• equipotentiality: could not explain differences in learning within individuals or across species

Behaviourists complained cognitivists:

• only made inference about mental constructs
• no reference to physiology
• ignored emotion and motivational valence

Question 32

What do modern perspective of learning appreciate?2

Answer 32

• biological constraints and preparedness

- utility of cognitive constructs (CBT)

Question 33

What perspectives do modern cognitivists hold? 3

Answer 33

• utility of learning principles
• apply associationist in theories of the mind
• research relation between brain and cognition

Question 34

How do behaviour and cognition integrate? 2

Answer 34

Behaviour is mediated by cognition (memory, perception, etc)

Learning is one of the basic processes that contributes to cognition

Question 35

What are 6 problems with experiments?

Answer 35

Measurement disrupts the behaviour Technological errors related to measuring the independent and dependent variables Intra-individual variability - subjects variation in behaviour over the experiment Individual differences - related to different samples of subjects Rosenthal effects - biases due to experimenter expectations Hawthorne effects - the behaviours of people may differ from whether they know they are being observed or not.

Question 36

What is a powerful way to test a theory using experimental design?

Answer 36

Design so that if theory is correct there will be no change in variables, if incorrect there will be an observed change. Ie try to break the theory.

Question 37

What is an ‘efficient’ experimental design?

Answer 37

One that tests two theories by making them predict opposite results from the experiement.

Question 38

What is basic definition of learning?

Answer 38

Change in behaviour due to an experience

Question 39

What are common features of definitions of learning? 4

Answer 39

There is a change (which could be invisible)
Change is lasting
Experience and practice go ‘hand in hand’
Learning situation is important (think clinical office vs home)

Question 40

What happens in habituation?

Answer 40

An organism gets used to a novel stimulus