Respondent Conditioning - 11

Question 1

What is the limbic system?

Answer 1

The limbic system is a set of structures in a loop of information processing: structures all connected to one another. It has a main circulatory region (border outer areas of the brain). Commonalities between the structures. Not a structural system, but is a functional system = certain functions that are attributed to certain functions, and these functions are attributed to the limbic system. Our ability to learn simple things and motivated behaviour are linked to the limbic system.

Question 2

What is learning?

Answer 2

A relatively permanent change in behaviour that occurs as a result of experience. Exclude effects of drugs, injury/illness of maturation. Some are learnt, some are innate.

Question 3

What is not learning?

Answer 3

Innate responses are not learning:

1. Reflexes: defined as simple innate responses. They involve a single set of muscles. Doesn’t take a lot to trigger the reflex. Examples include patellar (knee kick) and eye-blink reflex.
2. Taxes: reflexive responses involving the entire body. Positive = behaviour of moths (fly into light), negative = behaviour of cockroaches (move toward darkness).
3. Instincts: differ in terms of complexity, involve a complex sequence of behaviour. Actions are triggered by stimuli.e.g. food begging in herring gulls (chick peck red spot of mothers beak to get regurgitation of food).

Question 4

What are limitations of innate responses?

Answer 4

Stimulus must be physically present in the environment and in a particular configuration. Difficult for novel stimuli to trigger the same response. Little opportunity to modify response - order of sequence remains the same.

Question 5

What are the functions of learning & memory?

Answer 5

Allows for adaptions in behaviour within individual lifetime: non-associative learning (learning that stimuli exist in the world), associative learning (learning associations between stimuli/events).

Question 6

What is habituation?

Answer 6

Learned suppression of a response to a repeated stimulus. As experience a stimuli multiple times, you learn to ignore it. It is important to ignore stimuli that is not important (have a limited memory capacity).

Question 7

What is the first study of associative learning?

Answer 7

Twitmeyer studied the patellar reflex in humans: when applied pressure to the tendion, after a few tries merely an implication of the stimulus would produce a small reflex.

Question 8

What is Pavlovian conditioning?

Answer 8

Dogs restrained, tube in their mouth to collect saliva, applied substances to their mouth to see salivation response. Noticed that repeatedly tested animals produced saliva prior to introduction of substance into dogs mouths.

Question 9

What is the terminology of respondent conditioning?

Answer 9

1. Unconditioned stimulus (UCS): stimulus that has biological relevance.
2. Unconditioned response (UCR): innate response triggered by UCS.
3. Conditioned stimulus (CS): neutral stimulus that elicits response through learning/pairing. Elicited by conditioned stimulus.
4. Conditioned response (CR): response produced by CS.

Question 10

What are the principles of respondent conditioning?

Answer 10

1. Acquisition
2. Extinction (no reinforcement/loss of contiguity).
3. Spontaneous recovery (passage of time after extinction. Can see that information learnt is not lost).
4. Reacquisition (doing the same process as in acquisition. Learn a great deal faster than they did the first time: info had been stored).
5. Generalisation (flexible: if associate with a certain tone, animal will respond to similar tones as well)
6. Discrimination (only the exact tone will elicit a response: start with generalisation, but soon get discrimination).