task 8 - learning by example

Question 1

social learning

Answer 1

learning from others; often used as a synonym for obervational learning

Question 2

observational learning

Answer 2

a process in which the learner actively monitors events and then chooses later actions based on those observations

Question 3

how does the learning types differ from types of conditioning?

Answer 3

researchers cannot predict what an organism will learn from observing

Question 4

copying

Answer 4

the act of doing what one oberves another organism doing

• bobo doll experiment

Question 5

modeling

Answer 5

demonstration of actions

Question 6

social learning theory, process steps

Answer 6

a theory of human behavior prominent from the 1940s through the 1960s that proposed that the kinds of reinforcements an individual has experienced in past social contexts will determine how that individual will act in any given situation

• the basic process of people copying what they see
  
  1. presence of a model
  2. accessible format
  3. ability to reproduce the action
  4. motivation for reproducing

Question 7

true imitation

Answer 7

copying that involves reproducing motor acts

Question 8

emulation

Answer 8

copying that involves replicating an outcome without replicating specific motor acts

Question 9

emotional contagion

Answer 9

an inborn tendency to react emotionally to visual or acoustic stimuli that indicate an emotional response by other members of one’s species, typically in ways that replicate the observed value

Question 10

observational conditioning

Answer 10

a process in which an individual learns an emotional response after observing similar responses in others

• conditioning in black birds

Question 11

stimulus enhancement

Answer 11

a process in which observations of other individuals causes an organisms attention to be directed toward specific objects or events within an environment

Question 12

bobo doll experiement

Answer 12

opposite inhibits, viewing agressive acts can in some cases inhibit agressive behavior rather than increase it

→ strongly influenced the behavior of the children later on

→ when watching the adult act with the doll that is when the children formed ideas that they would recall later to reproduce similar actions

Question 13

two action test of true imitation (in children and chimps)

Answer 13

→ a technique developed to investigate imitation abilites that involves exposing naive animals to demonstrators trained to achieve the same goal using different actions

→ cross species examination

→ children were more likley to exactly copy as they saw where the chimps were more likely to still solve the box but use non exact techniques (emulation)

Question 14

conditioning in black birds

Answer 14

→ blackbirds can learn to attack harmless objects such as bottles if they observe other blackbirds doing so (in this case they are tricked into thinking that is what they are observing

→ illustrates the difficulties associated with identifying the mechanisms that contribute to social learning and imitation in natural situations

Question 15

social transmission of food preferences by rats

Answer 15

→ given the choice of two novel foods, observer rats are more liley to eat the food they smelled on a demonstrator rats breath, meaning that information about food has been tramitted between the rats

• social transmission of information
• social confirmity

→ the preference may be transmitted to succesive generations

Question 16

social transmission of escape routes by guppies

Answer 16

→ after demonstator guppies were trained to escape from a net by swimming through a particular hole (with a second escape hole closed) observer guppies tended to use the same escape path as the demonstator guppies when both holes were open

→ social conformity from both experiments may be driven in part by stimulus enhancement (odors, locations, or actions) that are relevant to one individual become more salient to others

Question 17

design of Dipelligrino’s (1992) experiment

Answer 17

aim

• activity of F5 neurons activation in a monkeys brain
• electrodes were planted to measure single cells
• box with different geometrical figures was placed in front of the monkey

conclusion of data

• neurons were active during movement and observation
  
  • fire more during observation over actual movement 2
• mirror neurons
• arrows indicate the onset of grasping

Question 18

direct-matching hypothesis

Answer 18

→ the proposal that memories for actions are stored in specialized cortical regions that map observed actions onto motor representations of the acts

• specialized cortical regions that map observed actions onto the motor representations of the acts
• when observing an action there is automatic activation in the same neural systems required to perform the action memories for the action are stored as part of this process

Question 19

mirror neurons

Answer 19

→ neurons that respond during performance of an action and during visual observations of that same action

• no direct evidence that they are necessary for imitative abilities
• most strongly firing during observation of the outcome of an action rather than in response to observations of the action itself
• basis for empathy
• fire more for new things

Question 20

neural circuits for song learning by birds

Answer 20

→ birds contain neurons that map observed events onto vocal acts in a manner comparable with that of the mirror neurons seen in primates

Question 21

hippocampus damage

Answer 21

→ damage never affected newer episodic memories more than older ones

→ disrupts the ability of animals to learn from social interactions in ways that parallel episodic memory deficits in human suffering from amnesia

→ with rats its memories of previously acquired food perferences will be drastically impaired, its future ability to learn is fine

Question 22

echolalia

Answer 22

the automatic repetition of words or phrases immediately after hearing them spoken

Question 23

brain bits of autism

Answer 23

• anatomically abnormal
• brain sizes are different
• show less overall activity-related circulation of blood within the temporal lobes
• abnormal patterns of cortical activation
• cortical processes contributing to imitation were impaired
• could be related to abnormal function of mirror neurons

Question 24

mind-blindlessness theory

Answer 24

struggle with perspective taking in an emotional sense

Question 25

stroke patients

Answer 25

• with frontal lobe damage tend to produce involuntary imitative responses
• acitivity in frontal-lobe circuits normally inhibits such imitation