Task 8 - Social Learnign Flashcards
Social learning
- learning form others
- often used as a synonym for observational learning
Observational learning -> learner actively monitors events and then chooses later actions based on those observations
Copying
The act of doing what one observers another organism doing
True imitation
- reproducing Motor acts
- simplest form of copying (not behavior only motor act is copied)
Emulation
-copying outcomes/goal without specific motor acts
Two action test
-animals are more likely to learn a behavior that they have seen before than behaviors that they hadn’t seen
Perspective taking
- imagining oneself in place of another
- > some researchers suggest it as a prerequisite for voluntary imitation of actions
->
Bandura 4 basic processes of copying
1) a model increases observers attention
2) memories of the scene must be stored in an accessible format
3) observer must be able to reproduce the action
4) observer must have motivation for reproducing
Phenomena that closely resemble imitation (3)
1) emotional contagion
2) observational conditioning
3) stimulus enhancement
Emotional contagion
- inborn tendency to react emotionally to visual/acoustic stimuli that indicated an emotional response by other members of ones species
- > typically in ways that replicate observed response
- > the matching reaction is often an unconditioned response
Observational conditioning
- an individual learns an emotional response after observing similar responses in others
- contagion is used to learn a specific behavior in response to a certain stimulus
Observational conditioning in blackbirds
-blackbirds can learn to attack harmless objects such as bottles if they observe other blackbirds doing so
Stimulus enhancement
- observation of other individuals causes an organism attention to be directed toward specific object or events within an environment
- > can powerfully affect what an individual learns
Social transmission of information
- learning through experience with others
- does not necessarily involve imitation
-> involves to learn more rapidly than all other animals in almost unlimited range of contexts
Why does social transmission exists
- increase learning speed
- can protect individuals form harmful experiences
- evolutionary benefit
-> but it can be hard for a group to establish new behavior
Social conformity
-tendency to adopt the behavior of the group
Social transmission of foods preferences in rats
- given choice of 2 novel foods -> observer rats were more likely to eat the food they smelled on demonstrator rats breath
2 theories of social transmission and brain
1) visual hypothesis: storage in visual cortex
2) direct matching hypothesis: storage on cortical regions that map them onto motor representations ->focus on this one
Mirror neurons
- neurons firing both while performance as well as observation of certain actions
- neural link between seeing and doing
- may help to categorize observed events
- exist for different kind of actions
- have not directly observers in humans (only in moneys PFC) but are suspected to exist in humans as well
Hippocampus and basal forebrain lesions
- reduce effects of socially transmitted information (especially if lesion occurred right after observation)
- forming of episodic memories crucial in observational learning
- cholinergic neurons of basal forebrain also involved in the learning process
Echolalia
-repeating words/phrases immediately after hearing them
Frontal lobe lesions
- inability to voluntary reproduce observed actions
- tendency to involuntary imitate observed actions
Stimulus masking task
Stimulus onset asynchrone (SOA)
SOA= delay between target and mask
-> measure of how quick and accurate one can detect a target in a very noisy environment (that’s the skill that is trained)
- if the onset is 500 -> picture is on there for 500msc -> easier to detect
- if onset is 60msc -> very difficult
How does the training work?
SOA , masking etc
- visual training is done in periphery of visual quadrant
- > stimulus appears in same part of quadrant or not at all
- > people acquired improved skill for stimulus detection in ONE quadrant of the field
- > then start training other visual field quadrant
Results of SOA task
- people learn do to the task with shorter and shorter SOA
- > they get better
- SOA decreases as learning session increases , after a while they don’t improve anymore
- large improvement at beginning , then amount of improvement levels off
- > reaches asymptotic level of learning
-> learning visual skill in one visual field quadrant does NOT transfer to other quadrants -> they have to start acquiring the skill again from beginning
- does not transfer to different target-background gradient
- does not transfer between eyes
- question is how well people perform when the
Primary visual cortex
- primary visual cortex has bad plasticity
- sensitive to where things were presented
- if skill ist best learned in one are and has problem transferring to another area -> we are most likely looking at primary visual cortex
Monkey digest training task
- monkeys trained for >11 days
- pick out flavored food pellet from small hole, which requires finger nimbleness (Gewandtheit)
- becomes easier to pick up food with fewer movements
-larger part of cortex has become sensitive when touching fingers that has been used for training
Effects of digit training task
- finger flexion and extension representations enhanced (cortical expansion)
- wrist representation decreased
- > cortical representation has changed after digit specific training at the expanse of other representations
Asymptotic learning
-
Learning Hand movement task
- no transfer to dominant (untrained) Hand
- no advantage to learn another sequence or transfer it to other hand
- > learning is laterality specific
Latent consolidation in skill learning
- off line learning
- process of brain plasticity continue after active training
- > unconscious
- improved from one day to another even if there was no active training
Patient HM and skill learning
- impaired episodic memory formation
- intact skill learning -> mirror star
Rat research -radial maze
-hippocampus lesion -> rat cannot remember which arm it had already visited
Rat research - radial maze task with light
- its NOT about spatial navigation
- basal ganglia lesion: rat cannot learn light-arm associations
Basal ganglia
- codes for learned Perceptual motor associations
- early in learning: BG activated at cross section
- late in learning: BG activates at start and end points
Role of neocortex - skill learning
-contain sensory-motor representations form which hippocampus and basal ganglia derive content information of experience
The role of reward in learning - skill learning with operant conditioning
-reinforcement increases learning
Role orbitofrontal cortex and VTA
- OFC: WHAT TO EXPECT
- > codes for reward identity
- learning = activity for reward carried over to Sd
- increased activity when expected reward is omitted (ausgelassen)
- VTA Dopamine: EXPECTED (ofc) VS ACTUAL OUTCOME (sensory input) -> (error)
- > informs dorsal striatum to update Sd - response association
- cods for reward value
- learning = activity for reward carried over to Sd + lower activity for reward itself
- decreased activity when expected reward is omitted
