Week 1 Flashcards
What is learning?
A fundamental process in living animals.
Adaptive process where specific behaviour, emotion and though is changed by experience.
Effects of the environment mediated by a sensory system.
Repeated practice or experience which creates a change in behaviour.
The two major ways of learning
§ Non-associative: Habituation (discussed today)
§ Associative: (discussed in future lectures)
Habituation (and sensitisation)
“getting used to it” response towards a novel stimulus
Process of habituation towards a novel stimulus
Attention or reaction (orienting response) towards the stimulus.
Prolonged exposure results in the stimulus no longer being novel (stops having an orienting response). learned that the stimulus has no special significnace.
Examples of habituation
Children’s attention towards new toys
Distracting noises
Why does habituation occur?
§ Allows us to learn that a stimulus is not
significant, and therefore you don’t have to be
distracted by petty events
§ Sensitisation
Key figures in the history of associative learning
Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) John Watson (1878-1958) B.F. Skinner (1904-1990)
what are the fundamentals of behavioural approach to associative learning?
§ We measure behaviour to infer learning
§ Limited to observable effects of learning
§ Complex behaviours follow the same laws as small units
of behaviour
§ But bear in mind behaviour is caused by
- The goals of the organism
- Environmental demands
- Internal states
The fundamentals: Associations
§ Associative learning = forming new associations
§ Connecting stimuli with each other and with behaviour
§ Avoid danger, find food, learn emotional responses to
important situations and people/animals
§ Associative learning in animals
§ Simple learning and behaviour disorders in
people – effects of rewards and punishment,
phobias, addictions.
§ Associations are also fundamental in (human)
abstract conceptual learning and thinking.
Changes in behaviour that are not due to associative learning
§ Habituation
§ Innate response tendencies - (reflexes, taxes, instincts)
§ Maturation - (regular stages, unaffected by practice)
§ Fatigue - (disappears after break)
§ Changes due to physiological/motivational state
§ Change due to evolution vs. change due to learning
What is cognitive psychology?
‘Cognitio’ - to know or to think
§ The study of MENTAL processes such as perceiving, attending,
remembering and reasoning
§ Psychology as the science of the mind
§ The scientific approach (Herschel 1830):
§ 1) gathering of data through experimentation and observation;
§ 2) generation of hypotheses from these data;
§ 3) testing of the hypotheses to see if they can be disproved
Who are the three men in the very brief history of cognition?
§ Wilhelm Wundt (1879) and the
method of introspection
§ Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885) and the empirical study of memory
§ William James (1890) principles of psychology
The rise of Behaviorism
Lack of progress through introspection
§ Watson (1913): psychology as objective study of behavior not mind
§ Introspection cannot be measured objectively
§ Theories should be as simple as possible
§ Metaphor of the ‘black box’- inner workings cannot be understood
§ belief in tabula rasa rather than nativism
§ belief in equipotentiality
§ 50 years of mindless psychology …with some notable exceptions:
§ Jean Piaget’s (e.g.,1926) cognitive development
§ Wolfgang Köhler’s (e.g.,1927) insight and ‘gestalt’
§ Frederick Bartlett’s (e.g., 1932) reconstructive memory
§ Edward Tolman’s (e.g.,1932) goal-directed behaviour
Ethology history
§ Ethology in the 1950s: Tabula rasa cannot be true.
Different species have different genetic
predispositions that determine behavior.
§ Fixed-action patterns such as stereotyped mating
behavior, nest building, territory marking etc.
(e.g., Niko Tinbergen)
§ Critical periods for specific learning such as chicks
learning who mother is (ie., imprinting, Konrad
Lorenz)
§ Tinbergen, Lorenz and Karl von Frisch (famous for studying
the communication in bees) received the Nobel Prize in 1973
The Reemergence of Cognition
§ The generativity of human language cannot be explained in behaviorist terms (Chomsky)
§ Psychology as science of behaviour is like defining
physics as science of meter reading (Chomsky)
§ Theories of the mind are needed to explain behaviour
§ The 1956 MIT conference (Chomsky, Miller, Bruner,
Newell & Simon)
§ The computer metaphor
§ Information processing in the‘black box’ became a
legitimate topic of discussion as such processes are,
after all, instantiated in a machine
The information-processing model
§ A computer uses symbols (series of 0 and 1) to represent something
§ Neurons can fire (1) or not fire (0)
§ Programs specify the rules for the manipulation of these symbols
§ Software is to hardware, as mind is to brain?
§ The computational theory of mind
§ From box and arrow models to parallel distributed processing
§ The rise of cognitive neuroscience
§ The rise of evolutionary approaches
Approaches to studying the mind
§ Experiments
§ Classic (a la Ebbinghaus)
§ Since cognitive revolution: e.g., reaction time as a measure of mental processing
load – combining objective measures with introspection
§ Neuroscientific investigations
§ Brain imaging and recording (with introspection or task performance)
§ Lesion studies - Malfunctioning of the brain/mind
§ Modeling
§ Computer simulations of human performance
§ Comparative
§ Performance comparison across age groups, clinical groups and species
The Domain of Cognitive Psychology
§ Cognitive Neuroscience § Perception § Pattern recognition § Attention* § Consciousness § Memory* § Imagery* § Representation of knowledge § Language* § Cognitive Development § Thinking* § Intelligence* § Comparative Psychology* § Evolutionary Psychology*
Basic and higher level cognition
§ For researchers in perception and cognition, their domain is
a loosely defined continuum
§ From low to high levels of processing
§ Low = close to the input from our senses (vision, hearing,
touch, taste and smell).
§ Mental representations correspond to objects and events in the
environment
§ High = abstract, conceptual, relational
§ Abstract mental representations
§ Derived from many individual experiences
Lower-level cognition
§ The first step is the analysis of visual, auditory and other
sensory input
§ Perception: How do people identify objects based on past
experience? (PSYC2020, PSYC3192)
§ Selecting what is relevant to current goals from all of the
sensory information available - “attention”
§ If we are to act and plan effectively, we must remember
what we have seen and heard - “memory”
§ We will tell you about attention & memory in lectures 6 - 9.
Higher-level cognition
§ Dealing with environmental input that has been re-processed by the
human cognitive system
§ How do people mentally represent and manipulate objects that they
see – the role of “imagery”
§ Word-based concepts, communication of ideas, facts, and intentions
to other people - “language”
§ The special human facility for manipulating abstract concepts and
engage in reasoning – “intelligence”, “comparative & evolutionary
cognition”
§ Imagery, language, (intelligence) and comparative & evolutionary
cognition in lectures 10-12.
Past Conflicts - Learning & Cognition
- Cognitivists complained that behaviourism § ignored basic mental processes like memory, attention, imagery etc. § assumed equipotentiality and could not properly explain different learning within individuals and across species - Behaviourists complained that cognitivism § made merely inferences about mental constructs § made no reference to physiology § ignored emotion and motivational valence
Modern Perspectives on Past Conflicts -
Learning & Cognition
- Modern learning theorists § appreciate biological constraints and preparedness § acknowledge the utility of cognitive constructs in theory and practice: e.g. cognitive-behavioural therapy - Modern cognitivists § appreciate the utility and power of learning principles § apply associationism in theories of the mind § research relation between brain and cognition
How does it hang together?
§ Behaviour is mediated by cognition (e.g., perception,
memory, etc.)
§ Learning is one of the basic processes that
contributes to cognition
