Week 2 - Learning Flashcards
What is learning?
Learning is the modification through experience of pre-existing behaviour and understanding.
Learning is an adaptive process
What is habituation?
Habituation is the process of adapting to stimuli that do not change. It is a type of learning.
It is through habituation that you eventually lose awareness of your glasses or your watch, and that after being in a room for a while, you no longer smell its odour or hear its ticking clock.
What is dishabituation?
An example of dishabituation is a ticking clock that suddenly stops.
You may become aware of it again because now, something in your environment has changed. The reappearance of your original response when a stimulus changes is called dishabituation.
What is sensitisation?
Sensitisation, appears as an increase in responsiveness to a stimulus. It is a type of learning.
Sensitisation occurs, for example, when people and animals show exaggerated responses to unexpected, potentially threatening sights or sounds, especially during periods of emotional arousal. Watching a scary movie may achieve this.
Provide two examples of non-associative learning
Non-associative learning might involve habituation or sensitisation. They both result from exposure to a single stimulus. Neither kind requires the association of one stimulus with another, as when we learn that, say, dark clouds signal rain.
What is opponent process theory?
According to Richard Solomon’s (1980) opponent process theory, new stimulus events – especially those that arouse strong positive or negative emotions – disrupt the individual’s physiological state of equilibrium, or homeostasis.
This disruption triggers an opposite, or opponent, process that counteracts the disruption and eventually restores equilibrium.
If the arousing event occurs repeatedly, this opponent process gets stronger and occurs more rapidly. It eventually becomes so quick and strong that it actually suppresses the initial response to the stimulus, creating habituation.
Provide an example of opponent process theory
Consider, for example, what happens as someone continues to use a drug such as heroin. The ‘high’, or pleasurable reaction, that follows a particular dose of the drug, begins to decrease, or habituate, with repeated doses.
Habituation occurs, Solomon says, because the initial, pleasurable reaction to the drug is followed by an unpleasant, increasingly rapid opposing reaction that counteracts the drug’s primary effects. As drug users become habituated, they must take progressively larger doses to get the same high.
Describe the opponent process theory in terms of drug overdose
Suppose that the unpleasant reaction that counteracts a drug’s initial effects becomes associated with a particular room, person or other stimulus that is normally present when the drug is taken.
This stimulus may eventually come to trigger the counteracting process, allowing the user to tolerate larger drug doses.
Now suppose that a person takes this larger drug dose in an environment in which this stimulus is not present.
The strength of the drug’s primary effect will remain the same, but without the familiar environmental stimulus, the counteracting process may be weaker.
The net result may be a stronger-than-usual drug reaction, possibly leading to an overdose
If viewing a picture of a spider causes my heart rate to increase, then by habituating me to such pictures you would expect that my heart rate would _____
Return to normal
If I have just watched an exciting movie involving lots of car crashes, you might expect that, if I hear tyres screech on the road outside my house, my response to this sound would be _____
to flinch
If a drug is known to produce a decrease in heart rate, then stimuli associated with such a drug should _____ heart rate.
Decrease
Describe Pavlov’s experiments
- A REFLEX, which is a quick, automatic response to a stimulus such as meat powder that made the dogs salivate (UCR)
- A NEUTRAL STIMULUS that does not trigger that reflex (the sound of a bell which initially did not make the dogs salivate)
The bell (CS) was sounded first then not long after the powder (UCS) was produced causing the dogs to salivate. This process was called PAIRING.
This learning by association is a type of classical conditioning - eventually the dogs salivated when they only heard the bell (CR)
What is classical conditioning?
Classical conditioning is a procedure in which a neutral stimulus is repeatedly paired with a stimulus that elicits a reflex or other response until the neutral stimulus alone comes to elicit a similar response
What is the unconditioned stimulus (UCS)?
The unconditioned stimulus (UCS) is a stimulus that elicits a response without conditioning
What is the unconditioned response (UCR)?
The unconditioned response (UCR) is the automatic or unlearned reaction to a stimulus
