Week 2 Learning & behavioural psychology/ principles of behaviour analysis (learning theory) Flashcards
What is classical conditioning?
Learning associations - All animals with nervous systems can learn to predictively associate stimuli in the environment.
eg blinking when objects approach the face, turning heads towards loud sounds, salivating when presented with food
What is operant conditioning?
Changing behaviour to get what you want and avoid what you don’t want. You’re more likely to repeat a behaviour with good consequences and less likely to repeat an action with bad consequences
What is cognitive social theory?
When an individual learns from other members of the group by observing or imitating behaviour
Define what a physiotherapist does
“Physiotherapists help you recover from injury, reduce pain and stiffness, increase mobility and prevent further injury. They listen to your needs to tailor a treatment specific to your condition”.
Define what an OT does?
“Occupational Therapy is a clientcentred health profession focused on enabling people to participate in the activities of everyday life”.
Define what a speech pathologist does?
“SP’s study, diagnose and treat communication disorders, including difficulties with speaking, listening, understanding language, reading, writing, social skills, stuttering and using voice. ”.
What is the link between psychology and allied health?
Because they work with people and having a psychological understanding of clients is beneficial to providing treatment
Define what learning is
Reacting to stimulus in our environment based on past experiences
Using Pavlov's classical conditioning experiment, what does the following represent? food salivation bell/whistle the room experiments were done in
food - Unconditioned Stimulus
salivation - Unconditioned Response + Conditioned Response
bell/whistle - Conditioned Stimulus (just before food)
the room experiments were done in - Discriminative Stimulus
In classical conditioning what is extinction?
When the Conditioned Stimulus is presented repeatedly without the Unconditioned Stimulus, the conditioned association is rapidly ‘unlearned’/contra-learned
In classical conditioning what is spontaneous recovery?
Re-training after extinction is a much faster process
In classical conditioning what is stimulus generalisation?
When a wide range of stimuli superficially similar to the original CS trigger the CR (eg bell/whistle in different settings always means food)
In classical conditioning what is stimulus discrimination?
When partial-extinction experience
with similar stimuli trains the subject to react to only narrow CS (eg dog knows whistle in experiment room means food but elsewhere it doesn’t)
In classical conditioning what is blocking?
A new CS will fail to be paired, and thus elicit CR, if
presented alongside another CS that is already paired
In classical conditioning what is latent inhibition?
CS stimuli that have been presented without pairing
before are difficult to subsequently pair with new things
What does ABC refer to in operant conditioning?
Antencedent - Behaviour - Consequence
In operant conditioning what is reinforcement?
Any consequence that makes the preceding
behaviour more likely to reoccur in the future
In operant conditioning what is punishment?
Any consequence that makes the preceding
behaviour less likely to reoccur in the future
In operant conditioning what are positive responses?
Adding something to the subject
In operant conditioning what are negative responses?
Removing something from the subject
Different types of consequences
Positive Reinforcement – To give something appetitive (nice)
Giving chocolates, Praising, Pat on the head
Negative Reinforcement – To take away something aversive (bad)
Turning off horrible noise, Giving painkillers, Stop nagging
Positive Punishment – To add something aversive (bad)
A punch in the face, Spanking, Scolding, Imprisonment
Negative Punishment – To take away something appetitive (nice)
Grounding, Confiscation of games, Fine penalties
Explain how money is a secondary reinforcer?
It doesn’t meet a primary need but can be used to get you the things you want
In operant conditioning what is shaping?
Reinforcing a series of steps (step by step) until you are only reinforcing the whole series of steps. Often used in dog training.
In operant conditioning what is chaining?
Breaking something down into individually reinforceable steps - often useful in allied health context to learn a skill
What is long term reinforcement?
Ways to reinforce behaviour without satiation. Can use schedules of reinforcement.
- ratio schedule
- interval schedule
What is a ratio schedule?
Reinforce at intervals, eg every second time, every 5th time etc (can be fixed or variable)
What is an interval schedule?
Period of time needs to pass before reinforcement (can be fixed or variable)
Which scheduled reinforcement is most effective?
Variable ratio, followed by Variable interval
What is observational learning?
Observing others and learning personal information from that
In observational learning what is imitation?
Acquiring a new set of behaviours by copying the
movements of another
In observational learning what is emulation?
Learning to attend to features of the environment
that seem to correlate with goal-seeking in others
In observational learning what is vicarious conditioning?
Acquiring a conditioned response
(classical or operant) based on seeing the pairings &
consequences play out for someone else
Describe prompting and fading in observational learning
Where a new skills is being taught by showing so the learner can observe, aspects are gradually faded out so the learner needs to rely on their memory of previous observations. ie being a role model and then gradually pulling back that modelling
