Week 2 Learning & behavioural psychology/ principles of behaviour analysis (learning theory)

Question 1

What is classical conditioning?

Answer 1

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

Question 2

What is operant conditioning?

Answer 2

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

Question 3

What is cognitive social theory?

Answer 3

When an individual learns from other members of the group by observing or imitating behaviour

Question 4

Define what a physiotherapist does

Answer 4

“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”.

Question 5

Define what an OT does?

Answer 5

“Occupational Therapy is a clientcentred health profession focused on enabling people to participate in the activities of everyday life”.

Question 6

Define what a speech pathologist does?

Answer 6

“SP’s study, diagnose and treat communication disorders, including difficulties with speaking, listening, understanding language, reading, writing, social skills, stuttering and using voice. ”.

Question 7

What is the link between psychology and allied health?

Answer 7

Because they work with people and having a psychological understanding of clients is beneficial to providing treatment

Question 8

Define what learning is

Answer 8

Reacting to stimulus in our environment based on past experiences

Question 9

Using Pavlov's classical conditioning experiment, what does the following represent?
food
salivation
bell/whistle
the room experiments were done in

Answer 9

food - Unconditioned Stimulus

salivation - Unconditioned Response + Conditioned Response

bell/whistle - Conditioned Stimulus (just before food)

the room experiments were done in - Discriminative Stimulus

Question 10

In classical conditioning what is extinction?

Answer 10

When the Conditioned Stimulus is presented repeatedly without the Unconditioned Stimulus, the conditioned association is rapidly ‘unlearned’/contra-learned

Question 11

In classical conditioning what is spontaneous recovery?

Answer 11

Re-training after extinction is a much faster process

Question 12

In classical conditioning what is stimulus generalisation?

Answer 12

When a wide range of stimuli superficially similar to the original CS trigger the CR (eg bell/whistle in different settings always means food)

Question 13

In classical conditioning what is stimulus discrimination?

Answer 13

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)

Question 14

In classical conditioning what is blocking?

Answer 14

A new CS will fail to be paired, and thus elicit CR, if

presented alongside another CS that is already paired

Question 15

In classical conditioning what is latent inhibition?

Answer 15

CS stimuli that have been presented without pairing

before are difficult to subsequently pair with new things

Question 16

What does ABC refer to in operant conditioning?

Answer 16

Antencedent - Behaviour - Consequence

Question 17

In operant conditioning what is reinforcement?

Answer 17

Any consequence that makes the preceding

behaviour more likely to reoccur in the future

Question 18

In operant conditioning what is punishment?

Answer 18

Any consequence that makes the preceding

behaviour less likely to reoccur in the future

Question 19

In operant conditioning what are positive responses?

Answer 19

Adding something to the subject

Question 20

In operant conditioning what are negative responses?

Answer 20

Removing something from the subject

Question 21

Different types of consequences

Answer 21

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

Question 22

Explain how money is a secondary reinforcer?

Answer 22

It doesn’t meet a primary need but can be used to get you the things you want

Question 23

In operant conditioning what is shaping?

Answer 23

Reinforcing a series of steps (step by step) until you are only reinforcing the whole series of steps. Often used in dog training.

Question 24

In operant conditioning what is chaining?

Answer 24

Breaking something down into individually reinforceable steps - often useful in allied health context to learn a skill

Question 25

What is long term reinforcement?

Answer 25

Ways to reinforce behaviour without satiation. Can use schedules of reinforcement.

• ratio schedule
• interval schedule

Question 26

What is a ratio schedule?

Answer 26

Reinforce at intervals, eg every second time, every 5th time etc (can be fixed or variable)

Question 27

What is an interval schedule?

Answer 27

Period of time needs to pass before reinforcement (can be fixed or variable)

Question 28

Which scheduled reinforcement is most effective?

Answer 28

Variable ratio, followed by Variable interval

Question 29

What is observational learning?

Answer 29

Observing others and learning personal information from that

Question 30

In observational learning what is imitation?

Answer 30

Acquiring a new set of behaviours by copying the

movements of another

Question 31

In observational learning what is emulation?

Answer 31

Learning to attend to features of the environment

that seem to correlate with goal-seeking in others

Question 32

In observational learning what is vicarious conditioning?

Answer 32

Acquiring a conditioned response
(classical or operant) based on seeing the pairings &
consequences play out for someone else

Question 33

Describe prompting and fading in observational learning

Answer 33

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