Week 3 Reading Flashcards
Who is John Locke?
Empiricist philosopher
What does John Locke believe?
Experience shapes the nature of the human mind
Also considers learning to be the primary factor in social personality and personality development
What process of development do learning theorists believe in?
Continuity
Mechanisms of change
Why do learning theorists think children are different from one another?
Due to different histories of reinforcement and learning opportunities
What is the theme of research and children’s welfare?
Approaches based on learning principles have been widely applied to a range of issues in child rearing
Who is John B Watson?
The founder of behaviourism
What does Watson believe?
Development is determined by the child’s environment, by learning through conditioning
Psychologists should study visible behaviour
Who said this:
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.
John B Watson
What type of condition did Watson demonstrate?
Classical conditioning
What was Watson’s famous classical conditioning experiment?
Little Albert Study:
Exposed the 9 month old to a nice white rat to which Albert responded positively
Then he accompanied the rat with a loud noise to scare Albert
After the pairing Albert became scared of the rat itself
How did Watson try to apply the power of learning to parenthood?
It was the parents responsibility to guide development
In North America he advised to put infants on a strict feeding schedule so they would be conditioned to expect food at regular intervals and hence not cry in between
Treat babies as though they are young adults
Who claimed that:
a person does not act upon the world, the world acts upon him?
B. F. Skinner
What is the major belief of Skinner’s operant conditioning theory?
We tend to repeat behaviours that lead to favourable outcomes (reinforcement) and suppress those that result in unfavourable outcomes (punishment)
What does Skinner believe?
Everything we do in life is an operant response influenced by the outcomes of past behaviour
What are the two discoveries from Skinner that are of particular interest to parents and teachers?
1: Attention can by itself serve as a powerful reinforcer
2: The difficulty of extinguishing behaviour that has been intermittently reinforced (sometimes been followed by reward and sometimes not)
Define intermittent reinforcement
Inconsistent response to a behaviour; for example, sometimes punishing unacceptable behaviours, and other times ignoring it
What form of therapy evolved from Skinner’s work?
Behaviour modification
What is behaviour modification therapy?
A form of therapy based on principles of operant conditioning in which reinforcement contingencies are changed to encourage more adaptive behaviour
Example: if a child is alone and you want them to engage in a group yet you only approach them while alone, you need to start approaching them in the group instead
What is social learning theory?
Attempts to account for social development in terms of learning mechanism while also emphasizing observation and imitation
Who is Albert Bandura?
Social-learning theorist
What does Bandura believe?
Most human learning is inherently social in nature and is based on observation of the behaviour of other people
What is Bandura’s Bobo doll study?
Had preschool children watch a short film where an adult performed highly aggressive actions (e.g., hitting with a mallet and throwing balls at) on a Bobo doll
They then had 3 groups where children then watched the adult be praised, scolded or no consequences
Test to see if vicarious reinforcement would affect the children’s behaviour
And after being left in a room with the Bobo doll they were offered incentive to reproduce as many of the models action’s as they could remember
Define vicarious reinforcement
Observing someone else receive a reward or punishment
What are the results of Bandura’s Bobo doll study?
Children who saw the model being punished imitated less than the other two groups but in all conditions the children learned from observing the models behaviour
Additionally boys exhibited more aggressive behaviours than girls