LEARNING change in an organism's actions, thoughts, or emotions as a result of experience
by Allison Baker
1. Instinctive Drift
1.1. The tendency for animals to return to innate behaviours following repeated reinforcement
2. Insight Learning
2.1. "AHA" moment in learning
2.2. Wolfgang Kohler (Gestalt Psychology)
3. Mirror Neurons
3.1. When a monkey watches another monkey perform an action, a group of neurons in its prefrontal cortex, near its motor cortex, becomes active
3.2. The same cells that would have become active had the monkey performed the same movement, "imagining" the movement
3.3. Conjectured that mirror neurons play a central role in empathy, including feeling others' emotional states and emulating their movements
4. Real World Aggression & Video Games
4.1. Is it the violent video games creating the aggression or are more aggressive kids more interested in violent video games?
5. Aggression
5.1. Albert Bandura proved that children can learn to act aggressively by watching aggressive others
5.2. Bobo doll: Adults either ignoring or hitting the dolls with kids watching Kids who saw aggression were more likely to be aggressive
6. Cognitive conditioning - our interpretation of the situation affects conditioning, suggests that conditioning is more than an automatic, mindless process
6.1. Pavlov's dogs heard the ticking of the metronome and THOUGHT "ah, i think some meat powder is on the way"
7. Interpretation - whether criticism is viewed as constructive feedback or a personal attack
8. Learning histories - in essence how someone has been trained to react to criticism
9. Cognitive Modes of Learning
10. Radial Behaviourism
10.1. Skinner believed that observable behaviour, thinking, and emotion are all governed by the same laws of learning, namely, classical and operant conditioning (thought that thinking wasn't any different from any other behaviour)
11. Observational Learning
11.1. Learning by watching others
11.2. Saves us from having to learn everything first-hand
12. Latent learning
12.1. Edward Chase Tolman- suspected threats reinforcement wasn’t the be-all and end-all oflearning
12.2. Competence- what we know
12.3. Performance- showing what you know
12.4. Rats who started off without reinforcement, then were given reinforcement halfway through, did the best
12.5. Cognitive Maps - spatial representations of the maze (theta waves)
13. S-O-R Thinking
13.1. O is the organism that that interprets the stimulus before having produced a response
13.2. The link between S and R isn't mindless or automatic The response to a stimulus depends on what this stimulus means to it
13.3. Ex; people’s reactions to you telling them you don’t appreciate them eating with their mouth opened.
14. Skinner Box
14.1. Electronically records an animal's responses and prints out a cumulative record or graph of the activity
14.2. Ex. Rat presses bar, dispenses food, and light signals when reward is coming, electronically measures when light /sensor is hit
15. Insight
15.1. Learning by grasping the underlying nature of the problem
15.2. Characterized by the "AHA" moment, once cats figure out the solution, the get it correct every time following
16. S-R Psychology
16.1. Theorizes that everything we do in life (all our complex behaviours) reflect the progressive accumulation of associations between stimuli and responses
16.2. Everything we do voluntarily results from the gradual build-up of S-R bonds due to the law of effect
17. Learning controlled by the consequences of the organism's behavior
17.1. The organism's behaviour is shaped by what comes after it (aka reward)
17.2. Rewards are known as operants because the animal "operates" on its environment to get what it wants
18. Principles
19. Applications
20. Disgust reactions
20.1. Paul Rozin- Fudge shapes like dog feces
20.2. Normal things paired with typically gross things elicit this same response
21. Fetishes
21.1. Sexual attraction to non-living things, possibly caused by the pairing of non-living things with sexual experience
22. Classical conditioning
23. Higher-Oder conditioning
23.1. An organism develops a classically conditioned response to a previously neutral stimuli that will later become associated with the original CS
24. Spontaneous Recovery
24.1. Seemingly extinct CR appears as we present the CS again. The subject does not forget it but rather suppresses it.
24.2. Renewal effect- when a response is extinguished in a different setting than conditioned in, the response can reappear when returned to the original setting
25. Stimulus Discrimination
25.1. Occurs when we exhibit less pronounced CR to CSs’ that differ from the original
26. Stimulus Generalization
26.1. The process by which the CSs’ that are similar, but not identical, to or original CS. Elicit like the CR
27. Extinction
27.1. The CR decreases in magnitude and will eventually disappear when the CS is repeatedly presented without the CS. The CR rewrites over the CR with a new one
27.2. Still an active process
28. Acquisition
28.1. As the CS and UCS are paired; the CR increases progressively in strength Backward conditioning- when the UCS is presented before the CS (hard to achieve)
29. A form of learning which has animals respond to a neutral stimulus that has been paired with another stimulus.
29.1. 1. Start with a neutral stimulus that does not provide no response. Ex. Metronome
29.2. 2. Pairs the NS with Unconditional Stimulus, a stimulus that elicits an automatic response. Ex. Meat powder.
29.3. 3.Through time the NS was able to cause a response without the UCS, which was then deemed the CR. The CR will become the same as the UCR. The NS has become the conditioned stimulis.
30. Law of Effect E.L. Thorndike
30.1. If a response, in the presence of a stimulus, is followed by a satisfying state of affairs, the bond between the stimulus and response will be strengthened
31. B.F Skinner and Reinforcment
32. Ivan Pavlov Russian Psychologists' primary research was on dogs digestion and salvation.
32.1. The dogs were placed in a harness, and cannulas were inserted into their salivary glands in order to study the salivary responseto meat powder
32.2. Dogs salivation increased not only with the presence of meat powder but with the stimulus like the sound of footsteps.
33. Operant Conditioning
34. Types of Learning
35. Sensitization
35.1. Responding more strongly over time to a repeated stimulus
35.2. Most likely to occur when a stimulus is irritating, dangerous or both
36. Differences front Classical Conditioning
36.1. 1. The response is emitted, generated in a seemingly more voluntary fashion
36.2. 2. The reward is contingent on behaviour, dependent on what it does
36.3. 3. Responses depend primarily on the skeletal muscles, voluntary motor behaviour
37. Preparedness
37.1. We're evolutionarily predisposed to fear certain stimuli more than others
37.2. Prepared fears are "evolutionary memories" (emotional legacies of natural selection)
37.3. May render us likely to develop illusory correlations between stimuli and negative consequences
38. Preparedness and Phobias
38.1. People fear things that they've never had a particularly terrifying experience with
39. Conditioned Taste Aversions
39.1. Refers to the fact that classical conditioning can lead us to lead us to develop avoidance reactions to the taste of food
39.2. Typically require ONE trial to develop
39.3. CTA are remarkably specific and display little evidence of stimulus generalization
39.4. Cancer patients eat scapegoat food before chemotherapy
39.5. Contradicts Equipotentiality - The claim that we can classically condition all CSs equally well to all UCSs, a belief held by many traditional behaviourists
40. Two Factor Theorem
40.1. People acquire phobias by means of classical conditioning, then once they have the phobia, they start to avoid their feared stimulus whenever they encounter it
40.2. If they have a dog phobia, they may cross the street whenever they see someone walking toward the with a dog. When they do they experience a reduction in anxiety that negatively reinforces their fear
41. Fear & Conditioning
41.1. Classically conditioned fear reactions are based largely in the amygdala, whereas operantly conditioned responses are based largely in brain areas rich in dopamine ( linked to reward).
42. Applied behaviour Analysis (ABA) - for autism makes extensive use of shaping techniques, mental health professionals offer food and other primary reinforcers to individuals with autism as they reach progressively closer approximations to certain words, and eventually, complete sentences (LOVAAS)
43. Therapeutic Uses of Operant Conditioning
43.1. Target Behaviours - actions they hope to make more frequent. Reinforce patients who exhibit these behaviours using tokens, chips, points, or other secondary reinforcers
43.2. Token Economy - system, often set up in psychiatric hospitals, for reinforcing appropriate behaviours and extinguishing inappropriate ones
43.3. Secondary Reinforcers - are neutral objects that become associated with Primary Reinforcers
44. Explaining Superstitions
44.1. When given reinforcement without actually performing a behaviour, we start to believe that we actually DID do something that caused the reinforcement
44.2. Accidental operant conditioning --> superstitious conditioning
45. Overcoming Procrastination
45.1. Don't reward yourself with fun things/treats until you've finished your work
46. Animal Training
46.1. Shaping by Successive Approximations: Train a new target behaviour by reinforcing behaviours that aren't exactly the target behaviour but that are progressively closer versions of it
46.2. Chaining: They link several interrelated behaviours to a longer series (each becomes cue for the next behavior in the chain)
47. Ratio Schedule
47.1. FIXED RATIO: Reinforced after same set number of responses
47.2. VARIABLE RATIO: Reinforced after a specific number of responses on average but the precise number of responses required during any given period varies randomly
47.2.1. YIELDS THE HIGHEST RATE OF RESPONDING