Unit 6 Learning

Neutral Stimulus

A stimulus that produces no response other than catching your attention. For example, let's say you have to bring your child to the pediatrician for a shot. Prior to the shot, the pediatrician presses a buzzer to call her assistant to come in and help her administer the vaccine. In this case, the sound of the buzzer is the neutral stimulus because it doesn't produce any response from the child, but the child does notice it.

Positive Reinforcement

A stimulus which increases the frequency of a particular behavior using pleasant rewards. A doggy treat can pleasantly coerce your new puppy to sit (positive reinforcement) just as a pull to the choke collar can achieve the same affect (negative reinforcement).

Punishment

An event that decreases the behavior that it follows.

Habituation

As humans, we get used to things. Something that is new and incredibly exciting can become boring. This tendancy to have decreased repsponsiveness to something is habituation. For example, there may be a painting or picture you really like so you put it on the wall in your room. You see this picture every day, 10 times a day. Over time and repeated exposures to this picture you might start feeling like you've "seen it a million times" and it just doesn't have the same effect on you that it used to. This is habituation.

B.F Skinner

B.F. Skinner (1904 - 1990) is best known for developing the theory of Operant Conditioning, which uses reinforcers or consequences to change behavior.

Edward Tolman

Edward Tolman (1886 - 1959) was a Cognitive Behaviorist who believed that animals had the ability to learn things that they could use later in a variety of ways. This point of view was in opposition to the idea that learning occurs as an automatic response to environmental stimuli.

Higher Order Conditioning

Extending the conditioning one more level...the conditioning is happening not by pairing the stimulus with something that naturally produces a response, but with something that has been conditioned to produce a response.

Extinction

Extinction is from conditioning and refers to the reduction of some response that the organism currently or previously produced. In classical conditioning this results from the unconditioned stimulus NOT occurring after the conditioned stimulus is presented over time. In operant conditioning it results from some response by the organism no longer being reinforced (for example, you keep getting your dog to sit on command, but you stop giving it a treat or any other type of reinforcement. Over time, the dog may not sit every time you give the command)

Generalization

Generalization refers to a process within operant and classical conditioning, where a conditioned response (CR) starts occurring in response to the presentation of other, similar stimuli, not just the conditioned stimulus (CS). For example, a dog is trained to sit (CR) when you give the command, "sit" (CS). Soon after that, the dog might sit when you say "hit", "bit", and "kick". In this case, the CR (sitting) is not only done to the CS (the command, "sit") but also to commands that are similar.

Continuous Reinforcement

Principle in which an organism is reinforced every single time that organism provides the appropriate operant response. For example, you, as a researcher, might present a food pellet every time the rat presses the lever. One of the biggest dangers when using this type of reinforcement is saturation (the organism basically gets full - you keep feeding it and it no longer wants the reinforcement because it is stuffed), so the idea that giving reinforcement all the time is the best way to teach/learn is not necessarily true.

Pro-social Behavior

Prosocial behaviors are those intended to help other people. Prosocial behavior is characterized by a concern about the rights, feelings and welfare of other people. Behaviors that can be described as prosocial include feeling empathy and concern for others and behaving in ways to help or benefit other people.

Schedule of Reinforcement

Reinforcement is effective when it occurs on some schedule. Psychologist have identified several different schedules by which reinforcement works well, including variable ratio, variable interval, fixed ratio, and fixed interval. Each schedule provides reinforcement in different ways according to different criteria, and work better in different situations. But the goal is always the same--deliver reinforcement in a way that increases the chances of a target behavior occuring more frequently.

Respondent behavior

Respondent behavior is a behavioral process (or behavior) that happens in response to some stimuli, and is essential to an organism's survival. This behavior is characterized by involuntary action. For example, the pupil starts to flicker when exposed to direct sunlight. If the pupil does not flicker, the eye will be more exposed to sun rays, which may lead to blindness.

Acqusition

The phase in classical conditioning in which one begins to associate a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned response, resulting in the neutral stimulus eliciting a conditioned response.

Observational Learning

The process of acquiring information by observing others. Learning to tie your shoe by observing another individual perform the task would be an example of observational learning.

Behaviorism

The school of thought that stresses the need for psychology to be an objective science. In other words, that psychology should be a science based on observable (and only observable) events, not the unconscious or conscious mind. This is an extremely important concept for science; without it, how can you ever find out what is true, false, real, or fake.

Latent Learning

The type of learning that occurs, but you don't really see it (it's not exhibited) until there is some reinforcement or incentive to demonstrate it. For example, if you are in a car going to school with a friend every day, but your friend is driving all the time, you may learn the way to get to school, but have no reason to demonstrate this knowledge. However, when you friend gets sick one day and you have to drive yourself for the first time, if you can get to school following the same route you would go if your friend was driving, then you have demonstrated latent learning.

Associative Learning

This is a "learning" or "conditioning" term that refers to learning that two different events occur or happen together. This is really a fundamental component of conditioning since a response to a stimulus won't really be learned if the organism doesn't get the point that the stimulus and response are supposed to occur together. This association must occur for the learning to occur.

Shaping

This is a behavioral term that refers to gradually molding or training an organism to perform a specific response (behavior) by reinforcing any responses that are similar to the desired response.

Primary Reinforcer

This is a term used in conditioning, and it refers to anything that provides reinforcement without the need for learning to an organism. This means that the reinforcer is naturally reinforcing to the organism. For example, water is naturally reinforcing because organisms don't need to learn to be reinforced by it, they naturally get reinforced especially in times of being thirsty.

Negative Reinforcement

With negative reinforcement the occurrence of a behavior is increased by removing an unpleasant stimulus. For example, your dog can avoid being spanked when it sits in response to your command. If the dog has been getting spanked, not getting spanked is rewarding (removal of unpleasant stimulus) so the frequency of the behavior will increase.

CS and CR

• CS (conditioned stimulus)-stimulus that begins to elicit a particular response through classical conditioning

Violence Viewing effect

seeing or being exposed to violent actives via t.v., media, newspaper, movies, etc...

E.L Thorndike

Edward Thorndike (1874 - 1949) is famous in psychology for his work on learning theory that lead to the development of operant conditioning within behaviorism.

Albert Bandura

1925-present; Field: sociocultural; Contributions: pioneer in observational learning, stated that people profit from the mistakes/successes of others; Studies: Bobo Dolls-adults demonstrated 'appropriate' play with dolls, children mimicked play.

Cognitive Map

A cognitive map is a mental representation of the layout of one's environment. It seems that many animals, not just humans, are able to form a mental representation of an environment that they have been in or are currently in. For example, when a friend asks you for directions to your house, you are able to create an image in your mind of the roads, places to turn, landmarks, etc., along the way to your house from your friend's starting point. This representation is the cognitive map.

UCS and UCR

Behavior that happens naturally, unlearned.

Biological constraints

Biological constraints on learning refers to he limitations on a species ability to learn new tasks that are imposed by physical restraints or cognitive (mental) abilities of the species. For instance, although some of the great apes (Gorillas and Chimps) can perform many physical tasks and even learn how to communicate through sign language, it appears that they lack the mental organization or physical means to to learn to read or speak.

Classical Conditioning

Classical conditioning is one form of learning in which an organism "learns" through establishing associations between different events and stimuli. For example, when a neutral stimulus (such as a bell) is paired with an unconditioned stimulus (such as food) which produces some involuntary bodily response all on its own (such as salivating), the neutral stimulus begins to trigger a response by the organism similar (some salivation) to that produced by the unconditioned stimulus. In this way, the organism has "learned" that the neutral stimulus equals something good (just like the unconditioned stimulus).

Discrimination

Discrimination is a term that is used in both classical and operant conditioning. In classical conditioning, it refers to an ability to distinguish between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and other, similar stimuli that don't signal an unconditioned stimulus (US). For example, if Pavlov's dog had developed discrimination, it would have salivated to the tone that had been paired with the delivery of the meat powder, and not a similar tone with a slightly different pitch. In operant conditioning, the definition is essentially the same, but here the organism discriminates between a learned, voluntary response and an irrelevant, non-learned response. For example, a dog that has learned to sit when a person says "sit" in order to receive a treat, but the dog does not sit when a person says "bit".

Insight

Insight learning is a type of learning or problem solving that happens all-of-a-sudden through understanding the relationships various parts of a problem rather than through trial and error.

Intrinsic Motivation

Motivated to perform specific behaviors to achieve promised outside rewards or to avoid punishment from others. Intrinsic motivation does seem to be more satisfying to people though. People who are extrinsically motivated tend to be less satisfied and become unhappy more easily (in general, not always).

Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Pavlov (1849 - 1936) is best known for his work describing the psychological phenomenon of Classical Conditioning. From his work studying digestion in dogs, he observed that the dogs would salivate at the mere sight of food.

John Garcia

John Garcia came up with The Garcia Effect. The highly selective nature of food aversion is called the Garcia Effect. John Garcia showed that animals associated illness with food, even if the illness was caused by something else.

Conditioned Learning

Learning is a relatively permanent change in behavior or knowledge that comes from experience or training.

Stimulus- Response

Learning resulted from an association between experience( external stimulus) and subsequent reaction( behavioral response).

Unconditioned learning

Learning where it occurs naturally due to natural stimulus.

Mirror Neurons

Mirror neurons are a type of brain cell that fires when you do an action, and also when you simply watch someone else doing the same action. For example, when you are grabbing a cup of coffee, Motor Neuron A (which also happens to be a Mirror Neuron) fires to tell your hand to reach out and grip the handle of the cup. When you watch your friend pick up his own cup of coffee, Motor Neuron A also fires as if you were also picking up his cup of coffee, even if your hand is not moving at all.

Modeling

Modeling is a form of learning where individuals ascertain how to act or perform by observing another individual.

Operant Conditioning

Operant Conditioning is a type of learning in which a behavior is strengthened (meaning, it will occur more frequently) when it's followed by reinforcement, and weakened (will happen less frequently) when followed by punishment. When you are reinforced for doing something, you're more likely to do it again. When you are punished for doing something, you are less likely to do it again.

Partial Reinforcement

Partial reinforcement is reinforcing an organism only sometimes and not everytime the desired behavior occurs. Think of trying to teach your dog to sit. Will he learn to sit faster if you reward the dog every single time he sits when you tell him to or if you reward him only sometimes? Of course he will learn to sit slower using this partial reinforcement approach.

Secondary Reinforcer

Secondary reinforcers are reinforcing only after the organism has been conditioned to find it reinforcing. Some stimulus that does not naturally provide reinforcement is paired with a primary reinforcer so that the organism begins to associate the secondary reinforcer with the primary reinforcer. For example. If you recall the Pavlov's dog case, the dog naturally salivated to the presence of meat powder. The meat powder serves as a primary reinforcer. But then pairing a sound with the meat powder over and over again, the sounds became reinforcing to the dog because it had been associated with the primary reinforcer (meat powder).

Skinner Box

Skinner used it to study animals such as rats and pigeons. The chamber (in the shape of a box) contains either a lever or key that can be pressed in order to receive reinforcements such as food and water. There was also a mechanism that recorded all the behaviors of the animals, the schedules of reinforcement the animals were on, etc. It was a very controlled environment that Skinner used to meticulously study behavior.

Spontaneous Recovery

Spontaneous recovery is the reappearance of a response (a Conditioned Response; CR) that had been extinguished. The recovery can occur after a period of non-exposure to the Conditioned Stimulus (CS). It is called spontaneous because the response seems to reappear out of nowhere. Let's look at an example. Let's say I condition (teach/train) a rat to press a lever whenever I ring a bell. Then I teach the rat to press the lever when I flash a light and not when I ring the bell. Once I've accomplished this, we can say that the first conditioned response (pressing the lever when I ring the bell) has been extinguished. But then one day, the rat starts to press the lever when I ring the bell and not when I flash the light. In this situation, there was spontaneous recovery of the response that was previously extinguished.

Taste Aversion

Taste Aversion-With taste aversion, the mind develops a resistance towards a certain food. In simpler terms, eating certain types of food can cause a bad reaction. This is a form of classical condition when the body uses a natural instinct as a means of protection. This is also called a survival mechanism. It warns the body if a type of food (berries or mushrooms) is harmful.

Law of Effect

The Law of Effect, as stated by psychological theorist Thorndike, deals with what is called "stimulus-response" reaction that is exhibited by living creatures. Stimulus-response means exhibiting a reaction to some form of reward. This law is based on the observation of the effects that rewards have on animal behavior in test conditions. For example, an animal can be taught to push a lever to receive a bite of food as a reward. When the animal receives a treat for its behavior, it becomes more willing to continue to perform the behavior. In this example, you can see the effect the reward has the animal's behavior.

Learned Helplessness

When an organism (person, animal, etc.) is prevented from avoiding some aversive stimulus repeatedly (e.g., continuous electric shocks) the organism will reach a state in which it becomes passive and depressed because he believes that there are no actions it can take to avoid the aversive stimulus.