psychology chapter 9

positive and negative reinforcement

-Suppose you want to teach a dog to shake hands. One way would be to give the animal a treat every time it lifts its paw up to you. The treat is called a POSITIVE REINFORCER. In this example, the dog will eventually learn to shake hands in order to get the reward. -Whereas positive reinforcement occurs when something desirable is added after an action, NEGATIVE REINFORCEMENT occurs when something undesirable is removed, or stopped, after an action. For instance, there are automobiles that when driven produce an unpleasant dinging sound if the driver has left her seat belt unbuckled. When the driver buckles her seat belt, the dinging sound goes away. She has to perform the action of buckling her seat belt to receive the desired result of the removal of the dinging sound. This is negative reinforcement.

B.F. Skinner-rewards and punishment

B.F. Skinner has been the psychologist most closely associated with operant conditioning. He believed that most behavior is influenced by a person's history of rewards and punishments. -Suppose you want to teach a dog to shake hands. One way would be to give the animal a treat every time it lifts its paw up to you. The treat is called a POSITIVE REINFORCER. In this example, the dog will eventually learn to shake hands in order to get the reward. -Whereas positive reinforcement occurs when something desirable is added after an action, NEGATIVE REINFORCEMENT occurs when something undesirable is removed, or stopped, after an action. For instance, there are automobiles that when driven produce an unpleasant dinging sound if the driver has left her seat belt unbuckled. When the driver buckles her seat belt, the dinging sound goes away. She has to perform the action of buckling her seat belt to receive the desired result of the removal of the dinging sound. This is negative reinforcement.

Token economy

Conditioning in which desirable behavior is reinforced with valueless objects, which can be accumulated and exchanged for valued rewards. -Psychologists tried an experiment with a group of troubled boys in Washington, D.C. They received points-or secondary reinforcers-for good grades on tests. They could cash in these points for such rewards as snacks or lounge privileges. A majority of the students showed a significant increase in IQ scores. The boys continued to improve in the months that followed, showing that they were, indeed, educable. -In token economies people are systematically paid to act appropriately.

Rosalie Rayner

John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner used conditioning on a human infant in the case of Little Albert. Rayner and Watson attempted to condition an 11-month-old infant named Albert to fear laboratory rats. At first Albert happily played with the rats. When Watson struck a steel bar with a hammer to produce a loud sound, Albert began to display a fear response. Eventually Albert showed fear each time he saw a rat even though the loud sound was not repeated. This provided evidence that emotional responses can be classically conditioned in humans.

Generalization

Occurs when an animal responds, or reacts, to a second stimulus similar to the original CS without prior training with the second stimulus. When Pavlov conditioned a dog to salivate at the sight of a circle, he found that the dog would salivate when it saw another geometric figure as well. However, the more closely the figure resembled the circle, such as an oval, the more the dog would salivate.

Ivan Pavlov-classical conditioning

Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov was the first to document in great detail conditioning as we know it. Today, we call the types of conditioning documented by Pavlov, classical conditioning. In Classical conditioning: a person's or animal's old response to a prompt or stimulus becomes attached to a new prompt or stimulus. His discovery of this principle was accidental.

Modeling

The second type of social learning. Modeling is learning by imitating others; copying behavior. -When you go to a concert for the first time, you may be very hesitant about where to go, when to enter, when to clap, when to stand or sit down and so on. So you observe others at the concert, follow their lead, and soon you have it all figured out. -Modeling includes three different types of effects. 1. In the simplest case, witnessing the behavior of other simply increases the chances that we will follow their lead and do the same thing. You could think of this a mimicry. 2. Observational learning or imitation. In this sort of learning an observer watches someone perform a behavior and is later able to reproduce it closely, though the observer was unable to do this before he or she observed the actions of the model. 3. disinhibition: When an observer watches someone else engage in a threatening activity without being punished, the observer may find it easier to engage in that behavior later.

Conditioned stimulus

a once-neutral event that elicits a given response after a period of training in which it has been paired with an unconditioned stimulus. This would be the sound of the tuning fork making the dog drool.

Unconditioned response

a reaction that occurs naturally and automatically when the unconditioned stimulus is presented, in other words, a reflex.

Unconditioned stimulus

an event that elicits a certain predictable response typically without previous training the dog does not have to be trained to salivate when it smells meat.

Learned helplessness

condition in which repeated attempts to control a situation fail, resulting in the belief that the situation is uncontrollable. If a person has numerous experiences in which his or her actions have no effect, he or she may learn a general strategy of helplessness or laziness. They see no evidence that their efforts produce results, so they stop trying. -Martin Seligman believes that learned helplessness is one major cause of depression. He reasons that when people are unable to control events in their lives, they generally respond in one of the following ways: 1. They may be less motivated to act and thus stop trying altogether. 2. They may experience a lowered sense of self-esteem and think negatively about themselves. 3. They may feel depressed. -Three important elements of learned helplessness: 1.Stability refers to the person's belief that the state of helplessness results from a permanent characteristic. For example, a student who fails a math test can decide that the problem is either temporary, i did poorly on this math test because I was sick. or stable, I never have done well on math tests and never will. 2. globality: the person can decide that the problem is either specific, I'm no good at math tests or Global, i'm just dumb. 3. Internality: Both stability and globality focus on the student-ON internal reasons for failure.

Escape conditioning

is a type of negative reinforcement. In escape conditioning, a person's behavior causes an unpleasant event to stop. Consider the case of a child who hates liver and it is served for dinner. She whines about the food and gags while eating it. At this point, her father removes the liver. The whining and gagging behavior has been thus negatively reinforced, and the child is likely to whine and gag in the future when given an unpleasant meal.

operant conditioning

learning in which a certain action is reinforced or punished, resulting in corresponding increases or decreases in occurrence. It is basically learning from the consequences of behavior. -The term operant is used because the subject, the wandering dog in our example, operates on or causes some change in the environment. This produces a result that influences whether the subject will operate or respond in the same way in the future. Depending on the effect of the operant behaviors, the learner will repeat or eliminate these behaviors to get rewards or avoid punishment.

Learned laziness

receiving rewards with little or no effort

Discrimination

the ability to respond in different ways to different stimuli. Pavlov was later able to do the opposite of generalization, teaching the dog to respond only to the circle by always pairing meat powder with the circle but never pairing it with the oval.

Extinction

the gradual disappearance of a conditioned response when the conditioned stimulus is repeatedly presented without the unconditioned stimulus. Pavlov discovered that if he stopped presenting food after the sound of the tuning fork, the sound gradually lost its effect on the dog. After he repeatedly struck the tuning fork without giving food, the dog no longer associated the sound with the arrival of food-the sound of the tuning fork no longer caused the salivation response.

Conditioned response

the learned reaction to a conditioned stimulus. This would be when the dog drools due to the sound of the tuning fork.

avoidance conditioning

the person's behavior has the effect of preventing an unpleasant situation from happening. If the child starts whining and gagging when the father removes the liver from the refrigerator to cook it, he may decide to put it back and fix something else. We would identify the situation as avoidance conditioning; the child avoided the unpleasant consequences by whining early enough.

Observational learning/imitation

this is a type of modeling. In this sort of learning an observer watches someone perform a behavior and is later able to reproduce it closely, though the observer was unable to do this before he or she observed the actions of the model.