CHAPTER 7: LEARNING

Dr. Ark Verma

LEARNING

“a relatively permanent change in behaviour that is the result of

experience”
an important human capacity.

allows us to create effective lives by being able to respond new

situations & challenges. (remember assimilation & accommodation).

a lot of what we do (most things) is based on learning (different

kinds of learning).

multiple perspectives/theoretical backgrounds have been offered

to explain learning?
a few important ones:

conditioning - the ability to connect stimuli with responses

(something like observing the environment & detecting
patterns).

observational learning (modeling): picking up successful models

(what works & what does not)

insight learning: processing, & computing & then having the ‘aha
moment’ !!!
CLASSICAL CONDITIONING

Russian Physiologist, Ivan Pavlov

(1849 - 1936).

was studying the digestive system

of dogs, when…

conducted a series of systematic

experiments to study this pairing,
which the dogs were making.
& identified a fundamental associative learning process called
classical conditioning.

refers to learning that occurs when a neutral stimulus (e.g. tone)

becomes associated with a stimulus (e.g. food) that naturally produces
a particular behavior.
Important Terms:

Unconditioned Stimulus: is something that triggers a natural

behaviour/response.

Unconditioned Response: is the naturally occurring response

(such as salivation) that follows an unconditioned stimulus.

Conditioned Stimulus: is a neutral stimulus, that after being

repeatedly presented prior to the unconditioned stimulus,
begins evoking a similar response as the unconditioned
stimulus.

Conditioned Response: acquired response to the formerly

neutral stimulus.
Conditioning is evolutionary useful as it allows organisms to
develop expectations that helps them prepare for contingencies
(both good & bad).
What after classical conditioning?
More concepts:

acquisition: learning to pair CS & US to give CR.

extinction: reduction in CR, when CS is presented repeatedly

without the US.

spontaneous recovery: increase in CR for CS, following a pause

after extinction.
stimulus generalisation: the tendency to respond to stimuli that
resemble the conditioned stimulus.

e.g. if we have a stomach upset on eating some kind of street -

food we would generally refrain from the any kind of street
food.

e.g. think stereotypes!!!

e.g. Lewicki’ (1985) experiment.

stimulus discrimination: the tendency to respond differently to
stimuli that are similar but not identical.

e.g. Pavlov’s dogs quickly learned, to salivate when they heard the
specific tone that preceded the food, but not upon hearing
similar tones that had never been associated with food.

discrimination is important!

you might be making a lot of mistakes, if you go by only

previous experiences.
secondary conditioners: an existing conditioned stimulus can
serve as an unconditioned stimulus for a pairing with a new
conditioned stimulus.

e.g. black square, the tone & the salivating dog.

e.g. we feel good about summer vacations!

Evolutionary Significance:

clinical psychologists make use of CC to explain the learning of

phobias. e.g. lady on the bridge.

people are more likely to develop phobias that have been

dangerous to people in the past for e.g. spiders, snakes or even
heights.

Garcia & colleagues discovered that taste conditioning was very

powerful.

rats learned to avoid the taste of food, sight or sound that

made them feel nauseated. e.g. de-addiction procedures.
OPERANT CONDITIONING

learning that occurs based on the consequences of behaviour &

can involve learning of new actions.

the organism learns from the consequences of its own actions.

EDWARD L. THORNDIKE (1874 - 1949)

Thorndike was the first scientist

to systematically study operant
conditioning.

observed cats who had been

placed in a “puzzle box” from
which they tried to escape.

first, they struggled haphazardly

then they discovered the ‘lever’.
B. F. SKINNER (1904 - 1990)

Skinner expanded on Thorndike’s

ideas to develop a more
complete set of principles to
explain operant conditioning.

c re a t e d s p e c i a l ly d e s i g n e d
environments known as operant
chambers to systematically study
learning.
Some important concepts:

Reinforcement: refers to the process whereby the delivery of

an stimulus increases the probability of a behaviour.

can be done by giving an appetitive stimulus, i.e. positive

reinforcement.

or by removal of an aversive stimulus, i.e. negative

reinforcement.
Two kinds o contingency between the behaviour &
reinforcement:

Positive: something is given e.g. food on pressing lever.

Negative: something is taken away

Punishment: it decreases the probability of a behaviour & consists
of:

the delivery of an aversive stimulus (positive punishment) or

the removal of an appetitive stimulus (negative punishment or

‘omission training).
Shaping: to teach some novel behaviour, step by step; an animal
can be given adequate reinforcers eacc time the animal takes
baby steps towards that behaviour; gradually until finally the
animal learns that behaviour.
Conditioned Reinforcers: most reinforcers are primary because
they satisfy basic drives. Not all reinforcement is based on
primary reinforcers.

However, many other stimuli can start functioning as secondary

reinforcers or conditioned reinforcers.

Conditioned reinforcers greatly increased the generality of

instrumental conditioning.
e.g.When a rat in a Skinner box presses a lever, a tone sounds
momentarily and is followed shortly by delivery of food (the food
is a primary reinforcer; the tone will become a conditioned
reinforcer). After the animal has been conditioned in this way, the
experimenter begins the extinction process, so that when the rat
presses the lever, neither the tone nor the food occurs. In time,
the animal ceases to press the lever. Then the tone is
reconnected but not the food magazine. When the animal
discovers that pressing the lever turns on the tone, its rate of
pressing increases markedly, overcoming the extinction even
though no food is delivered. The tone has acquired a reinforcing
quality of its own through classical conditioning. Because the tone
was reliably paired with food, it came to signal food.
Interestingly, Secondary reinforcers apply to human behavior as
well: our lives abound with conditioned reinforcers. Two of the
most prevalent are money and praise. Presumably, money is a
powerful reinforcer because it has been paired so frequently with
so many primary reinforcers – we can buy food, drink, and
comfort, to mention just a few of the obvious things. And mere
praise can sustain many activities without even the promise of a
primary reinforcer.
Generalisation & Discrimination: Organisms generalize what they
have learned, and generalization can be curbed by discrimination
training. If a young child is reinforced by her parents for petting
the family dog, she will soon generalize this petting response to
other dogs. Because this can be dangerous (the neighbors might
have a vicious watchdog), the child’s parents may provide some
dis- crimination training so that she is reinforced when she pets
the family dog but not the neighbor’s.
SCHEDULES OF REINFORCEMENT

Not all instances of behaviours, need to be reinforced. (Efficiency)

e.g. once the pigeon has learned to peck in order to get food.
the pigeon continues to peck at a high rate, even if it receives
only occasional reinforcement. In some cases, pigeons that
were rewarded with food an average of once every five
minutes (12 times an hour) pecked at the key as often as 6,000
times per hour – 500 pecks per pellet of food received!

this is called partial reinforcement.

Moreover, extinction following the maintenance of a response on
partial reinforcement is much slower than extinction following
the maintenance of a response on continuous reinforcement.

e.g. Extinction of pecking in pigeons reinforced every five minutes

takes days, whereas pigeons reinforced continuously extinguish in
a matter of minutes.

This phenomenon is known as the partial reinforcement effect.

It makes sense to think that the schedules of reinforcement
determines the pattern of responding.

ratio schedules: reinforcement depends on the number of

responses the organism makes.

fixed ratio:

variable ratio
interval ratio schedules: reinforcement is available only after a
certain time interval has elapsed (and the animal makes a
response).

fixed interval

variable interval
OTHER IMPORTANT CONCEPTS

Aversive Conditioning: Negative of aversive events, such as shock

or painful noise are often used in instrumental conditioning.

in punishment training, a response is followed by an aversive

event or stimulus, which results in the response being
weakened or suppressed on subsequent conditions.

it can effectively eliminate an undesirable response if it is

consistent & delivered immediately after the undesired
response - & if an alternate response if rewarded.
e.g. rats that have learned to take the shorter of two paths in a
maze to reach food will quickly switch to the longer one if they
are shocked when taking the shorter path.

the temporary suppression produced by punishment provides an

opportunity for the rat to learn to take the longer path.

applying punishment training to correct human behaviour has not

always been successful. It is often used in an attempt to increase
safe behaviour, for example in driving, two ways are used:

if you speed you might meet an accident.

if you speed you might get fined.

punishment has some disadvantages.

its effects are not often as informative as the results of reward.

by-products of punishment can be unfortunate.

LEARNING & COGNITION

Watson said, “Give me a dozen healthy infants well-formed, and

my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee t
take any one at random & train him to become any type of
specialist I might select - doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant - in -
chief & yes, even beggar-man and thief; regardless of his talents,
penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, & race of his ancestors
(1930, p.104).
but, such theories were challenged!
in 1930s, Edward C. Tolman, an American psychologist, described findings
showing latent learning in simple animals:

he was able to show that animals were learning, while their behaviour
did not change in a corresponding way (Tolman & Honzik, 1930).

in a typical study, rats would learn to run a complicated maze.

one group of rats was rewarded with food for finding their way
through the maze, over the course of a few days.

a second group of rats was not rewarded initially, & consequently

showed little improvement in learning the maze.

however, when a reward was introduced for this second group of

rats, their performance almost instantaneously caught up with the
first group.
this showed that the second group of rats had ‘latent knowledge’
of the maze, which was only behaviorally expressed once the
food was introduced.

Tolman concluded that a rat running through a complex maze

was not learning a sequence of right- and left turning responses,
but rather was developing a cognitive map - a mental
representation of the lay out of the maze (Tolman, 1932).

more importantly, this learning occurs even when the animal is

not reinforced.
OBSERVATION LEARNING

Humans, also learn often without

reinforcement, through imitation
and observational learning.

Albert Bandura emphasized that

observational learning occurs
through the principle of operant
conditioning (Bandura & Walters,
1963): models inform us about
the consequences of our
behaviours.
Models often are actual persons whose behaviours we observe,
but they can also be more abstract (for e.g. the written
instructions found in a book).

Reinforcement in many cases is vicarious: the imitator expects to

be reinforced just like the model was.
One of Bandura’s early studies concerned the observational
learning of aggressive behavior in young children (Bandura et al.,
1961).

in this study, a group of young children was shown adult

models behaving aggressively towards a Bobo doll.

another group of children were exposed to adult models

behaving non-aggressively.

afterwards, the children were led into a room in which they

could play with many different toys.
the first group of children was shown to display more aggressive
behaviour towards the Bobo doll than the second group of
children.

Bandura later showed that that effects are very similar if the
children are exposed to aggressive behaviour by models
presented in film-sequences on a TV screen (Bandura ey al.,
1963).
Pre-requisites for observational learning acc. to Bandura:

the learner must be able to:

pay attention to the model’s behaviour & observe its

consequences.

remember what was observed.

be able to reproduce the behaviour

be motivated to do so.

in other words: observational learning involves the ability to

imagine & anticipate - thoughts & intentions are essential.
APPLICATION TO EVERYDAY LIFE

the principles of learning are applied in numerous ways in

everyday settings to control, predict, or modify human behaviour.

e.g. operant conditioning has been used to motivate employees,

to improve athletic performance, to increase the functioning of
this suffering from developmental disabilities, & to help parents
successfully toilet train their children.
Some examples:

In advertising: classical conditioning has long been used &

continues to be, an effective tool in marketing & advertising
(Hawkins, Best & Cooney, 1998).

The general idea is to create an advertisement that has

positive features such that the ad creates enjoyment in the
person exposed to it.

the enjoyable ad serves as the US, & the enjoyment is the UR.
& the product becomes the CS & leads to the purchase which
is the CR.
different strategies are used:

good music, cute babies, attractive models & funny people.

Gorn (1982) showed research participants pictures of different

writing pens of different colors, but paired one of them with
pleasant music & the other with unpleasant music.

When asked to choose as a free gift, more people chose the

pen color associated with pleasant music.
Schemer, Matthes, Wirth & Textor (2008) found that people were
more interested in products that had been embedded in music
videos of artists they liked & less likely to be interested when the
products were in videos featuring in artists they did not like.
Another type of ad that is based on principles of classical
condtioning is the one that associates fear with the use of
product or behaviour.