What is learning?

Change in an organism’s behavior as a result of experience

 What are the general types of learning?
o Latent learning: learning that is motivated or orchestrated by incentive
or reinforcement (rats developed cognitive maps of the maze without
reinforcement)
o Observational learning: learning by watching others without any kind of
reinforcement (Bobo doll demonstration)
o Insight learning: both instruction and reinforcement must occur for
learning to occur (chimps learning the box to get grapes WITH
instruction and grape reward)
 What is classical conditioning?
o Classical conditioning: stimulus response pairings their association
 Who do we associate with it?
o Pavlov
 Who were the British Associationists, and what was their role in the
development of classical conditioning?
o Everything we leaned is based on our stimuli, everything based on our
stimuli and experience
 What did Pavlov do?
o Lead an experiment with dogs: every time he rang a bell, the would
thereafter feed the dog (they would hear the bell then salivate at the
sight of the food) up until a point where the dogs would immediately
begin to salivate at the sound of the bell even without food present
 What are the following: conditioned stimulus; unconditioned stimulus;
conditioned response; unconditioned response?
o Conditioned Stimulus: initially neutral
o **Conditioned Response: the response to a conditioned stimulus
o Unconditioned Stimulus: a stimulus that naturally revokes a response
o **Unconditioned Response: initial and natural response reaction to a
stimulus
o ** unconditioned and conditioned responses are the same
 Again, think in terms of examples. What are acquisition, extinction, and
spontaneous recovery
o Acquisition: repeated pairing of conditioned stimulus and unconditioned
stimulus to create a conditioned response
o EXAMPLE: because it is learned it can be unlearned if it isn’t paired
together for x amount of time
o Extinction: more times the conditioned stimulus is presented without
the unconditioned stimulus the weaker the conditioned response gets
o EXAMPLE: Jaws music plays -- no one dies -- people still get scared …Jaws
music plays -- no one dies -- people eventually don’t get scared
 o Spontaneous recovery: conditioned response isn’t forgotten just
suppressed
o EXAMPLE: Forget that they don’t need to be scared of music…Jaws music
plays -- people get scared
 Aversive conditioning?
o Pairing something to be unlearned with an unpleasant unconditioned
stimulus (e.g pain) trying to forget it
 Stimulus generalization and discrimination?
o Responding only to discriminatory stimulus not others
o Generalization you respond to every stimulus not just the original
specific one
 How do we get “higher-order conditioning”?
o When you have one thing that is related to another and then you
associate that thing with its surrounding or descriptors and then you
feel the same about those things as you did about the original object or
thing
 Who was Little Albert, and what did his story teach us?
o The little white fluffy rat that scared Albert of all white fluffy things or all
animals
o Wanted to demonstrate the classical conditioning
 What else can we do with classical conditioning?
o Everything if you associate two things together, fetishism, disgust
What is operant conditioning?
 What scientists do we associate with it?
o Skinner
 What is an “operant” and what other names might we know operant
conditioning (or classical conditioning) by?
 How are classical and operant conditioning similar, and how are they
different? Who was Thorndike, and what did he do?
 Who was Skinner, and what did he do?
o Skinner box, 3 learning components light food box reward
 What is the difference between positive and negative reinforcement?
o + give something good for more frequency
o - give
 Positive and negative punishment?
o +
o -
 What is the difference between negative reinforcement and punishment?
 Again, think examples! What are shaping and chaining?
 There are lots more terms here (discriminant stimulus, partial reinforcement,
etc.) – know them both definitionally and in terms of their application.
 o Variable interval: reinforcement after average interval but interval varies
around the average (rats rewarded on average 10 min, they could hit it
every 2 min, or every 2 hours but average is 10 min)
o Partial reinforcement:
o Discriminate stimulus:
 What are the different schedules of reinforcement?
o
 What dimension do they vary on?
 What kind of responding do we associate with each?
 How do they relate to what we generally think of as being
reinforcing/rewarding?
 How do we use these, or other principles of operant conditioning, in training
animals?
 When would we use reinforcement, and when would we use punishment?
 What else, other than training animals, can we do with operant conditioning?
What is cognitive learning
 and how does it differ from the behaviorist model?
 What are latent learning, observational learning, and insight learning?
 With what scientists do we associate these, and what did their studies tell us
about how organisms learn?

 Negative Punishment: doing something more frequently for a reward

 Negative Reinforcement: doing something less frequently
 Reinforcement is more effective than punishment
o Dogs: + treats – choke chains
o Positive behavior is positive outcomes
Superstitious behavior:
Learning fads: sleep assisted learning no
Discovery learning: you learn on your own without instructions how to do something
Thorndike’s law of effect:
Phobias: --
Each stepp