Download Conditioning and Learning

CONDITIONING AND LEARNING
1. CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
WHAT IS LEARNING?
 A relatively permanent
change in behavior due to
experience
EARLIEST EXPERIMENTS: IVAN PAVLOV
 Guess what? We
already did this. What
do you remember?
LATER EXPERIMENTS: JOHN WATSON
 Guess what? We
already did this.
What do you
remember?
JOHN WATSON CONT.
 Founder of behaviorism
 What is the main tenet of behaviorism?
 Behaviorism is not EXCLUSIVELY used today very frequently
 Cognition is also part of learning…duh
 Watson thought it was impossible to study cognition, and so decided
that it was useless to speculate…but now what can we do?
THE PARTS OF CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
 Stimulus: Anything in the environment that an
organism can respond to.
 What does that mean in real terms?
 Response: Any behavior or action.
 Surprisingly hard to define…
THE PARTS OF CLASSICAL CONDITIONING CONT.
 Unconditioned Stimulus
(UCS): A stimulus that
triggers a response
automatically and reflexively.
 What are some examples?
THE PARTS OF CLASSICAL CONDITIONING CONT.
 Unconditioned Response
(UCR): The automatic
response to the
unconditioned stimulus.
THE PARTS OF CLASSICAL CONDITIONING CONT.
 Conditioned Stimulus (CS): A previously neutral
stimulus that, through learning, has gained the
power to cause a conditioned response.
THE PARTS OF CLASSICAL CONDITIONING CONT.
 Conditioned Response (CS): The
response to the conditioned
stimulus, or, the UCR that has
been transferred from the UCS
to the CS. Mouthful.
MORE TERMINOLOGY
 Acquisition: The process of developing a learned
response
 Extinction: The diminishing of a learned response; when
a UCS does not follow a CS
 How long do you think the dogs salivated when the
metronome chimed?
 The boy who cried wolf
SPONTANEOUS RECOVERY
 The reappearance, after a rest
period, of an extinguished
conditioned response.
GENERALIZATION
 Generalization: A process in which an organism produces the same
response to two similar stimuli.
DISCRIMINATION
 Discrimination: A process in
which an organism produces
different responses to two
similar stimuli.
GROUP ASSIGNMENT
 At your table, come up with three classical conditioning scenarios
 Does your sister bug you? A parent ride you? A fellow student bully you? Etc.
 For each scenario, operationalize how you will condition their behaviors by outlining the following terms for each
case:
 UCS
 UCR
 CR
 CS
 If you go to far and they have generalized too much, how will you get them to learn to discriminate?
 When the experiment is over, you don’t want to pull a Little Albert. How will you bring the conditioning to
extinction?