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LEARNING
Instinct vs. Experience
What do salmon do at birth?
Unlike Salmon, we are not born with a genetic plan
for life. Much of what we do, we learn from
experience. Although we struggle to find the life
direction a salmon is born with, our learning gives us
more flexibility.
We can learn how to build grass huts or snow
shelters, submarines, or space stations, and thereby
adjust to almost any environment. Indeed, nature’s
most important gift to us may be to our
adaptability--our capacity to learn new behaviors
that help us cope with changing circumstances.
According to Myers, no topic is closer to the heart of psychology
than LEARNING, a relatively permanent behavior change due to
experience.
We will focus on 3 types of LEARNING for now:
Classical Conditioning
Operant Conditioning
Observational Learning
Classical Conditioning is…
You all worked on your Learning Terms and saw the
Zimbardo video…please take a second to tell the
class what you think Classical Conditioning actually
is?
Here’s a great way of putting it


Classical Conditioning is a type of learning in which
one learns to link two or more stimuli and anticipate
events.
Example—seeing lightning and wincing as you
anticipate thunder.
PAVLOV

We have already discussed his experiments, so let’s
jump in and discuss the terminology that resulted
from his research…
Unconditioned Response: he called the salivation in
the mouth the unconditioned response because it
was unlearned. The food was the unconditioned
stimulus.
More On Pavlov…


Salivation in response to the tone was conditional
upon the dog’s learning the association between the
tone and the food. Today we call this learned
response the Conditioned Response (CR).
The previously neutral tone stimulus that now
triggered the conditional salivation we call the
Conditioned Stimulus (CS).
1 Different Example

Identify the US, UR, CS, and CR:
An experimenter sounds a tone just before
delivering an air puff which causes your eye to
blink. After several repetitions you blink to the tone
alone.
ANSWERS
Unconditioned Stimulus=Air Puff
Unconditioned Response=Blinking to the Air Puff
Conditioned Stimulus=Tone After Procedure
Conditioned Response=Blink to Tone
Write this down to help you…
Unconditioned Stimulus
Unconditioned Response
Neutral Stimulus+Unconditioned Stimulus
Unconditioned Response
Repeat Several Times and…
Conditioned Stimulus+No Stimulus
Conditioned Response
1 Last Time…
Can one brave volunteer tell us…
The aroma of cake baking sets your mouth to
watering. What is the US? The CS? And the CR?
ANSWER

US=the Cake (and it’s taste)

CS=Aroma

CR=Salivating
To Fully Understand Classical
Conditioning…

Make sure you learn these terms (if you know them
now, please speak up):
acquisition
higher-order conditioning
extinction
spontaneous recovery
generalization
discrimination
learned helplessness