Learning: a relatively enduring change in behavior resulting from experience.
New Reflexes from Old
- Unconditioned response (UR): the natural response that doesn’t require additional learning.
- Conditioned response (CR): when a neutral (normal) stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus (CS) and starts to elicit a specific response.
- Classical conditioning has two phases:
- Acquisition (conditioned stimulus + conditioned response)
- Extinction (conditioned stimulus + no conditioned response)
- This is when the animal stops doing it, because they’re learning new rules about the world
A Learning to Like
- Behaviorism: an approach that emphasizes studying behavior, and the role of the environment as determinants of future behavior.
- Counterconditioning: using conditioning to treat a fear or anxiety.
- This learning is done in the brain by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)
- The vmPFC inhibits the amygdala
- The body is more prone to associating bad tastes with sickness.
- This probably evolved as a way to avoid eating poisonous food.
- Some cancer patients develop a conditioned anxiety response to anything associated with their chemotherapy.
Operant Conditioning
- Operant conditioning: the process by which a behavior becomes more or less likely to occur, depending on its consequences.
- In classical conditioning, responses are generally automatic. In operant conditioning, responses are generally complex and not automatic.
- Classical conditioning = two stimuli; operant conditioning = stimulus and response
- Reinforcement strengthens the response. Punishment weakens the response.
- Primary reinforcers: food, water, comfortable temperature (biological needs).
- Primary punishers: pain, extreme heat, extreme cold (inherently and biologically punishing).
- Secondary reinforcers: money, praise, applause.
- Secondary punishers: criticism, fines, bad grades.
Principles of Operant Conditioning
- It’s a mistake to even sometimes reinforce the behavior, because the organism will learn that the behavior still works sometimes.
- Shaping: reinforce an existing tendency in the right direction until it’s the behavior you want.
B.F. Skinner
- Believed that thoughts and feelings can’t explain behavior.
- Behaviors simply occur because of reinforcement or punishment.
- Believed that free will is an illusion.
Punishment
- The severity of criminal punishments doesn’t matter, just the consistency.
- Punishment is a poor way to eliminate behaviors.
- Punishment often doesn’t happen soon enough after the transgression.
- The punishment doesn’t contain information about what was done wrong.
- The punishment may reinforce the behavior (yelling at a toddler throwing a tantrum gives them the attention they were seeking).
- Punishments are associated with children becoming more aggressive and antisocial over time.
Reward
- When people are paid for an activity, they’re more likely to view it as work and to only spend the minimum amount of time on it.
Learning and the Mind
- Latent learning: when a person learns something but doesn’t apply it or realize they’ve learned it until much later.
- Social-cognitive theory: all theories that combine behavior principals with cognitive principles to explain behavior in a social context.
- Observational learning: learning by seeing someone else do something.
- It’s more effective when the person you’re observing is of the same racial or social group.