chapter6Lecture.ppt

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Chapter 6 Learning

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Learning

• Learning is defined as any relatively permanent change in behavior that is based upon

experience.

• It is an area of psychology that seems simple to evaluate but is in fact quite complex.

• Factors both within and outside of an organism can influence and interfere with learning.

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Module 6.1 • Behaviorism

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Behaviorism

• Behaviorists are psychologists who insist that psychologists should study only observable, measurable behaviors, not mental processes.

• There is, however, a wide range of views among researchers who call themselves behaviorists.

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Behaviorism • Methodological behaviorism

– Methodological behaviorists study only events that they can measure and observe.

– They sometimes use those observations to make inferences about internal events.

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– For example, from observing how an animal behaves in the presence of certain stimuli, a methodological behaviorist will infer the

presence of an intervening variable.

– An intervening variable is something that

cannot be directly observed yet links a variety of procedures to a variety of possible

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– If a monkey is more likely to show its teeth or make loud noises in response to the

placement of a stuffed animal or a larger

monkey of the same species in its cage, and to a recording of growling noises of a

predatory cat, the methodological behaviorist will infer the presence of the intervening

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– What measurements would you take to infer the presence of intervening variables such as:

• Hunger? • Affection? • Anger?

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Behaviorism • Radical behaviorism

– Radical behaviorists believe that internal states are caused by events in the

environment, not by genetics.

• The ultimate cause of behavior is

observable events, not internal states.

• Most vague discussions of mental states should be rephrased into descriptions of behavior.

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Behaviorism • The rise of behaviorism

– In the early 1900s, the structuralists used the technique of introspection to study

psychology.

– They asked subjects to describe their own experiences in order to study thoughts and ideas.

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– Behaviorists thought it was useless to ask people to describe their private experiences. – There was no way to check the accuracy of

these reports, and hard to define what “private experiences” mean.

– Behaviorists insisted that psychology deal

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– Jacques Loeb argued that all animal and most human behavior could be explained with

stimulus-response psychology.

• Stimulus-response psychology attempts to explain behavior in terms of how each

stimulus triggers a response.

• Flinching from a blow and shading one’s eyes from strong light are examples of stimulus-response behaviors.

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– More complex patterns of behavior are the sum of changes of speed and direction

elicited by various stimuli.

– Modern behaviorists do not subscribe to this model but now believe that behavior is

produced by stimuli and responses, plus the effects of natural physiological states (hunger, tiredness, etc.)

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– The behaviorists carried on the tradition of asking questions about animal learning. This practice was abandoned when it was found to be impossible to determine how intelligent

different animal species might be.

– Early behaviorists believed that it might be possible to determine the basic laws of

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Behaviorism • The assumptions of behaviorism

– Behaviorists are deterministic

• They assume that we live a universe of

cause-and-effect. Since our behavior is part of that universe, it too must have

identifiable causes.

• If enough is known about an individual’s experiences, influences, and genetics, we can predict that individual’s behavior.

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– Behaviorists believe that mental explanations are ineffective.

• Q. Why is she smiling?

• A. She is smiling because she is happy. • Q How do you know she is happy?

• A. We can tell she is happy because she is smiling.

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– Behaviorists believe that this is typical circular reasoning that arises when one infers the

presence of internal states based on behavior. – The influence of this perspective can be seen

in the American legal system. Witnesses are not allowed to make inferences about what they saw; they are encouraged to describe appearance and behavior.

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– Behaviorists believe that the environment plays a powerful role in molding behavior.

• The strongest influence on behavior is outcome.

• The environment selects and perpetuates successful behaviors, much as evolution selects successful animals.

• Behaviorists don’t deny the importance of heredity, but they don’t emphasize it.

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Behaviorism

• People are quick to dismiss behaviorism.

• They are disturbed by the notion that thoughts, beliefs and emotions are not the cause of

behavior, but the effect.

• A behaviorist argues that past outcomes of

behaviors have caused the thoughts, beliefs and emotions.

• How could you scientifically support the idea that thoughts, beliefs and emotions exist

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Module 6.2 • Classical Conditioning

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Pavlov and Classical Conditioning

• Ivan Pavlov was a physiologist who won a Nobel Prize for his research on digestion.

• His original description of classical conditioning was a by-product of this research. He did not set out to discover classical conditioning.

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Classical Conditioning

• Pavlov noticed that the dogs he used to do his research salivated upon the sight of the lab

workers who fed them.

– He concluded that this reflex was

“psychological” because it was based on the dog’s previous experiences.

– Further testing demonstrated that the sight of food produced the same effect as giving the same amount of food to the dog.

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Figure 6.2

Figure 6.2 Pavlov used dogs for his experiments on classical conditioning and salivation. The experimenter rings a buzzer (CS), presents food (UCS), and measures the responses (CR and UCR). Pavlov collected saliva with a simple measuring pouch attached to the dog’s cheek.

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• Based upon his tentative acceptance of the salivation as a reflex, Pavlov used the term conditional reflex to describe this response. • The term was mistranslated into English as

conditioned reflex, a mistake that helped create the terminology we use to describe classical

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• Pavlov started with the unconditioned reflex of salivation to food. He hypothesized the

presence of an automatic connection. – The dogs had an unconditioned reflex

between food and secretion of digestive juices.

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• A buzzer is a neutral stimulus because it elicits attention to the sound, but no automatic

connection.

– The dogs would lift their ears and look around when the buzzer sounded, but no salivation was produced.

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• Pavlov conjectured that animals develop new

connections by transferring a response from one stimulus to another.

– He hypothesized that if a buzzer always

preceded the food, the buzzer would begin to elicit the reflex of salivation.

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• After a few pairings of the buzzer with the food, the dogs would begin to salivate as soon as the buzzer sounded.

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Figure 6.3

Figure 6.3 A conditioned stimulus precedes an unconditioned stimulus. At first the conditioned stimulus elicits no response, and the unconditioned stimulus elicits the unconditioned response. After sufficient pairings the conditioned stimulus begins to elicit the conditioned response, which can resemble the unconditioned response.

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Classical Conditioning • Terminology

– Unconditioned Stimulus (UCS)  An event that consistently and automatically elicits an unconditioned response.

– Unconditioned Response (UCR)  An action that the unconditioned stimulus automatically elicits.

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Classical Conditioning • Terminology

– Conditioned Stimulus (CS)  Formerly the neutral stimulus, now paired with the

unconditioned stimulus, elicits the same response. That response depends on consistent pairing with the UCR.

– Conditioned Response (CR)  The response elicited by the conditioned stimulus due to

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• Factors that enhance conditioning

– Conditioning is quicker when the conditioned (neutral) stimulus is unfamiliar. If you are

habituated to (used to) the neutral stimulus, it will take longer for pairing with an unconditioned

stimulus to form a connection.

– Conditioning is facilitated when people are made aware of the connection between the CS and the UCS. Having been informed of the conditioning procedure they will be conditioned faster.

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Concept Check

A puff of air is blown into a rabbit’s eye just after a musical tone is played. After several repetitions of this procedure, the rabbit closes its eye when the musical tone is played.

What are the: – UCS

– UCR – CS – CR?

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• UCS= Air puff

• UCR= Closing the eye • CS= Musical tone

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Concept Check

• A TV commercial for Mega Burger shows a

delicious cheeseburger. A classic rock song is played during the commercial. You see the

commercial several times, and now when the song is playing on the radio, you get hungry.

What are the: – UCS

– UCR – CS

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• UCS= Cheeseburger • UCR= Hunger

• CS= Rock song

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Concept Check

• When the training starts, the CS elicits

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• When the training starts, the CS elicits no

response and the UCS elicits an unconditioned

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Concept Check

• After the training, the CS elicits ________ and the UCS elicits ________.

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• After the training, the CS elicits (CR) conditioned

response and the UCS elicits (UCR)

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• The processes of classical conditioning

– The process that establishes or strengthens a conditioned response is called acquisition.

– To extinguish a classically conditioned response, the conditioned stimulus is repeatedly presented without the

unconditioned stimulus. This decrease and elimination is referred to as extinction.

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• The processes of classical conditioning – A rabbit is conditioned to blink its eye.

Repeated presentation of a musical tone is followed by a puff of air directly blown in its eye. After a few repetitions, the rabbit blinks when the tone sounds. This is acquisition.

– The musical tone is then played repeatedly with no puff of air. Gradually, the rabbit stops blinking. This is extinction.

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– Extinction does not erase the association between the CS and the UCS.

– If the puff of air is presented again to the rabbit without warning, it will blink the next time the tone is played.

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– The temporary return of an extinguished response is called spontaneous recovery. – The rabbit acquires the response, and then

the response is extinguished through the

repeated presentation of the tone with no air puff. Hours after the experiment, the rabbit hears a musical tone. It blinks.

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Figure 6.4

Figure 6.4 If the conditioned stimulus regularly precedes the unconditioned stimulus,

acquisition occurs. If the conditioned stimulus is presented by itself, extinction occurs. A pause after extinction yields a brief spontaneous recovery.

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Concept Check

To deal with your conditioned response to the song from the Mega Burger commercial, what

steps would you take to produce extinction? What steps would you take to produce spontaneous

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– To produce extinction, play the song repeatedly with no image of the

cheeseburger.

– To produce spontaneous recovery, watch the commercial once a few days after the

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– Stimulus generalization is the extension of a conditioned response from the training

stimulus to similar stimuli.

– Through conditioning Baby Hannah smiles and laughs at the title screen with dark

background and white writing that precedes a funny song and cartoon on her “Sellatubbies” video tape. Her parents notice that she also smiles and giggles at the FBI Warning screen appearing on movie videotapes.

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Classical Conditioning • The process of classical conditioning

– Discrimination is the process of learning to respond differently to two stimuli because they produce two different outcomes.

– Gradually Hannah stops laughing at the FBI Warning screen because the song and

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Classical Conditioning • Explanations of classical conditioning

– The process of classical conditioning is more complex than it might seem.

– The association is not merely a transfer of

response from one stimulus to the other. The conditioned stimulus acts as a signal to the organism.

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– Temporal contiguity facilitates the process of conditioning. The less time elapsing between the presentation of the CS and the UCS, the faster the CR is acquired.

– The CR will be acquired more quickly when the CS precedes the UCS. This is called forward conditioning.

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Figure 6.8

Figure 6.8 According to Pavlov (a) At the start of conditioning, activity in the UCS center automatically causes activation of the UCR center. (b) After sufficient pairings of the CS and UCS a connection develops between the CS and UCS centers. Afterward, activity in the CS center flows to the UCS center and therefore excites the UCR center.

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– In trace conditioning, the CS stops before the UCS is presented. This is a slow and

relatively ineffective method.

– Backward conditioning (UCS follows by the CS) rarely produces a response.

– The phenomenon of blocking effects suggests that it is difficult to condition the same

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– When rats experience an electric shock (a UCS) they jump and shriek.

– After being conditioned to a buzzer preceding the shock (a CS) they freeze in place at its

sound, a typical alarm response in rats.

– Animals use a CS as a way to prepare for a UCS, not as the actual UCS.

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• Conditioning, contiguity and contingency

– A conditioned response develops only if there is predictability or contingency.

– The UCS is more likely to occur after the CS. – The learner discovers the event that predicts

the outcome. However, it is unclear whether any actual complex thinking occurs as a result of this process.

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• Classical conditioning is thought by those

unfamiliar with psychology to be the learning of simple, mechanical behavior.

• In reality it is a complex form of learning that

requires processing of information on the part of the learner.

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Module 6.3 • Operant Conditioning

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Thorndike and Operant Conditioning • In 1911, Harvard graduate student Edward

Thorndike developed a simple, behaviorist explanation of learning.

• He used a learning curve, a graph of the

changes in behavior that occur over successive trials of an experiment, to record how quickly

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Figure 6.11

Figure 6.11 Each of Thorndike’s puzzle boxes had a device that could open it. Here tilting the pole will open the door. (Based on Thorndike, 1911/1970)

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Figure 6.12

Figure 6.12 As the data from one of Thorndike’s experiments show, a cat gradually and irregularly decreases the time it needs to escape from a box. Thorndike concluded that the cat did not at any point “get the idea.” Instead, reinforcement gradually increased the probability of the successful behavior.

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Thorndike and Operant Conditioning

• He noted that cats would learn more quickly if the response selected produced an immediate escape.

• The cats would try a variety of behaviors to open the box, and gradually learn to more quickly

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Thorndike and Operant Conditioning • But overall, it appeared to Thorndike that the

cats were not “understanding” the connections between the solution and the escape. There was no sudden increase in the learning curve to

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Figure 6.13

Figure 6.13 According to Thorndike, a cat starts with a large set of potential behaviors in a given situation. When one of these, such as bumping against a pole, leads to reinforcement, the future probability of that behavior increases. We do not need to assume that the cat understands what it is doing or why.

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Thorndike and Operant Conditioning • Thorndike observed that the escape from the

box acted as a reinforcement for the behavior that led to the escape.

– A reinforcement is an event that increases the future probability of the most recent response.

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Operant Conditioning

• The type of learning that Thorndike studies has come to be known as operant or instrumental conditioning.

– Operant conditioning is the process of

changing behavior by following a response with a reinforcement.

– In operant conditioning, the subject’s behavior determines and is affected by a specific

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Table 6.2

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Processes of Operant Conditioning • In operant conditioning, extinction occurs if

responses stop producing reinforcements.

– A child for whom you are babysitting whines until you give him a cookie. If you stop giving the child cookies, he will eventually stop

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Processes of Operant Conditioning • Stimulus generalization occurs when a new

stimulus is similar to the original reinforced

stimulus. The more similar the new stimulus is to the old, the more strongly the subject is likely to respond.

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Processes of Operant Conditioning

The child for whom you are babysitting falls and scrapes his knee. He is crying

inconsolably. You give him a cookie. He continues to whine and cry on and off all

afternoon, stopping for brief periods after you give him a cookie. The stimulus of his whining has generalized to crying and whining. You

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Processes of Operant Conditioning • Discrimination occurs when someone is

reinforced for responding to one stimulus but not another. The individual will respond more

vigorously to one than to the other.

– If you stop giving the child cookies when he cries but continue when he whines, he will whine much more often than he will cry.

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Processes of Operant Conditioning • A stimulus that indicates which response is

appropriate or inappropriate is called a discriminative stimulus.

– The child for whom you baby-sit does not

whine for cookies when his mother is present, because she never gives in to his whining. As soon as she leaves, he is at your knee

whining for a cookie. The presence of his

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Phenomena of Operant Conditioning • The ability of a stimulus to encourage some

responses and discourage others is known as stimulus control.

– When his mother is present, the child for

whom you baby-sit asks her politely for some juice and crackers. When his mother is

absent, he whines for cookies. The presence or absence of one stimulus after another

signals to him which behaviors will or will not be reinforced.

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Processes of Operant Conditioning

• Thorndike noted that some responses are more easily learned than others. The cats learned to escape from the mazes relatively quickly, but

learned to scratch themselves on cue slowly and inconsistently.

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Figure 6.15

Figure 6.15 According to Thorndike’s principle of belongingness, some items are easy to associate with each other because they “belong” together; others do not. For example, dogs easily learn to use the direction of a sound as a signal for which leg to raise, but they have trouble using the type of sound as a signal for the same response

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Phenomena of Operant Conditioning • One possible explanation for this is

belongingness.

– Belongingness is the concept that certain stimuli are classified together or are more

readily associated with certain outcomes than with others. Some psychologists also refer this to as “preparedness”.

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B.F. Skinner and the Shaping of Behavior • B.F. Skinner is considered to be the most

influential of all radical behaviorists.

• He demonstrated many potential applications of operant conditioning.

• He was a firm believer in parsimony, seeking simple explanations in terms of reinforcement histories, and avoiding the inference of complex mental processes.

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Shaping Behavior

• Shaping establishes new responses by

reinforcing successive approximations to it.

• Skinner used an “operant chamber” (referred to as a “Skinner box” by others) into which he put the animal he wished to train by shaping.

• Gradually the animal was reinforced for

behaviors that approached the target activity until it fully performed the behavior.

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Shaping Behavior

• For example, to make a pigeon turn in a complete clockwise circle, Skinner would first reinforce the pigeon with food for just turning a few degrees to the right. After the pigeon began turning to the

right regularly, he would cease reinforcing until the pigeon turned a few more degrees in that

direction, and when that behavior was

established, wait until the pigeon turned further to the right, and reinforce that movement, until finally the pigeon turned completely around in a circle.

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Chaining Behavior

• Chaining is an operant conditioning method

where behaviors are reinforced by opportunities to engage in the next behavior

– The animal learns the final behavior, and then the next to last, and so on, until the beginning of the sequence is reached.

– Eating is an example of a chained behavior in humans. Most of us first learn to eat with

utensils, and gradually acquire the preceding activities of getting and preparing food.

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Increasing and Decreasing the Frequency of Responses

• A reinforcement is an event that increases the probability that a response will be repeated.

• A punishment is an event that decreases the probability of a response.

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• A reinforcement can be either the presentation of a desirable item such as money or food, or the removal of an unpleasant stimulus, such as verbal nagging or physical pain.

• A punishment can be the removal of a desirable condition such as driving privileges or the

presentation of an unpleasant condition such as physical pain.

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Reinforcement and Punishment

• All things being equal, most people will respond better to both immediate reinforcement and

immediate punishment.

• Most punishments are given in American society for behaviors that are immediately reinforcing. The punishments may or may not occur.

• The threat of punishment under these conditions is not an effective tool for changing behavior.

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Reinforcement and Punishment

• Punishment tends to be ineffective except for temporarily suppressing undesirable behavior. • Mild, logical, and consistent punishment can be

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Concept Check

Most people who speed are not put off this

infraction by the threat of a speeding ticket and fine. Based on what you have learned about the efficacy of punishment as a training method, why do you think this is?

Because the threat of the punishment is highly uncertain – very few people get pulled over

relative to the number who speed – and the behavior is very immediately gratifying.

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Reinforcements and Punishments

• The presentation of an event that strengthens or increases the likelihood of an event is called

positive reinforcement.

– A parent praises a child for excellent performance on a test.

– A waiter receives an extra large tip for good service.

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• Punishment is referred to as passive avoidance learning because in response to punishment an individual learns to avoid the outcome by being passive.

– A child learns to avoid the punishment of being sent to his room for the evening by not teasing his little sister.

– A woman avoids distress by not calling her

sister who always says cruel things whenever they talk.

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Reinforcements and Punishments • Omission training occurs when the lack of a

response produces reinforcement. Producing the response also leads to a lack of reinforcement.

– This is sometimes referred to as negative punishment.

• Parents tell a teenager that if she breaks curfew again, she will lose her driving

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• Escape learning or active avoidance learning occurs if the responses lead to an escape from or an avoidance of something painful.

– This is sometimes referred to as negative reinforcement.

• A teenager cleans his room to avoid

listening to any more of his dad’s nagging. • A babysitter gives a cookie to a child to

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Concept Check

• What type of learning has occurred?

You don’t go into your friend’s greenhouse because you get a headache and sore throat whenever you go in with him.

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Concept Check

Your little brother locks you in his room and

plays the Barney theme song at full volume until you tell him what Mom and Dad are giving him for his birthday.

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Concept Check

You win a $1,000.00 scholarship for your high GPA.

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Concept Check

• You put on your sunglasses because the bright sun is making your eyes hurt.

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Concept Check

• Your professor deducts points from your final grade if you are late to class.

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Concept Check

• You send flowers to your sweetheart because you always get extra affection and compliments after you do so.

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Concept Check

• You really want to pass this class so you never have to sit through it again.

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What Constitutes Reinforcement? • A reinforcer is something that increases the

likelihood of the preceding response.

– This can be confusing because it leads to a circular explanation.

– It can also be confusing because although generally a reinforcer is a pleasant event, it doesn’t have to be.

– What constitutes a “pleasant event” can be hard to define or vary from person to person.

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What Constitutes Reinforcement?

• Many reinforcers satisfy biological needs, such as hunger.

• Addictive behaviors don’t seem to give much pleasure to the addict (although they may be negatively reinforcing - done to avoid the

unpleasant condition of not having access to the drug.)

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What Constitutes Reinforcement?

• Some reinforcers don’t satisfy any immediate need, but may represent a future opportunity to have greater access to resources (such as a good grade – you can’t eat it, but getting many of them may raise your chances of having more to eat later in your life.)

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What Constitutes Reinforcement? • The Premack Principle

– The Premack Principle states that the

opportunity to engage in a preferred behavior will be a reinforcer for any less preferred

behavior.

• A person who prefers going to the movies to going to museums can be reinforced for extra trips to the museum with free movie passes.

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What Constitutes Reinforcement? • The disequilibrium principle

– The disequilibrium principle states that each person has a preferred pattern of dividing time between various activities and if the person is unable to engage in that pattern a return to it will be reinforcing.

• A person who must work overtime for the next three weekends makes an extra effort to finish up the assigned work to return to his preferred activity of playing golf.

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Concept Check

Using the disequilibrium principle and positive reinforcement, how would you encourage more studying in a child who is getting poor grades due to insufficient studying?

Determine the child’s preferred after school activity and tie set amounts of time spent doing that activity to the completion of a minimum number of minutes of hours studying.

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What Constitutes Reinforcement? • Unconditioned reinforcers meet primary,

biological needs and are found to be reinforcing for almost everyone. Food and drink are

unconditioned reinforcers.

• Conditioned reinforcers are effective because they have become associated with

unconditioned reinforcers. Money and grades are conditioned reinforcers.

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Table 6.1

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Learning What Leads to What

• Thorndike had a strictly mechanical view of reinforcement. An animal that receives

reinforcement for a behavior will perform that behavior more frequently. No learning will take place without reinforcement, and no

understanding of the reason for the behaviors is necessary.

– A rat learns to run a maze because food is present at the end of the alleys that lead to the exit from the maze.

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Learning What Leads to What

• The idea of latent learning, on the other hand, suggests that learning may occur in animals without being demonstrated until the reward is presented.

– A rat is left to explore and sniff around in a maze. When presented with the possibility of a reward of food, he runs the maze as fast as the rat that was painstakingly trained with

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Schedules of Reinforcement

• A schedule of reinforcement is a set of rules of for delivery of reinforcement

– It is used to maintain a learned behavior that might be extinguished if reinforcement ceased. – A continuous reinforcement schedule provides

reinforcement every time a response occurs.

– However, outside of the laboratory, reinforcement rarely follows every occurrence of a desired

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• Most schedules of reinforcement are intermittent. In other words, some responses are reinforced and others are not.

• One of the two major categories of intermittent reinforcement is ratio, in which the delivery of

reinforcement depends on the number of responses given by the individual.

• The second category of intermittent reinforcement is interval, in which delivery of reinforcement depends on the amount of time that has passed since the last reinforcement.

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• A fixed-ratio schedule provides reinforcement only after a certain (“fixed”) number of correct responses have been made. For example, a

laboratory rat being reinforced for hitting a lever after every 5 hits is being reinforced on an FR-5 schedule.

– The local gourmet coffee shop gives you a card that says if you buy 9 coffee drinks you will get the 10th beverage for free.

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• A variable-ratio schedule provides reinforcement after a variable number of correct responses,

usually working out to an average in the long run. For example, a baseball player who has a . 333 batting average is reinforcing fans with hits on a VR-3 schedule.

– Slot machines, like all gambling, provide a particularly compelling form of variable ratio reinforcement to the player.

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• A fixed-interval schedule provides reinforcement for the first response made after a specific time interval. A person who is paid every two weeks is reinforced for work on a fixed interval

schedule.

– You receive your local newspaper at the same time every day. You probably have a

good idea of when to start checking for it. This is a fixed interval schedule.

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Schedules of Reinforcement • A variable-interval schedule provides

reinforcement after a variable amount of time has elapsed.

– If your newspaper delivery person is very

inconsistent about delivery times, showing up one day at 5:00AM, the next day at 7:30AM, etc., your paper is delivered on a variable

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Table 6.3

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• All things being equal, extinction of responses tends to take longer when an individual has

been on an intermittent schedule rather than a continuous schedule.

• One explanation for this difference is that the lack of reinforcement does not signify the

complete cessation of reinforcements to the individual who has been on an intermittent schedule.

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Concept Check • Name the reinforcement schedule

• You receive e-mail from your friend who is studying in France this semester at about an average of 1 note every 4 days.

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Concept Check • Name the reinforcement schedule

• Your very reliable oven bakes a batch of cookies in 10 minutes.

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Applications of Operant Conditioning • There are a wide variety of applications for the

techniques of operant conditioning including, but not limited to:

– Animal training for performance, military, and helper animals.

– Persuasion in political and commercial enterprises.

– Psychological treatment, through the use of applied behavior analysis or behavior

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Applications of Operant Conditioning

• In behavior modification, the clinician determines which reinforcers sustain an undesirable or

unwanted behavior.

• The clinician then tries to change the behavior by reducing the opportunities for reinforcement of the unwanted behavior and providing

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Operant Conditioning

• People are sometimes offended by the idea that the possibility of positive reinforcement might influence behavior.

• You wouldn’t work hard in a course or a job if your performance didn’t matter and all the grades or

bonuses were given with no regard to quality.

• Operant conditioning provides one enormously useful and powerful way to change and improve behavior.

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Module 6.4 • Other Kinds of Learning

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Conditioned Taste Aversions

• If learning occurs reliably after just one trial, it is hard to know if the learning was a result of

classical conditioning or operant conditioning

– One kind of learning that occurs after a single trial is an association between eating

something and getting sick.

– This is referred to as a conditioned taste aversion.

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Conditioned Taste Aversions

– Many species appear to have a built-in

predisposition to associate illness with what they have consumed, even if some time has elapsed between the consumption of the

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Birdsong Learning

• The beautiful songs of male birds may be delightful to our ears, but they are serious business for the bird

– The songs are crucial for soliciting the attentions of a suitable mate.

– They are also a warning to potential interlopers in the singer’s territory.

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• Some species of songbird are especially

dependent on the process of hearing live songs of older males of the same species in order to develop a normal song.

• There is a sensitive period early in the bird’s life during which he will learn the song most readily. • The young bird will also learn better from a live

male than from a tape recording, and will not learn the songs of other species.

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• Birdsong learning resembles human language learning in some ways.

– It requires a social context, has an optimal period for learning early in life, starts with a kind of babbling, and tends to deteriorate if the individual becomes deaf later in life.

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• It differs from classical conditioning in that the song the baby male bird learns from is not an unconditioned stimulus – it elicits no response. • It differs from operant conditioning in that during

the sensitive period there is no apparent reinforcement of the learning.

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Social Learning

• The social-learning approach, defined by Albert Bandura, states that we learn many behaviors before we attempt them for the first time.

– Much learning, especially in humans, results from observing the behaviors of others and from imagining the consequences of our own. – Two of the chief components of social

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Social Learning

• Bandura and his assistants did experiments in which children watched films of real people and cartoon characters either attacked an inflated “Bobo” doll or did not.

– Children who saw the versions of the films with aggressive behavior were more likely to repeat those actions when left alone with a similar toy. – The implication was that the children were

imitating the aggressive behavior they had just witnessed in the film.

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Social Learning

• There has been great interest in the work of Bandura and those who have done further research along these lines because of the

controversy over violence in TV programs and movies.

• It is unclear if there is a direct relationship between televised or cinematic violence and violent behavior. People vary widely in the

degree to which they are open to the influence of violent imagery.

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Vicarious Reinforcement and Punishment • Another aspect of the social learning approach

is the idea that we are more likely to imitate behaviors that have been rewarding for other people, and we are less likely to imitate

behaviors that create unpleasant results for others.

• This substitution of someone else’s experiences for one’s own is referred to as vicarious

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Vicarious Reinforcement and Punishment

• The effectiveness of vicarious reinforcement and punishment parallels that of direct reinforcement and punishment.

• Vicarious reinforcement appears to be more effective in creating behavioral change than vicarious punishment is.

• It may be that people are more able to use

cognition to avoid identifying with others whose behaviors brought about serious or fatal

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Self-Efficacy in Social Learning • We tend to imitate people we admire.

• Advertisers are keenly aware of this tendency and routinely use endorsements from celebrities and sports figures, and images of the happy, healthy, affluent people that most of us would like to be.

• We do not model ourselves after every admirable figure that we encounter. We imitate others only when we have a sense of self-efficacy, when we perceive ourselves as also being able to perform the task successfully.

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Learning

• Classical conditioning, operant conditioning,

conditioned taste aversions, and social learning represent a diverse set of influences on human behavior.

• Your everyday behavior is in large part a product of the combined effects of these processes.