PSYCH101 Chapter Notes - Chapter 22: Conditioned Taste Aversion, Observational Learning, Classical Conditioning

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYCH101
• Professor: Richard Ennis

Document Summary

Module 22 effects of biology and cognition, and learning by observation. Biology, cognition, and learning learning is the product of the interaction of biol"cal, psych"cal, social-cultural influences. Biol"cal genetic predispositions; unconditioned responses; adaptive responses. Psych"cal previous experiences; predictability of associations; generalization; discrimination social-cultural culturally learned preferences; motivation, affected by presence of others. Exposed rats to a particular taste, sight, sound (cs) and later to radiation/drugs (us) that led to sickness (ur) 1st finding: even if sickened as late as several hours after tasting a particular novel flavour, rats thereafter avoided that flavour: violated notion that us must immediately follow cs. This is not always the case as we saw in taste-aversion findings. E. g. chemotherapy waiting room triggers nausea. Limits on operant conditioning: each species has its own capacity for operant conditioning, we most easily learn and retain behaviours that reflect our biol"cal predispositions. Naturally adaptive instinctive drift animals revert to their biol"cally predisposed patterns.