PSYC 111 Chapter 6: PSYC111 Notes (Ch 6)
18 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Psyc 111: Introductory Psychology Professor Deak
Chapter 6: Learning
Chapter Objectives:
• Provide an overview of major theories of learning from a historical perspective.
• Convey an understanding of how behavior is shaped through paired
associations, environmental contingencies and modeling.
Brief Lecture Outline:
I. Learning
A. Definition: any relatively durable change in behavior or knowledge that is due
to experience
a. Conditioning involves learning associations between events that occur
in an organism’s environment
B. Why do we learn?
a. Learning increases our chances of survival
C. Perspectives
II. Classical Conditioning
A. Classical conditioning is type of learning that involved a stimulus that aquires
the capacity to evoke a responve that was originally envoked by another
stimulus
a. Clicking for a treat: salivate at click
b. Passive learning: no behavioral output is required for an association to
be formed
c. Non associative learning
i. Habituation – reduces our reactions to repeated experiences
that have already been evaluated and found to be unchanged
ii. Sensitization – increases our reactine to a wide range of stimuli
following exposure to one strong stimulus
d. Pavlov’s dogs
i. Accidentally found that the dogs would salivate to the clicking of
the machine that released meat to them
B. Components of classical conditioning
a. Unconditioned stimulus: stimulus that envokes an unconditioned
response without previous conditioning
b. Unconditioned response: an unlearned reaction to an unconditioned
stimulus that occurs without previous conditioning
c. Conditioned stimulus: the previously neutral stimulus that has, through
conditioning, acquired th capacity to envoke a conditioned response.
d. Conditioned response: a learned reaction to a conditioned stimulus
that occurs because of previous conditioning
C. Evaluative conditioning
a. Changing the liking of a stimulus that result from pairing that stimulus
with other positive or negative stimuli
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Psyc 111: Introductory Psychology Professor Deak
Chapter 4: Sensation and Perception
D. Acquisition
a. The initial stage of learning a new response tendency
C. Extinction and Spontaneous Recovery
a. Extinction is the gradual weakening and disappearance of a
conditioned response tendency
b. Spontaneous recovery is the reappearance of an extinguished
response after a period of nonexposure to the conditioned stimulus
c. Renewal effect – if a response is extinguished in a different
environement than it was acquired, the extinguished response will
reappear if the animal is returned to the original environment where the
acquisition took place
i. Extinction does not lead to unlearning
d. Single trial learning
i. Getting bit by a snake: fear snakes
D. Classical Conditioning Paradigms
a. Simultaneous conditioning - when Cs and ucs are presented at exact
same time
i. Occurs frequently, unintentionally, or unplanned
b. Short-delayed conditioning - when the cs precedes and overlaps the
ucs
i. Precedes the UCS by a significant time period and the organism
learns to withhold its conditioned response
c. Trace conditioning - the UCS and CS are presented separately with an
interval of time in between
d. Backward conditioning - UCS precedes the CS (with no overlap)
e. Higher order conditioning - once a CS has been entrained, other stimuli
can be associated with that CS (and eventually lead to a CR)
E. Generalization, Discrimination, Biological Predispositions
f. Stimulus Generalization
i. When an organism that has learned a response to a specific
stimulus responds the same way to a new stimuli that is similar
to the original
g. Stimulus Discrimination
i. When an organism that has learned a response to a specific
stimulus does not respond the same way to a new stimuli that is
similar to the original
h. Biological Predisposition
E. Human Applications
a. Overcoming fear
i. Flooding
ii. Counterconditioning
iii. Systematic desensitization
b. Instincts - inborn patterns of behavior elicited by environmental stimuli
c. Reflexes - inevitable, involuntary responses to stimuli
F. Perspectives in learning
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find more resources at oneclass.com
