BESC1020 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Classical Conditioning, Observational Learning, Operant Conditioning
25 May 2018
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Behaviourism – Learning
Reduces all human and animal activity to behaviours
Learning – the process of acquiring through experience, new information of behaviours
Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, and intentions to non-human
entities and is considered to be an innate tendency of human psychology.
• Clever Hans: Horse who responded to arithmetic tasks by tapping his hoof. E.g. if asked
by his master what is the sum of 3 plus 2, the horse would tap his hoof five times.
Eventually it was discovered that Hans was responding to subtle physical cues such as
muscle movements and head tilts. Hans, is clever not because he understood human
language but because he could perceive subtle muscle movements.
• Limitations: Over generalize animals and humans
Classical Conditioning
A type of learning in which one learns to link two or more stimuli and anticipate events
In Classical Conditioning, we learn to associate two stimuli and thus to anticipate event. (A
stimulus is any event or situation that evokes a response.)
Ivan Pavlov
• Experiment with dogs
• He said we learn by association – notice when two things are linked
• If 2 stimuli happen together its called classical conditioning, or a response and a consequence it
is called an operant conditioning.
• Neutral Stimulus is a stimulus that naturally produces no response.
• Stimulus – a stimulus that naturally produces a response.
• Neutral stimulus is combined with an unconditioned stimulus begins to produce a response that
anticipates and prepares for the unconditioned stimulus.
• Unconditioned response – what naturally happens as a result of the unconditioned stimulus.
• Conditioned stimulus – after pairing with an unconditioned stimulus the neutral stimulus can
elicit the response on its own.
• Conditioned response: the response to the conditioned stimulus (fear)
• Palo’s dogs – Pavlov was convinced dogs would salivate even before the food was placed in
front of them
• Pavlov attached a tube to the dogs salivary glands to measure the amount of saliva each dog
produced
• Dog was kept in a small room where saliva was measured
• Pavlov knew that as soon as he put the meat powder directly into the dogs mouth he would
salivate
• Pavlov chose a bell as his neutral stimulus that initially had no effect on the dogs salivation
Conditioning Process
• After a number of trials with the bell being presented just before the food was presented,
Pavlov discovered the dog would begin to salivating as soon as the bell was rung
• Food was taken away and the dog would salivate with the bell being rung along
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• After the conditioning process the bell was now the conditioned stimulus and the saliva was the
conditioned response
Unconditioned Stimulus: Meat
Unconditioned Response: Salivation
Neutral Stimulus: Bell
Conditioned Stimulus: Bell
Conditioned response: Salivation
UCS – Stimulus that unconditionally –
naturally and automatically – triggers
an unconditioned response
UCR – An unlearned, naturally
occurring response (salivation) to an
unconditioned stimulus (UCS) (food in
mouth)
NS – A stimulus that elicits no response, before conditioning
CS – An originally irrelevant stimulus, that after association with an UCS comes to trigger a
conditioned response (CR)
CR – A learned response to a previously neutral (but now conditioned) stimulus (CS)
J.B. Watson – Little Albert Experiment
Looked at the idea that human emotions and behaviours, though biologically influenced, are
mainly a bundle of conditioned responses. Working with an 11month old, Watson and Rayner
shoed ho speifi fears ight e oditioed. Like ost ifats, Little Alert feared loud
noises but not white rats. Watson and Rayner presented a white rat and, as Little Albert reached
to touch it, a hammer was struck against a steel bar just behind his head. After seven repeats of
seeing the rat and hearing the noise, Albert burst into tears at the mere sight of the rat. Five days
later, he had generalised this startled fear reaction to the sight of a rabbit, a dog and a sealskin
coat, but not to dissimilar objects such as toys. The treatment of Little Albert would be
unacceptable by todays ethical standards.
He looked at how emotional reactions could be classically conditioned.
find more resources at oneclass.com
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