PSYC 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 27: Contiguity, Operant Conditioning

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Jens Pruessner

Document Summary

Learning: an enduring change in behaviour resulting from experience. It occurs when animals benefit from experience so that their behaviour is better adapted to the environments. The essence of learning is understanding how events are related. Classical conditioning or pavlovian conditioning: a type of learned response that occurs when a neutral object comes to elicit a reflexive response when it is associated with a stimulus that already produces response. When we learn that a certain event leads to a certain outcome. Operant conditioning or instrumental conditioning: a learning process in which the consequences of an action determine the likelihood that it will be performed in the future. When we learn that a particular behaviour leads to a particular outcome. The rise of the learning theory in the earlier 19 th century was partly due to the dissatisfaction with the use of introspection.