PSYC 301 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Orgasm, Habituation, Reinforcement

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 301
• Professor: Anne Almey

Document Summary

Montreal research on conditioning in the role it plays in sexual behavior. It turns out that classical and instrumental conditioning play an important role in determining and maintaining sexual behaviors. There are certain stimuli in the environment that are frequently presented with the unconditional stimuli orgasm, the rewarding component of the sexual behavior. It"s been linked to aberrant sexual behavior (the development of fetish). The researchers put an orange cone into a cage with a male rat about 30 sec before the introduce of a female rat that this rat can have sex with. The orange cone becomes a predictor of the us-sex. High level of sign tracking behavior between the cs and us: the rat will try to mate with the orange cone. The goal tracking behavior occurs at the end of the cs-us interval: the rat will mate with the female rat.