PSYC 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Reinforcement, Operant Conditioning, Classical Conditioning

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Valerie Wood

Document Summary

Learning (operational definition): more or less permanent change in behaviour or behavioural potential that results from experience. Nativists: almost all behaviour was relfexive or due to inborn ideas, life experiences play little or no role in shaping our behaviour. Empiricists: humans are born with no ideas or knowledge of behaviour, learn through experience, external sensations and human reason combine to produce knowledge. Form of learning where animal leanrs an association between two stimuli. Dogs began salivating when they saw experimenter who usually gave them food, learned to associate experimenter with presentation of food. Unconditioned stimulus (ucs) produces an unconditioned response (ucr: ucs = food, ucr = salivating. Neutral stimulus = bell becomes conditioned stimulus (cs) produces conditioned response (which looks a lot like unconditioned response) Generalization: conditioned responses elicited by stimuli that resemble, but are not identical to the cs used in training o. The degree of similarity between stimulus and response is called generalization gradient.