PSYC 2330 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Antipsychotic, Agonist, Reinforcement

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2330
• Professor: Julia Wreford

Document Summary

Learning has to be (cid:494)surprising(cid:495: when something is learned, it is no longer surprising, what happens has to be different from what the subject expected to happen. Learning has to do with predicting: predict the occurrence of something biologically relevant. Element of surprise of us = we look for predictors: e. g. Someone gives you love letter, look into who it was. Numbers used to represent (cid:494)surprisingness(cid:495) and mathematically modeled. Blocking: conditioning is not an automatic result of the cs-us pairings, for conditioning to occur, the cs must be informative and the us must be surprising. Reality: literally have a learning curve, forms an asymptote, measure the size of the cr during cs-us conditioning trials. Salivation becomes stronger the more trials that are performed. Theory: v = associative strength between cs and us, vmax = maximum associative strength, v = change in associative strength on each conditioning trial, change in associative strength gets smaller after each trial.