PSY101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Classical Conditioning, Operant Conditioning Chamber, Reinforcement
Document Summary
Nature"s most important gift to us may be our adaptability: our capacity to learn new behaviours that help us cope with changing circumstances. Learning breeds hope: what is learnable we can potentially teach. No topic is closer to the heart of psychological than learning. Learning: the process of acquiring new and relatively enduring information or behaviors. By learning, we humans are able to adapt to our environments. Learn to expect and prepare for significant events such as food or pain (classical condition) Learn new behaviors by observing events and by watching others, and through language we learn things we have neither experienced nor observed (cognitive learning) Learn to repeat acts that bring rewards and to avoid acts that bring unwanted results (operant learning) How we learn: learn by association, philosophers such as john locke and david hurne echoed aristotle"s conclusion from 2000 years earlier. Our minds naturally connect events that occur in sequence. Learned associations often operate subtly: ex.
