PSYC1003 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Classical Conditioning, Observational Learning, Lightning
Document Summary
Animals tend to live by an instinctive genetic code. For example, a salmon"s life is pretty much hard-wired into its genes birth, youth in the stream, adulthood in the ocean, then return to the stream to spawn and die. Humans also have an instinctive genetic code, but we however, can adapt to our environment and learn new behaviors and make changes. Learning is defined as a relatively permanent behavior change due to experience. This brings up the question, how do we learn? . This is connecting events that occur one after another. These events can be good, like connecting the birthday song to eating cake, or bad like seeing a flash of lightning then hearing loud thunder. If a stimulus occurs normally in an environment, an animal"s natural response may dwindle. This lessening of a response is called habituation. To a psychologist, learning is more specific than what we think of learning in school.
