PSY 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Operant Conditioning Chamber, Little Albert Experiment, Reinforcement
Document Summary
Change in a organism"s behavior or thought as a result of experience. Large amounts of learning occur through association. The british associationists believed we acquired most knowledge via conditioning. Simple associations provided the mental building blocks for more complex ideas. Russian physiologist and 1904 nobel prize winner. Most famous for work on digestion of the dog. This included the first work on classical conditioning. Start with a neutral stimulus (ns), which does not elicit a particular response. Pair the ns again and again with the unconditioned stimulus (ucs), which elicits an unconditioned response (ucr) Eventually, the ns becomes a conditioned stimulus, eliciting a conditioned response. The organism reacts the same way to the cs as it did to the ucs. Acquisition is the phase during which a cr is established. Extinction is the reduction and elimination of the cr after the cs is presented repeatedly without the ucs. Stimulus generalization occurs when similar css elicit the same cr.
