Psychology 1000 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Hypothalamus, Latent Learning, Nucleus Accumbens

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Dr.Mike

Document Summary

Learning is a process by which experience produces a relatively enduring change in an organism"s behaviour or capabilities. Measure learning by actual changes in performance. Cognitive and biological factors play important roles in learning. Significant impact of culture on learning: norms and beliefs. Historically, behaviourists focused on the processes by which organisms learn, and ethologists focused on the adaptive significance of learning. Today, these two perspectives have crossed paths, and more attention is paid also to how mental processes and cultural environments influence learning. Classical conditioning: in which an organism learns to associate two stimuli such that one stimulus comes to produce a response that originally was produced only by the other stimulus. Pavlov"s dog, that he found that dogs will salivate to food but not to tunes. Tune was presented before food, with repeated exposure, the dog will salivate to the tunes. Classical conditioning alerts organisms to stimuli that signal the impending arrival of an important event.