PSYC 2330 Lecture : Week 10.pdf
Document Summary
Learning is the process by which experiences change our nervous system. Changes in the circuits that participate in perceiving, performing, thinking, and planning. Proposed a theory explaining how stimuli are represented in the brain. Ma (1932): conditioned and unconditioned reflexes and inhibition. Spinal reflexes are the result of prenatal pavlovian conditioning. Analysis of neural learning mechanisms underlying pavlovian conditioning, inspired by the rule of contiguity. Neurological description of the neural mechanism (cid:1)let us assume then that the persistence or repetition of a reverberatory activity (or (cid:1)trace(cid:2)) tends to induce lasting cellular changes that add to its stability. The assumption can be precisely stated as follows: Important idea: a connection between two neurons takes place only if both neurons are firing at about the same time. If a synapse repeatedly becomes active at about the same time the post-synaptic neuron fires, changes will take place in the structure or chemistry of the synapse that will strengthen it.