PS101 Lecture Notes - Classical Conditioning, Immunosuppression, Operant Conditioning
Document Summary
Learning=relatively durable change in behaviour or knowledge that is due to experience. Conditioning=specific kind of learning, involves learning associations between events that occur in an organism"s environment. Functional perspective=conditioning must be evolutionary adaptive, contributing to our reproductive fitness. Trial=consists of any presentation of a stimulus or pair of stimuli; to form an association that can occur quite rapidly, sometimes in just one pairing of cs and ucs. Acquisition of cr depends on stimulus contiguity (stimuli occur together in time and space) Renewal effect=extinction suppresses a conditioned response rather than erasing a learned association; extinction does not appear to lead to unlearning. Stimulus generalization quantified in graphs called generalization gradients. Thorndike: operant conditioning=instrumental learning (instrumental in obtaining some desired outcome) Law of effect=if a response in the presence of a stimulus leads to satisfying effects, the association between the stimulus and the response in strengthened; successful responses gradually stamped in by their favourable effects.
