PSY 3103 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Fixed Action Pattern, Little Albert Experiment, Habituation

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 3103
• Professor: Catherine Plowright

Document Summary

Learning is not simply any change in behaviour as simple changes in behaviour could be due to performance rather than learning. Learning is an enduring change in the mechanisms of behaviour involving specific stimuli and responses which result from prior experiences or similar responses. A basic procedure for finding out if there has been learning: a manipulation of experience at time one and then a standard test at time two, compared against a control group or measuring responses prior to learning. The 4 whys of behaviour: material cause: biological, formal cause: cognitive, efficient cause: learning, final: evolutionary. Rats who were rewarded at the end of a maze performed faster, those who were not rewarded performed slower. However, when the second group of rats began to receive rewards they performed just as fast as the first group, showing that in previous unrewarded trials that they had learned but they had chosen not to perform well.