PSYC 100A Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Operant Conditioning Chamber, Reinforcement, Classical Conditioning

• School: University of Victoria
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100A
• Professor: Smith Martin

Document Summary

Learning: the process of acquiring through experience new information or behaviour. We learn by association eg. voters are more likely to support taxes to aid education if they"re voting within a school. Context affects behaviour; we also tend to fall back onto our habits if we"re fatigued. Associative learning: learning that certain events occur together. The events may be two stimuli (as in classical conditioning) or a response and its consequences (as in operant conditioning). In classical conditioning, we learn to associate two stimuli and thus anticipate events (a stimulus is any event or situation that evokes a response) eg. we learn to brace ourselves for thunder after we see a flash of lightning. We associate stimuli that we do not control, and we respond automatically, which is called respondent behaviour (behaviour that occurs as an automatic response to some stimulus). In operant conditioning, we learn to associate a response (our behaviour) and its consequences.