Psychology 1000 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Chemotherapy, Neural Adaptation, Seat Belt

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Mike Atkinson

Document Summary

Chapter 7 learning and adaptation: the role of experience. Important points: classical/operant conditioning, learning phenomena, observational learning, behaviour therapy. In science, we must measure learning by actual changes in performance. If an organism responded to every stimulus in the environment, would become overwhelmed and tired: by learning to not respond to uneventful stimuli, organisms conserve energy and can attend to more important stimuli. 3: when the ucs is intense, conditioning may require only one cs-ucs pairing (ie someone in car accident may develop a fear of cars as a result of only one single accident) In sum, classical conditioning is strongest when there are repeated cs-ucs pairings, the ucs is more intense, the sequence involves forward pairing, and the time interval between the cs and ucs is short. Extinction and spontaneous recovery: there must be a way of eliminating the conditioned response when it"s no longer appropriate.