1. Intro To Learning What is Learning

2. LEARNING IS A PROCESS OF MOVEMENT FROM THAT WHICH IS KNOWN INTO THAT WHICH IS UNKNOWN. FROM: Magical Child Matures

3. What is Learning A definition of Learning is: A behavioral, cognitive, and/or attitude adjustment made in response to NEW perceptions.

4. What is Learning Let’s explore this definition a bit. Learning involves change. Either a change in behavior, a change in thinking/perceiving, and/or a change in emotions i.e. attitudes. This change is a RESPONSE to NEW in formation in the form of PERCEPTIONS.

5. What Is Learning We can define learning as a process that results in a relatively permanent change in behavior or behavioral potential based on experience. Learning is not observed directly, but is inferred from changes in observable behavior.

6. What Is Learning A Change in Behavior or Behavioral Potential It is obvious learning has taken place when you "teach an old dog new tricks" or demonstrate a new skill. Learning is apparent from improvements in your performance.

7. What Is Learning Often performance doesn't show everything one has learned. In the academic arena performance may not show improvement because: test questions may be too specific, or because of test anxiety, or motivation is either very weak or very strong, or one acquires general knowledge that may not show up in particular changed actions.

8. What Is Learning The definition of learning, therefore, includes the phrase "or behavioral potential" because learning may have taken place even though it did not show in performance at the time. Learning that does not show up until later— when the circumstances allow, or the right kind and amount of motivation elicit appropriate performance—is called latent learning.

9. What is Learning We Perceive (see, visualize, understand) a situation, event, person in a specific manner. We respond to that Situation, Event, Person in a specific manner. An important aside. Lack of, or no overt action is still a response. The response may be carried out internally i.e. development of new neural pathways. When we perceive a situation, event, or person in a new light, we respond Differentially.

10. Two Important Doctrines Two important doctrines have emerged that are important in coming to understand the psychology of learning, they are: the Law of Association and the Principle of Adaptive Hedonism.

11. Two Important Doctrines The Law of Association holds that we acquire knowledge through associating ideas—mental events that originate in sensory information from the environment. If two experiences occur closely in time or space, a mental association will be formed between them, and this is the way the mind grows. 17th century philosopher John Locke was a prominent supporter of this view. It followed logically from his claim that our minds, at birth, are unetched slates (Tabula Rasa), and that most of our knowledge and abilities is determined by experience.

12. Two Important Doctrines The principle of adaptive hedonism, identified with another British philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, emerged in the 18th century as an explanation of the basic source of human motivation. Bentham's principle: individuals act in ways that provided pleasure and avoided ways that resulted in pain. What famous psychologist picked up this principle?

13. Behavioral Theory of Learning Just as philosophers have sought to explain human nature psychologists also have searched for laws of human nature. Most believe human nature can be studied scientifically and that general causal laws can be discovered through controlled research in the laboratory and in natural field settings. One branch of psychology is unique in its assumptions about the way to study human nature and what determines human (and animal) behavior. Experimental psychologists who are behaviorists, and whose work is guided by behavior theory, argue that human nature can be fully understood.

14. Behavioral Theory of Learning Their task is to discover the regularities in human actions that are universal, covering all types of people (and animals) in a variety of comparable situations. They believe that: experience changes people, and the change follows orderly principles that can be discovered.

15. Behavioral Theory of Learning Identifying these principles will achieve the goal of behavior theory: to predict future action on the basis of past experience. Two features of behavior theory relevant to this goal are: (a) the focus on objective behavior, and (b) the role of the environment in causing behavior. What is to be explained is: behavior, action, and responses, and not ideas, wishes, motives, beliefs, or other internal events that cannot be readily observed and measured.

16. Behavioral Theory of Learning Behaviorists focus solely on overt behavioral events, while ignoring all else that might be going on inside a subject's body or brain. Furthermore, they look for the causes of this behavior in only one place—the external environment.

17. Behavioral Theory of Learning Behavior theory states: If you want to know why someone did something, do not ask. Analyze the person's immediate environment until you find the reward. If you want to change someone's action, do not reason or persuade. Find the reward and eliminate it. The idea that people are autonomous and possess within them the power and the reasons for making decisions has no place in behavior theory.

18. Classical Conditioning: Learning Based on Signals The most basic and first learning one makes is an association you learned was between two stimulus events. This kind of associative learning is called classical conditioning, which can be defined as: a form of learning in which an organism learns a new association between two stimuli—a neutral one and one that already elicits a reflexive response. Following conditioning, the formerly neutral stimulus elicits a new reflexive response, one that is often similar to the original response.

19. Classical Conditioning: Learning Based on Signals Classical Conditioning: Pavlov's Chance Discovery Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), a Russian physiologist, is credited with discovering the principles of classical conditioning. (sometimes called Pavlovian conditioning.) Pavlov won the Nobel Prize for his research on the role of saliva and gastric secretions in digestion. He devised a technique to study digestive processes in living animals by implanting tubes in their glands and digestive organs that diverted bodily secretions to containers outside their bodies. To start these secretions, Pavlov's assistants put food (meat powder) into the mouths of dogs. After this procedure had been repeated on a number of trials, Pavlov observed a strange phenomenon: Secretions would start before food was put in the dogs' mouths. They would start at the sight of the food and, later, at the sight of the assistant or even at the sound of the assistant's footsteps.

20. Classical Conditioning: Learning Based on Signals Any stimulus the dog could perceive that regularly preceded presentation of the food came to evoke the same reaction as the food itself! These observations did not make sense from a purely physiological point of view. Pavlov initially called this behavior "psychic secretions." The behaviors Pavlov studied were reflexes. Reflexes are unlearned responses, such as salivation, pupil contraction, knee jerks, and eye blinking, that are automatically elicited by specific stimuli which have biological relevance for an organism. Reflexes temporarily change the organism in some way that promotes biological adaptation to the environment.

21. Classical Conditioning: Learning Based on Signals With conditioning, Pavlov's animals learned to make reflexive responses to new stimuli that had no such original biological relevance for them. (An aside: Classical conditioning is also called respondent conditioning because it is these automatic respondent behaviors that are involved initially.)

22. The Classical Conditioning Paradigm Paradigm is an important term for you to remember. A paradigm is a symbolic model or diagram that helps us understand the essential features of a process. It is a way of representing the relationship between basic events. A paradigm provides a structure for defining a set of procedures and analyzing experimental data. It often helps to simplify a complex process.

23. The Classical Conditioning Paradigm The classical conditioning paradigm reveals the conditions under which organisms come to learn relationships between pairs of stimulus events. In classical conditioning: a neutral stimulus, paired one or more times with a biologically significant stimulus (reflex), acquires the power to elicit a behavioral response in the absence of the biologically significant stimulus.

24. The Classical Conditioning Paradigm Initially, there exists a natural relationship between this stimulus and a reflex that it reliably elicits. Because learning has not been necessary for the relationship, such a stimulus is called an unconditioned stimulus (US) and the reflex (salivation) is called an unconditioned response (UR).

25. The Classical Conditioning Paradigm Before conditioning, a neutral stimulus, such as a bell, may elicit an orienting response—a general response of attention to the source of novel stimulation —but will not elicit the unconditioned response. A dog may prick up its ears, but will not salivate. During conditioning, the neutral stimulus, the bell, and the unconditioned stimulus, the meat powder, are both presented a number of times in close proximity.

26. The Classical Conditioning Paradigm After repeated pairings, the bell is presented alone; it now elicits salivation. This nonedible object has acquired some of the power to influence behavior that was originally limited to the food. Because learning has taken place, the initially neutral stimulus is now called the conditioned stimulus (CS) and the response to the conditioned stimulus alone is called the conditioned response (CR).

27. The Classical Conditioning Paradigm Nature provided the US-UR connection, but conditioning creates the CS-CR connection. The advantages of this Pavlovian paradigm are: (a) association learning processes can be studied under well-controlled laboratory conditions in which the stimuli are controlled and the responses precisely measured, and (b) the results are reproducible by other, independent researchers who follow the same methods.

28. The Anatomy of Classical Conditioning As a result of the work of Pavlov thousands of studies have been conducted and the fundamental principles of learning have been discovered. We will now examine the principles of learning that have emerged from classical conditioning. They are: acquisition, extinction, spontaneous recovery, generalization & discrimination, appetitive versus aversive types of conditioning, second-order conditioning, conditioned social behavior.

29. The Anatomy of Classical Conditioning Acquisition In the acquisition stage of conditioning repeated pairings of a neutral, to-be-conditioned stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus result in behavioral changes in response to the conditioned stimulus. Each time the two stimulus events are paired is called a conditioning trial. From these changes we infer the development of associations between the two stimuli. In studying conditioning, an experimenter may vary several aspects of this basic situation, such as the number of trials an organism gets, the time interval between successive trials, the time interval between the two stimuli, and the intensity or quality of either or both stimuli. Variations in these and other aspects of the situation are the independent variables in conditioning studies.

30. The Anatomy of Classical Conditioning The four major dependent variables are: (a) the strength of the conditioned response— its amplitude (how big it is); (b) how much time it takes before the response is made after conditioned stimulus appears— its latency (how fast it is); (c) how quickly the conditioned response appears and is strengthened—its rate of acquisition (how it develops); and (d) how long the response continues to be elicited by the new stimulus in the absence of the uncondioned stimulus—its persistence, or resistance to extinction (how durable it is).

31. The Anatomy of Classical Conditioning In conditioning timing is critical. The conditioned and unconditioned stimuli must be close enough in time— contiguous, or proximal, enough—to be perceived by the organism as being related.

32. The Anatomy of Classical Conditioning Conditioning is usually better with a short, rather than a long, interval between stimuli. The range of time intervals between stimulus events that will produce the best conditioning varies over different response systems, very brief for some and relatively long for others. For motor and skeletal responses such as eye blinks: a short interval of a second or less is best. For visceral responses such as heart rate and salivation: longer intervals of five-fifteen seconds work best. For conditioned fear to develop usually longer intervals: many seconds or even minutes are effective.

33. The Anatomy of Classical Conditioning Conditioning occurs most rapidly when the neutral stimulus, the CS, stands out against the many other neutral stimuli that are also present in the background. Thus, a stimulus will be more readily noticed the more intense it is and the more it contrasts with the background. In real life, as in the conditioning laboratory, the key is to increase the "signal-to-noise ratio" of the CS by making it a stronger signal than all other competing events that are irrelevant noise in the system.

34. The Anatomy of Classical Conditioning Extinction When an unconditioned stimulus (US) is no longer presented with a conditioned stimulus (CS), a conditioned response (CR) to the conditioned stimulus becomes weaker over time and eventually stops occurring. This process is called extinction. An extinguished response is out of sight, behaviorally speaking, but not out of mind, cognitively speaking. After a rest period, it will reappear in a weak form when the conditioned stimulus is presented alone again.

35. The Anatomy of Classical Conditioning Spontaneous Recovery Spontaneous recovery is the name for this reappearance of an apparently extinguished conditioned response without any new pairings of the two stimuli. With further acquisition training (further pairings of CS and US), a conditioned response gains strength more rapidly than it did initially. This more rapid "relearning" is an instance of a phenomenon called savings. However, it too is quickly weakened with further extinction training (CS and no US). ***The puzzle is that eliminating/extinguishing a conditioned response completely seems to be harder than acquiring it.

36. The Anatomy of Classical Conditioning Stimulus Generalization Once a conditioned response has been acquired to a particular stimulus, similar stimuli may also evoke the response. If conditioning was to a high frequency tone, a lower tone may also elicit the response. A child bitten by a big dog is likely to respond with fear even to small dogs. This automatic extension of conditioned responding to stimuli that have never been paired with the original unconditioned stimulus is called stimulus generalization. The more similar the new stimulus is to the conditioned stimulus, the stronger the response will be.

37. The Anatomy of Classical Conditioning Stimulus Discrimination Stimulus discrimination is a conditioning process in which an organism learns to respond differently to stimuli that are different from the conditioned stimulus on some dimension (differences in hue or in pitch). An organism's perceptual discrimination between similar stimuli (tones of 1000, 1200, and 1500 cycles per second) is sharpened with training in which only one of them (1200 cps) is associated with the unconditioned stimulus (UCS), whereas the others are repeatedly presented without the unconditioned stimulus. This procedure provides an organism with "negative examples," examples of stimuli that should not be treated as similar.

38. The Anatomy of Classical Conditioning Stimulus Discrimination Early in conditioning, stimuli similar to the neutral stimulus being used will elicit a similar response, though not quite as strong. As discrimination training proceeds, the responses to the dissimilar stimuli weaken: an organism learns which events to treat as part of a class that are equivalent signals or predictors of the unconditioned stimulus and which to ignore. For optimum adaptation, the initial perceptual tendency to generalize and respond to all somewhat similar stimuli needs to give way to discrimination between them, with response only to those that are, in fact, followed by an unconditioned stimulus. Ideally, then, conditioning is a process in which discrimination ultimately wins over generalization— but it is a balancing act between these two counteracting tendencies of being overresponsive and too-selective.

39. The Anatomy of Classical Conditioning Appetitive and Aversive Conditioning Pavlov's conditioning with meat powder is an example of appetitive conditioning— conditioning in which an unconditioned stimulus is of positive value to an organism. On the other hand aversive conditioning—is conditioning in which an unconditioned stimulus is of negative value to an organism. Laboratory studies of aversive conditioning have used unconditioned stimuli like electric shock and puffs of air to the eye that all members of a species find aversive.

40. The Anatomy of Classical Conditioning Appetitive and Aversive Conditioning A discovery from these studies has been that with aversive (also called noxious) stimuli, an organism learns not only a specific conditioned muscle response but a generalized fear reaction as well. There is both learning of a specific response to a stimulus and a revaluation of the previously neutral stimulus—as affectively negative. Specific reflexive actions are accompanied by reactions of the autonomic nervous system— changes in heart rate, respiration, and electrical resistance of the skin (the galvanic skin response, GSR). The muscle response, too, may come to involve more than the limited area stimulated.

41. The Anatomy of Classical Conditioning Appetitive and Aversive Conditioning All these changes become part of an overall conditioned fear response. Sometimes, when strong fear is involved, conditioning may take place after only one pairing of a neutral stimulus with the fear-arousing stimulus. Traumatic events in our lives that may occur only once can condition us to respond with a diffuse set of strong physical, emotional, and cognitive reactions that may not extinguish over years. In many cases learned fear is easy to acquire and difficult to overcome without special training procedures.

42. The Anatomy of Classical Conditioning Little Albert and the White Rat John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner (1920) set out to induce a conditioned fear in a infant named Albert, to study stimulus generalization, and then remove the conditioned fear. Watson and Rayner conditioned Albert to fear a white rat he had initially liked by pairing its appearance with an aversive unconditioned stimulus—a loud gong struck behind the child.

43. The Anatomy of Classical Conditioning Little Albert and the White Rat The unconditioned startle response and the emotional distress to the noxious noise was the basis of Albert's learning to react with fear to the appearance of the white rat in just seven conditioning trials. They were hoping the experiment would demonstrate the superiority of the behaviorist belief that fears were learnable over the then-popular assumption that human fears were instinctive. We know now that conditioned fear is very resistant to extinction. Even if the overt components of muscle reaction eventually disappear, the reactions of the autonomic nervous system continue, leaving an individual still vulnerable to arousal by the old signals. Conditioned fear reactions may persist for years, even when the original frightening stimulus is never again experienced.

44. The Anatomy of Classical Conditioning During World War Il, the signal used to call sailors to battle stations aboard U.S. Navy ships was a gong sounding at the rate of 100 rings a minute. To personnel on board, it was associated with the sounds of guns and bombs; it became a conditioned stimulus for strong emotional arousal. Fifteen years later, the emotional reactions of navy and army veterans were compared to 20 different sounds. The sound of the "call to battle stations'' still produced strong emotional arousal in the navy veterans. Their response was significantly greater than that of the army veterans. It is important to recognize we all carry around this kind of excess baggage, our learned readiness to respond with fear, joy, or other emotions to old signals (often from childhood) that are no longer appropriate or valid in our current situation. When we are unaware of their origins, these once reasonable fear reactions are interpreted as "anxiety," and we get additionally upset because we seem to be reacting irrationally— without adequate cause or reason.

45. The Anatomy of Classical Conditioning Second-order Conditioning Following conditioning, the conditioned stimulus (CS) has acquired some of the power of the biologically significant unconditioned stimulus (US), as shown by the fact that it now elicits the response alone. It has become a "surrogate" unconditioned stimulus: it can stand in for, and act like, the unconditioned stimulus. This process of a neutral stimulus becoming a conditioned stimulus solely by its pairing with an established conditioned stimulus is called second-order conditioning (also called higher-order conditioning).

46. The Anatomy of Classical Conditioning Second-order Conditioning In Phase One of a study subjects were conditioned to respond to a light (CS1) paired with food (US). In Phase Two they were exposed to pairing of a sound stimulus (CS2) with the light (CS1)—without any presentation of the food. When tested with the sound stimulus alone, they gave the same conditioned response as had previously been elicited by the light. This process extends the domain of classical conditioning, since a biologically powerful stimulus is no longer required for conditioning to take place.

47. The Anatomy of Classical Conditioning Second-order Conditioning Respondent behaviors become potentially controllable by a limitless array of stimuli once they become associated with other stimulus events whose power is either natural or acquired through learning. This means conditioning is more than just the development of a behavioral response; it involves associations between stimulus events that become revalued as signals and sources of pleasure and pain. In this sense second-order conditioning is an important process for understanding many types of complex human behaviors, both normal and abnormal. Though the classical conditioning paradigm was first developed in connection with animals, extensive studies with human subjects have demonstrated its importance in many everyday human reactions.

48. Instrumental Conditioning: Learning About Consequences As a term instrumental conditioning is sometimes used interchangeably with operant conditioning, contrasting both with respondent or Pavlovian conditioning. In instrumental conditioning the important relationship that is learned is between a response and its consequences, rather than between stimulus events (as in classical conditioning). Behavior that is instrumental to (a means to) changing the environment in some way that is desirable or rewarding is repeated and becomes a learned habit. While classical conditioning rests on the assumption of association, instrumental conditioning rests more on the assumption of adaptive hedonism—we do what avoids pain and gets pleasure.

49. Instrumental Conditioning: Learning About Consequences In classical conditioning, you learn to use one signal to predict something important in your environment. For example, you may learn that a certain look from your lover (CS) signals (enables you to predict) that you are about to be caressed (US) and get positively aroused (UR). You then come to respond with arousal (CR) to that "look of love" even before you feel your lover's actual touch. Learning how to control stimulus events, as well as predict them, means learning how to produce the consequences you want and how to minimize the ones you don't.

50. Classical and Instrumental Learning Compared In the history of the field of association learning, one difference between these two types of basic learning is in the content of the learning. In classical conditioIling, a subject learns relationships between stimulus events. In instrumental conditioning a subject learns relationships between its responses and their stimulus, or environmental, consequences.

51. B.F. Skinner and Operant Conditioning Operant conditioning is equated with Skinnerian conditioning, a procedure used by B. F. Skinner who did not believe in any teleological assumptions that behavior was instrumental to get a reward. He was an empiricist who asserted only that behavior operated on the environment. If the environment changed as a function of behavior, then the behavior would also change, i. e. producing learning.

52. B.F. Skinner and Operant Conditioning Through such behaviors an organism actively operates on the environment instead of simply reacting to something the environment does to it, as in the case of respondent behaviors. The effects it achieves—the consequences of the action—then determine the probability that the response will be repeated. According to this perspective if you want to change behavior? Do one thing: Change its consequences.

53. Conditioned Social Behavior Many of our attitudes have been formed by conditioning processes that take place without our awareness. Attitudes are often defined as an individual's learned tendencies to respond to particular target stimuli, such as people, ideas, or things with positive or negative evaluations, along with some emotional feelings and also beliefs about them. The targets that become attitudinal stimuli may acquire their power to elicit attitudinal responses by being paired with unconditioned stimuli (US) that elicit emotional or affective responses. Words, symbols, and pictures associated with stimuli that naturally elicit strong positive responses will become conditioned arousers of similarly positive reactions.

54. Conditioned Social Behavior Research shows that social behavior can be studied as response systems that are formed through conditioning, among them attitudes toward people, liking or disliking, aggression, altruism, persuasion, cooperation, and competition. The ability of neutral stimuli to acquire the power to elicit strong responses automatically through conditioning makes us all vulnerable. Virtually any stimulus you can perceive can be associated with almost any response so that you learn to value, desire, or fear the stimulus. We learn to use this information about impending events to help us make preparatory responses; we prepare for the future on the basis of our past history of conditioning.

55. Cone of Learning Developed By: Edgar Dale