What the college board is asking for: This section of the course introduces students to the differences between learned and unlearned behavior. It covers the basic learning processes of classical conditioning and operant conditioning and makes clear their similarities and differences.
Students learn about the basic phenomena of learning, such as acquisition, extinction, spontaneeous recovery, generalization, discrimination, and higher-order conditioning. They study the effects of reinforcement and punishment in different, specific learning paradigms: reinforcement and omission training, and active and passive avoidance, among others. They also consider important independent variables such as amount of proactive schedules and delay of reinforcement, and motivation. In addition, they learn about the various types of graphs used to show the results of experiments on learning and how the principles of learning are related to practicalities such as emotional learning, taste aversions, coping versus helplessness, and biofeedback and self-control.
In its coverage of biological factors in learning, this section of the course reexamines the biological bases of behavior discussed in the earlier section and focuses particularly on biological constraints of learning. Through its coverage of insight and social learning, it lays the groundwork for the study of cognition.
In operant conditioning, we learn to associate a response and its consequence and thus to repeat acts followed by rewards and avoid acts followed by punishment.
Anything that serves to strengthen behavior is a reinforcer. Anything that serves to weaken behavior is a punisher.
The operant chamber (Skinner Box) was Skinner's tool with a bar that an animal presses or pecks to release a reward of food or water, and a device that records these responses.
Shaping: a procedure in which reinforcers, such as food, gradually guide an animal's behavior toward a desired behavior.
Primary reinforcers: are innately satisfying
Secondary reinforcers: learned (money, grades)
Acquisition: best within 30 seconds, however delay for humans can be much longer (paychecks)
In classical conditioning, we learn to associate two stimuli and thus to anticipate events.
Pavlov presented a neutral stimulus (a tone) just before an unconditioned stimulus (food in the mouth). The neutral stimulus then became a conditioned stimulus, producing a conditioned response.
Acquisition: initial learning, of the stimulus-response relationship. A half second is best when presenting a UCS after a neutral stimulus.
Extinction: the diminishing response that occurs when the CS no longer signals an impending UCS.
Spontaneous recovery: the reappearance of a CR after a rest pause
Generalization: The tendency to respond to stimuli similar to the CS
Discrimination: the learned ability to distinguish between a CS and other irrelevant stimuli.
Skinner's laboratory pigeons produced these response patterns to each of the four schedules of reinforcement. (Reinforcers are indicated by diagonal marks.) For people, as for pigeons, reinforcement linked to number of responses (a ratio schedule) produces higher response rate then reinforcement linked to amount of time elapsed (interval schedule). But the predictability of the reward also matters. A predictable (fixed) schedule produces a higher response rate then an unpredictable 9variable) schedule.
(Adapted from "Teaching machines" by B.F. Skinner. Copyright 1961, Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cognitive Maps: a mental representation of spatial layout, indicating where and what leads to what. A chimp shown 18 different hiding places for food can return to those places after jsut one trial of passive watching.
Insight: To behave intelligently. Kohler said it is seen by moving head and eyes , as if studying the problem. Once a problem is solved we can now reproduce this procedure in a smooth and easy fashion.
Social learning: We observe and imitate others. The famous research of frustrated children and a Bobo Doll by Albert Bandura is a profound example of this theory of learning.