4.
1 - Conditioned Learning:
- Learning
- A relatively permanent change in an organism’s behavior due to experience
- Organisms learn the learning and experience
- Associative learning
- We learn through watching others’ behaviors
- Ex
- We can learn to associate music with sadness/happiness
- Behavioral learning
- Classical conditioning
- Dr.Ivan Pavlov (1936)
- About respondent behavior
- Associates two or more stimuli to effect a very specific response
- Researched dogs
- Unconditioned response
- When dogs are presented with food, they begin to
stimulus
- Unconditioned because it happens naturally
- Wondered if it was possible to make the stimulus occur
without the food
- Began using an auditory stimulus - no response from dog
- Realized if he paired auditory stimulus with food, the dog
began associating those two things together
- Acquisition: when you are training the respondent to
respond to the stimulus
- Association of neutral stimulus with
unconditioned stimulus
- Discovered that he waits too long to present
the unconditioned stimulus, the dog won’t
associate (for dogs, it is half a second)
- More conditioned stimulus means a
longer wait time you can have
- Also, if you don’t associate the unconditioned
response with neutral stimulus repetitively,
the dog loses its association - extinction
- Can lose the association but can have a little
response when presented again (spontaneous
recovery)
- After a while, he noticed the dog did start salivating even
without the presentation of food and only the auditory
response
- Discovered it was possible to take a neutral stimulus
(auditory) and make it a conditioned response (trained the
dog to respond to auditory stimulus)
- Generalization
- Discovered that it is possible to generalize the conditioned
stimulus in the respondent
- Example
- I can salivate not only when I hear a whistle,
but also a bell
- Consequences
- Respondent might be generalizing visual, touch, and
other stimuli as well
- Little Albert experiment
- John Watson - founder of behaviorism
- Studied conditioning in children through
naturalistic observation at first, and then
decided to conduct an experiment
- Thought that the respondent might
generalize the association, so he wondered if
he could condition someone to do something
and then undo that conditioned response
- Began an experimental case study with
infants and documented his experiments
- Child was 9 months old and the
mother gave permission
- Wanted to demonstrate that since
children were scared of loud noises,
he could pair it with a neutral
stimulus and make the child afraid of
that thing as well
- Operant conditioning
- Operant behavior
- Subjects associate their actions with consequences
- Two ways to respond
- No, it’s responding to events it can’t control - classical conditioning
- Yes, it can alter the event if it changes its behavior - operant
conditioning
- B.F. Skinner (behaviorist)
- Interested in shaping behavior
- How do I shape responses so that the subjects do what I want
them to do?
- Thorndike’s Law of Effect
- A behavior that is rewarded is more likely to occur
- Mostly want to use positive reinforcement because that is
what is going to encourage the desired behavior
- Skinner wanted to test this idea
- Skinner box (operant chamber)
- Built a box where the goal was to get the white rat to get the
thing that he wants him to do
- When the rat sees that the light is green, it would
learn to press the button to get food
- There is an auditory stimulus (loud speaker), electrified grid,
and other colored lights (red and green)
- Starts with associative learning (just lights on, then you press
the lever)
- Then, it is that only one light is on, then you press the lever
- Discovered the rats quickly recognized that green meant
food (rewarded)
- Shaping is reinforced by the reward
- Reinforcers
- Primary
- Something that satisfies a basic need for survival (food,
water)
- Secondary
- Something that gets you the basic need (money)
- These are gradually shaped
- Reinforcement
- Positive
- Introduce a reinforcing stimulus following a specific
behavior
- Skinner did positive reinforcement
- Adding something pleasurable so that it can happen again
- Here, you get the reward after the behavior you want
has occurred
- Negative
- Strengthen a behavior that avoids or removes a negative
outcome
- Basically taking away an unpleasurable stimulus when the
right thing has been done
- Example
- If you don’t put sunblock on, you get burned, so the
behavior you want to encourage is to put sunscreen
on
- Punishment
- Trying to get rid of an undesired behavior
- Trying to make something less likely to happen
- Positive
- Adding an unpleasant stimulus
- Negative
- Pleasant stimulus is taken away (being grounded)
Reinforcement Punishment
Positive + pleasant stimulus (add good thing) + UNpleasant stimulus (add bad
(Adding) Ex.: gold star thing)
Ex.: spanking
Negative - UNpleasant stimulus (take away bad thing) - pleasant stimulus
(Removing/ Ex.: no ticket (take away good thing)
Avoiding) b/c you Ex.: being
stopped at the grounded
red light
- Edward Tolman
- Interested in looking at how rats could learn a maze
- Rats that are rewarded are going to learn the maze faster than rats
that are not rewarded
- First group - rewarded; second group - rewarded after 10 days; third
group - never rewarded
- Found that rats given food after 10 days already knew the maze but
didn’t act upon it because there was no food
- Theorized that the rats formed a cognitive map of the maze,
but they didn’t demonstrate their learning because there was
no incentive
- We form cognitive maps - we are not aware that the learning is
happening unless if we have to show it
- Cognitive maps are an example of latent learning because many of us
learn things and we don’t have a motive to demonstrate it until we
have to
- Insight learning
- Wolfgang Kohler is a psychologist who was isolated in two different
places due to wars
- He was stuck on an island, so he researched great apes
(chimpanzees)
- Wanted to know if chimpanzees could use tools
- Devised an experiment where he hung a bunch of bananas high up
and spread around the space with different items so that they could
potentially reach the bananas
- Started with bananas in reach and slowly kept increasing the
height of the bananas
- Witnessed the chimpanzees stacking up the crates together
horizontally (didn’t work)
- Showed latent learning because it showed they saw
someone doing it
- The chimpanzee (sultan) discovered that he could stack the crate
vertically and then horizontally and get the bananas
- Insight learning: when you are grappling with a problem for
a long time, you suddenly get the answer
- Martin Seligman
- Became interested in operant conditioning and what would
be the best situation for operant conditioning
- Designed an experiment using dogs and tried to see at what
point the dog would try to get out of the operant chamber
(held in place by a harness and shockers were emitted in the
harness to amplify little electric charges)
- They wanted the dog to understand that when an auditory
stimulus happened, they should know what to do in the
situation
- The dog started to shake
- They released the dog and allowed the dog to move
in the chamber with a low wall
- One part of the floor was electrified and the other
part was not
- Expected that the dog would try to get away from the
electrified area
- Found that the conditioned dogs didn’t move
while the unconditioned dogs jumped over
the wall
- Even when they increased the shock, the dogs
didn’t move
- Discovered learned helplessness (lose intrinsic motivation)
- When an organism has been conditioned to believe
that nothing will change no matter what action they
take, so they won’t even try to change that situation
- Went back to the little Albert experiments and wanted to
decondition these animals
- Found it was almost impossible to decondition them
fully as they always tended to fear/react to it
- Observational learning
- Intrinsic motivation
- Comes from within - the desire to do something for no reward
- Examples
- Employment
- Purpose
- Growth
- Curiosity
- Passion
- Self-expression
- Fun
- Extrinsic motivation
- You desire to do something for a future goal since there will be a payoff
- Examples
- Promotions
- Pay raises
- Benefits
- Prizes
- Winning
- Perks
- Changes over time as the same motivators before won’t motivate you again
- Overjustification effect
- You can enjoy do something, but if you are rewarded too much for it, you slowly
start to not enjoy it
- Example
- Children started coloring and got stickers for coloring well
- Did it multiple times, so the kids started realizing that the image had to just
be finished and slowly gave up focusing on coloring
- If you reward something no matter how nice or bad it is, people will think it
is not a worthwhile activity
- Tells us that we might not want to reward intrinsic motivation
- Applied Behavior Analysis
- Most often used with children (type of operant conditioning)
- Used with adults that have social and communication diagnoses
- Give the participants a set of desired behaviors and by using reinforcement, they try
to shape the behavior
- Try to use it with children with ADHD so that they can learn to manage it
4.2 - Observational Learning:
- Looking at organisms that can see, have the ability to remember, and have the capacity to
practice
- Modeling
- When you want to teach others how to do something, you have to show others how
to do it first
- Happens when we are little kids and infants such as with speech
- As you get older, the modeling shifts in type
- Example
- Looking at essays to see how to write them
- Drawing art, playing an instrument
- Mirror neurons
- Responsible for helping us learn through observation
- Not all similar parts of the brain light up when watching someone compared
to doing it yourself, but it still allows your brains to start practicing
- Four elements to observe
- Attention
- Memory
- Imitation
- Body has to be able to do those things
- Motivation
- Albert Bandura
- Conducted a series of experiments on modeling and observing with Bobo dolls
- Initially, when they saw the doll, they did the same things that the model did
- Later on, the aggression developed into new forms
4.3 - Learning Language:
- Language
- Helps to define modern humans
- Depends on structure
- Phonemes: basic sounds
- Morphemes: smallest unit of phonemes with meaning
- Different languages have different language and rules
- Syntax
- Depending on the language, word order is different
- Fluent
- We feel fluent when we can speak a language without many pauses
- Features of language
- Semanticity
- The sounds of human language convey meaning and other sounds that we
make are not part of our meaning, so we ignore them
- ex) clearing your throat in the middle of a conversation doesn’t mean that it
is part of the conversation
- Arbitrariness
- No inherent connection between a symbol and the thing it conveys
- Whale doesn’t resemble the gigantic animal that it is
- Flexibility of symbols
- Connection between symbol and meaning changes over time and is invented
more
- Ex
- In the 14th C, the f word represented something you burned for fuel,
but in the 16th C it became a specific kind of fuel for burning
heretics, in the 18th C it became something that defined lazy women
(ones who read all the time), in the 20th C it became something for
entertainment and later it turned into a derogatory term for
homosexual men and women
- Naming
- We assign names to things
- We are conscious that things have a name, even when we are unsure of what
the name is
- Infants point out everything in their environment
- Adults often misinterpret this as the children wanting the thing
- They actually just want to know what the thing is
- Displacement
- Allows us to talk about something other than the present
- Because of semantics (tenses), we are able to talk about the past and future
- Due to this, we can talk about abstract concepts and people/things that are
not in front of us with naming
- Productivity
- Also known as generativity
- We generate sentences, not repeat them
- Speaking is a creative process
- We see this a lot with kids who create language when they don’t
understand structure or semantics
- Often inaccurate, but language is being created
- True when we write language as well
- Though we have a list of what to say, we continue to expand upon
that
- Ex
- In 1897, english adapted a french word automobile
- All children when they are born, they are born with the ability to speak any human language
- However, that ability ends after the first few years of their life after being exposed to
phonemes and morphemes
- Our ears and muscles become attuned to that, so the earlier they learn the language,
the more native they sound
- Deaf
- Don’t develop language as the vast majority of us do
- For some people, verbal language is delayed
- Can be fitted with a cochlear implant and learn the phonemes and morphemes as a
young child
- They can also learn sign language as it has its own syntax and grammar
- Bilingual
- Often in the US, the child is not raised as a bilingual speaker unless their parents
were recently immigrated
- In 1980, only 10% of residents speak bilingual
- In Austin, the most common are Chinese, Vietnamese, Hindi, and Spanish
- Additive
- People master a second language without ever losing the first language
- Subtractive
- Their second language replaces or severely hampers their first language
- Happens when you lose practice with the language to purposely assimilate
- Advantages
- Greater expertise in native language
- Can better understand and recognize rules in language even if it was
not taught to them
- Better at paying attention to certain aspects of language
- Career benefits
- Family benefits
- Feral children
- People who don’t have fluency in any language because they were not able to learn
language in the time frame where language acquisition is easiest
- If a child remains linguistically isolated until 7, they can’t learn a language and at 9
they can’t ever become fluent/master a language even if they can learn to speak it
- Whorf’s linguistic determinism
- Believes that language determines the way that you think
- Had a theory that argues that different languages impose different concepts of
reality
- Linguistic relativity
- If you are somebody who speaks multiple languages, then your cognitive processes
for those languages are different
- Bilinguals report different personality traits when talking and different senses of
self
- Most people agree that language influences the way we think, not determines the
way we think
- William Lutz: euphemism
- Revenue enhancement
- Used on government documents to increase taxes
- Inoperative statements
- Used to find that diplomats were lying (didn’t want to call him a liar so they
said inoperative)
- Negative patient care outcome
- Patients who are dying
- Period of accelerated negative growth
- Recession
- Pupil station
- Student desk (inflated language)
- Types of doublespeak
- Euphemism
- Use it to avoid a harsh/unpleasant reality
- Jargon
- Specialized language of a trade/profession
- Gobbledygook/bureaucratese
- Overwhelming the audience with long sentences so you can sound smart
- Inflated language
- We make the ordinary seem extraordinary
