Daisy Garcia

Psychology 1/Professor Buenaventura

March 21, 2013
Study Guide: Biology, Cognition, and Learning
I. Biological Constraints on Conditioning
A. Limits on Classical Conditioning
1. In 1956, learning researcher Gregory Kimble proclaimed, Just about any
activity of which the organism is capable can be conditioned andthese
responses can be conditioned to any stimulus that the organism can perceive,
and 25 years later he acknowledged that he had been proven wrong.
2. Each species predispositions prepare it to learn the associations that enhance
its survival.
3. John Garcia challenged the prevailing idea that all associations can be learned
equally well and in an experiment with Robert Koelling, he noticed that rats
were no longer drinking water from the plastic bottles in the radiation
chambers possibly because they associated the plastic tasting water to the
sickness triggered by the radiation.
4. Rats were exposed to particular tastes, sounds, and sights (CS) and later to
radiation and drugs (US) which caused nausea and vomiting (UR), which
showed that if sickened the rats would later avoid that flavor. This violated the
notion that for conditioning to occur, the US must immediately follow the CS.
The rats also developed aversions to tastes but not to sights or sounds and this
contradicted the behaviorists idea that any perceivable stimulus could serve as
a CS.
5. Taste aversion is when species avoid a certain food because of a previous
sickness.
6. When you eat something that sickens you, you will develop an aversion to the
taste, but not to related sights or sounds.
7. This research also helped protect the predator and prey, for example coyote
and wolves were tempted to eat sheep carcasses laced with a sickening poison
and then developed an aversion to sheep meat and in a different situation, two
wolves later penned with a live sheep feared it.
8. Nausea, anxiety, pain, and other bad feelings serve as a good purpose.
9. Michael Domjan and his colleagues report that conditioning is even speedier,
stronger, and more durable when the CS is ecologically relevant-something
similar to stimuli associated with sexual activity in the natural environment.
10. The tendency to learn behaviors favored by natural selection may help explain
why we humans seem to be naturally disposed to learn associations between
the color red and sexuality, for example in females enhanced bloodflow
produces the red blush and because of situations like these, people may pair
red with sex.
11. Studies show that men and women find each other more attractive with
something red on them or near them.
12. Ex. When chemotherapy causes nausea and vomiting more than an hour
following treatment, can patients develop classically conditioned nausea to
sights, sounds, and smells associated with the clinic and when they return to
the hospital, these feelings can return.
B. Limits on Operant Conditioning
1. Nature sets limits on each species capacity for operant conditioning.
2. Ex. You can use food as a reinforcer to condition a hamster to dig or to rear
up, because this is what they do to search for food, but you cannot get them to
do things like wash their faces because those behaviors arent associated with
food or hunger.
3. Biological constraints predispose organisms to learn associations that are
naturally adaptive.
4. Marian Breland and Keller breland witnessed the power of operant
conditioning as they spent half a century training 15,000 different animals for
movies, amusement parks, etc.
5. Instinctive drift occurs as the animals revert to their biologically predisposed
pattern, for example the pigs were taught to pick up large wooden dollars and
deposit them in a piggy bank but a short while after, they dropped the coin and
pushed it with their snout instead.
II. Cognitions Influence on Conditioning
A. Cognitive Processes and Classical Conditioning
1. Robert Rescorla and Allan Wagner showed that an animal can learn the
predictability of an event, for example if a shock is always preceded by a tone,
and then may also be preceded by a light that accompanies the tone, a rat will
react with fear to the tone but not to the light, the more predictable the
association, the stronger the conditioned response=awareness.
2. Associations can influence attitudes, for example when British children
viewed novel cartoon characters alongside either ice cream (Yum!) or
Brussels Sprouts (Yuk!), they came to like best the ice cream associated
characters.
3. Without any conscious memory for the pairings, the participants formed more
gut-level liking for the characters associated with the positive stimuli.
4. Conditioned likes and dislikes are even stronger when people notice and are
aware of the associations they have learned.
5. People receiving therapy for alcohol dependence may be given alcohol spiked
with a nauseating drug and to some extent it will work. When there is
awareness of the nausea being induced by the drug the associations are
weakened.
6. Even in classical conditioning, it is not simply the CS-US association but also
the thought that counts.
B. Cognitive Processes and Operant Conditioning
1. B.F. Skinner granted the biological underpinnings of behavior and the
existence of private thought processes.
2. For Skinner, thoughts and emotions were behaviors that follow the same laws
as other behaviors.
3. Animals on a fixed interval reinforcement schedule respond more and more
frequently as the time approaches when a response will produce a reinforcer;
the animals behave as if they expected that repeating the response would soon
produce the reward.
4. Cognitive map- a mental representation of the layout of ones environment.
For example, after exploring a maze, rats act as if they have learned a
cognitive map of it.
5. Latent Learning- learning that occurs but is not apparent until there is an
incentive to demonstrate it, for example children may learn from watching a
parent but demonstrate the learning only much later, as needed.
6. There is more to learning than associating a response with a consequence;
there is also cognition.
7. Promising people a reward for a task they already enjoy can backfire.
8. Excessive rewards can destroy intrinsic motivation-the desire to perform a
behavior effectively and for its own sake, for example rewarding children with
toys or candy for reading diminishes the time they spend reading.
9. If I have to be bribed into doing this, it must not be worth doing for its own
sake.
10. Extrinsic motivation- a desire to perform a behavior to receive promised
rewards or avoid threatened punishment, for example reading this chapter
since there is a grade at stake.
11. Rewards used to signal a job well done can be effective.
III. Learning by Observation
A. Observational Learning
1. Observational learning- learning by observing others, for example watching
our sister burn her fingers on a hot stove teaches us not to do that.
2. Modeling- the process of observing and imitating a specific behavior.
3. Albert Bandura is the pioneering researcher of observational learning.
4. Example: child watches teacher pound, kick and throw around the large
inflated Bobo doll and yelled Sock him in the noseHit him downKick
him, later the teacher takes away the childs toys and says they are for the
other children and when the child is left alone with the Bobo doll, the child
reacts the same way the adult had and says the same things.
5. By watching a model, we experience vicarious reinforcement or vicarious
punishment, and we learn to anticipate a behaviors consequences in situations
like those we are observing.
6. fMRI scans show that when people observe someone winning a reward their
own brain reward systems activate as if they themselves literally had won the
reward.
B. Mirrors and Imitation in the Brain
1. A monkey used for an experiment attached to wires that buzzed when the
monkey moved, showed some form of sensation when it saw others eating and
its buzzer buzzed.
2. Mirror Neurons- frontal lobe neurons that some scientists believe fire when
performing certain actions or when observing another doing so. The brains
mirroring of anothers action may enable imitation and empathy. For example,
when a monkey grasps, holds, or tears something, these neurons fire, and they
likewise fire when the monkey observes another doing so.
3. Rhesus macaque monkeys rarely made up quickly after a fight unless they
grew up with forgiving older macaques.
4. Our catch-phrases, hem lengths, ceremonies, foods, traditions, vices, and fads
all spread by one person copying another.
5. By 8 to 16 months, infants imitate various novel gestures. By 12 months, they
look where an adult is looking. By 14 months, children imitate acts modeled
on TV. By 2 and a half young humans surpass chimps at social tasks.
6. 2-5 year olds over imitate, no matter where they are located in the world.
7. Humans like monkeys have brains that support empathy and imitation
8. Regardless, childrens brains enable their empathy and their ability to infer
anothers mental state, an ability known as theory of mind.
9. The brains response to observing others makes emotions contagious; through
its neurological echo, our brain stimulates and vicariously experiences what
we observe.
10. Observing others postures, faces, voices, and writing styles, we
unconsciously synchronize our own to theirs-which helps us feel what they
are feeling, for example seeing a loved ones pain, our faces mirror the others
emotion.
11. The pain imagined by an empathic romantic partner has triggered some of the
same brain activity experienced by the loved one actually having the pain.
12. Brain activity underlies our intensely social nature.
IV. Applications of Observational Learning
A. Prosocial Effects
1. Prosocial behavior- positive constructive, helpful behavior. The opposite of
antisocial behavior
2. Many business organizations effectively use behavior modeling to help new
employees learn communications, sales, and customer service skills.
3. People who exemplify nonviolent, helpful behavior can also prompt similar
behavior in others, for example Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King
who both drew on the power of modeling, making nonviolent action a
powerful force for social change in both countries.
4. Socially responsive toddlers who readily imitate their parents tend to become
preschoolers with a strong internalized conscience.
5. Models are most effective when their actions and words are consistent, for
example to encourage children to read, read to them and surround them with
books and people who read.
6. Exposed to a hypocrite, they tend to imitate the hypocrisy-by doing what the
model did and saying what the model said.
B. Antisocial Effects
1. Critics note that being aggressive could be passed along by parents genes.
2. Young monkeys separated from their mothers and subjected to high levels of
aggression grew up to be aggressive themselves.
3. The lessons we learn as children are not easily replaced as adults, and they are
sometimes revistited on future generations.
4. TV teaches children that bullying is an effective way to control others, that
free and easy sex brings pleasure without later misery or disease, or that men
should be tough and women gentle.
5. During the first 18 years, most children in developed countries spend more
time watching TV than they spend in school. At 75 years of age one spent
watching a total of 9 years of TV.
6. TV viewers are learning about life from a storyteller; in the late twentieth
century the average child watched 8000 TV murders and 100,000 acts of
violence before finishing elementary school.
7. Between 1998-2006 prime time violence increased by 75% and between
1996-97 it was revealed that more than 3000 cable programs aired with 6 in
10 shows featuring violence; 74% of violence being unpunished, 58% did not
show victims pain, nearly half involved an attractive predator, and half of the
violence being justified, this all causes the violence viewing effect.