Learning: Understanding Classical and Operant Conditioning

1. Learning

2. Learning • Learning is defined as any relatively permanent change in behavior that is based upon experience. • Behaviorists are psychologists who insist that psychologists should study only observable, measurable behaviors, not mental processes.

3. Classical Conditioning

4. Some more examples… • The television commercial for Mega Burger shows a big delicious cheeseburger. A 50’s rock-and-roll song is played during the commercial. You see the commercial several times, and now when the song is playing on the radio, you get hungry. • What are the: • Neutral Stimulus/CS • UCS • UCR • CR?

5. Classical conditioning proceeds through several phases, depending on the time of presentation of the two stimuli. • If the conditioned stimulus regularly precedes the unconditioned stimulus, acquisition occurs. • If the conditioned stimulus is presented by itself, extinction occurs. • A pause after extinction yields a brief spontaneous recovery.

6. Operant Conditioning Trial and error or insight? The time that a cat needs to escape from a puzzle box gradually grows shorter, but in an irregular manner. Thorndike concluded that the cat did not at any point “suddenly get the idea.” Instead, reinforcement gradually increased the probability of the successful behavior.

9. The Premack Principle • The Premack Principle states that the opportunity to engage in frequent behavior will be a reinforcer for any less-frequent behavior. • A person who prefers going to the movies to going to museums can be reinforced for extra trips to the museum with free movie passes.

10. Conditioned Taste Aversions • If learning occurs reliably after just one trial, it is hard to know if the learning was a result of classical conditioning or operant conditioning • One kind of learning that occurs after a single trial is an association between eating something and getting sick.

11. Social Learning • The social-learning approach states that we learn about many behaviors before we attempt them for the first time. • Much learning, especially in humans, results from observing the behaviors of others and from imagining the consequences of our own. • Two of the chief components of social learning are modeling and imitation.