AP Psychology Learning Flashcards

Learning Concepts

• Learning is a process influenced by experience, leading to a relatively lasting change in behavior or potential behavior.
• Habituation is a decrease in response to a repeated stimulus, indicating an organism's ability to ignore familiar stimuli.
• Associative learning involves recognizing that certain events occur together, illustrated by classical and operant conditioning.

Classical Conditioning

• Classical conditioning is learning where a conditioned stimulus elicits a conditioned response due to its association with an unconditioned stimulus.
• Unconditioned responses are involuntary reactions to unconditioned stimuli without prior learning.
• Conditioned responses emerge from pairing a previously neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus, leading to learned reactions.
• Acquisition refers to the initial stage where the conditioned response is first elicited by the conditioned stimulus.
• Higher order conditioning allows a conditioned stimulus to gain meaning through previous learning, facilitating connections to new stimuli.
• Extinction occurs when a conditioned association weakens without reinforcement or the unconditioned stimulus.
• Spontaneous recovery is the unexpected return of a previously extinguished conditioned response after a rest period.

Generalization and Discrimination

• Generalization is the tendency to respond similarly to various but related stimuli, like a dog salivating to different tones.
• Discrimination is the capability to differentiate between stimuli, an advanced learning skill compared to generalization.

Learned Behavior

• Learned helplessness describes a state where an organism fails to respond to adverse stimuli after experiencing uncontrollable events.
• Respondent behavior is an automatic response to specific stimuli, closely related to classical conditioning.

Operant Conditioning

• Operant conditioning changes the likelihood of a behavior based on the consequences that follow it.
• Key principles include positive reinforcement (adding a pleasant stimulus), negative reinforcement (removing an unpleasant stimulus), positive punishment (adding an unpleasant stimulus), and negative punishment (removing a pleasant stimulus).
• The law of effect states that behaviors are strengthened by rewards and weakened by the absence of rewards.

Research Tools

• The operant chamber, developed by B.F. Skinner, is designed to study animal behavior under controlled conditions, featuring mechanisms for stimulus delivery and response detection.

Explore key concepts and definitions related to the process of learning in psychology with these flashcards. Understand fundamental terms like learning and habituation, and how they affect behavior and responses in various situations.