Classical Conditioning Explained

• Associative learning involves making connections between events and behavioral responses
• Nonassociative learning involves an increased or decreased response to some repeated event or stimulus.

Habituation

• Occurs when becoming less responsive with repeated exposure to an irrelevant event
• Allows avoidance of expending resources

Dishabituation

• The recovery of a response that has undergone habituation
• Demonstrates that habituation is not due to muscle fatigue or sensory adaptation.

Sensitization

• Is the process by which attention increasingly focuses on potentially harmful stimuli

Classical Conditioning: Nuts and Bolts

• It's a passive form of associative learning
• Reflexive or involuntary behaviors become associated with an event
• It takes place when a neutral stimulus is paired with an unconditioned stimulus
• An unconditioned stimulus is a stimulus that consistently elicits an involuntary response.
• The unconditioned response is the automatic response elicited by unconditioned stimuli, such as salivation elicited by food.
• The conditioned stimulus is a stimulus that, after pairing with an unconditioned stimulus, evokes a conditioned response.
• The neutral stimulus becomes the conditioned stimulus.
• The conditioned response is the learned response to an initially neutral stimulus after the neutral stimulus is paired with the unconditioned stimulus.

Classical Conditioning: What It Teaches

• Acquisition describes the act of learning some behavior not previously exhibited.
• Generalization describes an organism's tendency to respond to stimuli that are similar to the original conditioned stimulus.
• Discrimination is the learning of differential responding to different stimuli: responding to some but not to others.
• Extinction occurs when a conditioned response weakens and disappears because the conditioned stimulus is no longer presented with the unconditioned stimulus.
• Spontaneous recovery is the reappearance of an extinguished conditioned response after an interval of time.
• The occurrence of events close together in time (contiguity) is essential for conditioned learning
• So too is contingency i.e. how reliably one event predicts another.
• Prediction error occurs when learned associations are inaccurate, leading to revision of previous learning.
• Blocking reveals that stimuli are learned only if they have additional predictive value
• Provides evidence that the occurrence of closely timed events is not enough for learning.

Learning to Feel

• Classical conditioning can reach well beyond simple reflexes to include complex emotions, such as fear or anger.
• A classic study on the infant "Little Albert" demonstrated how fear responses could be learned through classical conditioning and generalized.

PTSD

• People who develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after experiencing war, rape, or violence may be stricken with anxiety for years after the event
• Occurs because once-neutral environmental stimuli associated with the traumatic experience serve as conditioned stimuli for their fears.
• The classical conditioning of fear has been found to depend on the amygdala in humans and other animals.
• The amygdala is consistently implicated as the key brain region through which emotional conditioned stimulus-unconditioned stimulus associations are formed
• Applies regardless of the type of sensory input, or the behavioral response system involved.

Association Predispositions

• Human and nonhuman animals have evolved internal mechanisms that guide them to make associations that are generally adaptive.
• Preparedness is the species-specific biological predisposition to learn some associations more quickly than other associations.
• Conditioned taste aversion illustrates preparedness by revealing a higher likelihood to associate nausea with food than with other environmental stimuli.

Classical Conditioning in the Real World

• Explains how the brain responds to chronic drug use - surrounding context and drug paraphernalia serve as conditioned stimuli.
• The advertising industry takes advantage of the powerful ways in which emotion and classical conditioning can alter behavior.
• Understanding conditioned taste aversions can be used in farming practices - to protect livestock
• Can be used in medicine to help chemotherapy patients.

Operant Conditioning: Nuts and Bolts

• It's an active form of learning
• An organism learns to use its behavior to operate on the environment, causing specific outcomes.
• According to The law of effect, proposed by Edward Thorndike - behavior has consquences
• It is learned to repeat behaviors that lead to satisfying outcomes and avoid behaviors that lead to annoying ones.
• Can be understood in terms of the ABCs - Antecedents signal a context in which behaviors will lead to certain consequences.

Behavioral Consequences

• Reinforcement increases the frequency of the behavior it follows
• Punishment decreases a behavior's frequency.
• Primary reinforcers tend to satisfy some biological need and are effective regardless of a person's prior experience.
• Secondary reinforcers are learned - acquire value through experience because of their association with primary reinforcers.
• Positive form adds a stimulus as a consequence of a behavior.
• Negative form removes a stimulus as a consequence of a behavior.

Behavior Modification

• Reinforcement often leads to more positive and lasting changes, relative to punishment
• Activities that individuals frequently engage in can be harnessed and used to reinforce activities that they are less inclined to do.
• Sometimes behaviors can have immediately reinforcing consequences, but delayed punishing consequences.
• Delay discounting causes the immediate reinforcement to overpower the delayed punishment, when these two outcomes compete

New Habit Formation and Breaking Old Ones

• B. F. Skinner revolutionized how learning could be assessed because the chambers that he designed allowed for free operant responses.
• Operant chambers allow animals to respond at any time - as many times as needed, without intervention because there is no clear endpoint or goal.
• Shaping describes how random behaviors are gradually changed into a desired target behavior by the reinforcement of successive approximations.
• Despite operant training efforts, instinctive drift can occur - an animal reverts to evolutionarily derived instinctive behaviors instead of demonstrating newly learned responses.

Learning Schedules

• Continuous reinforcement involves rewarding a behavior every time it is performed.
• Partial reinforcement involves rewarding a behavior only some times.
• A fixed-interval schedule is a plan of reinforcement in which reinforcement always occurs after a specific amount of time has elapsed.
• A fixed-ratio schedule is a plan of reinforcement in which a specific number of correct responses are required in order for a reinforcement to occur.
• A variable-interval schedule is a plan of reinforcement in which reinforcement occurs after a varying amount of time has elapsed.
• A variable-ratio schedule is a plan of reinforcement in which a variable number of responses are required for the reinforcement to occur.

Beyond Behavior: The Mind's Role

• Early learning theorists known as behaviorists preferred to focus their research exclusively on observable behavior
• Later research suggested that the mind of the learner was critically important to understand.
• A specific response must be made for the animal to receive contingent reinforcement
• A fixed-interval reward is delivered no matter what behavior an animal is exhibiting at the time in noncontingent reinforcement
• A behavior is considered superstitious if it develops after noncontingent reinforcement begins and increases during the intervals between reinforcement.
• Latent learning occurs when no incentive stimulus is present and without any clear motivation or need to learn.
• A cognitive map of the environment is a learned internal representation of external space.
• Insight learning occurs when a solution to a problem suddenly comes to mind
• Chimpanzees, like humans, appear to be able to learn by insight.

Social Learning Theory

• Observational learning is learning that occurs when a person observes and imitates a behavior from a model.
• Newborns arrive in the world with a curious capacity for imitation, suggesting that learning through imitation might be our first teacher.
• Social learning theory suggests that social learning involves four main processes
• Attention, retention, motor reproduction, and reinforcement.
• When children watch adults engaging in a behavior like acting aggressively - the children may subsequently mimic this behavior.
• From an operant learning perspective, children who see another person being rewarded for a behavior experience vicarious reinforcement
• Children who see another person being punished experience vicarious punishment.
• There are campaigns dedicated solely to reminding parents and mentors about the impact that their actions have on children.
• Observational learning of motor skills may depend on mental simulation of the actions.
• Evidence suggests that our ability to imitate, learn, and understand the actions of others is supported by a specialized matching system in the brain - a system composed of mirror neurons.
• Mirror neuron systems are active during empathic experiences, such as when you see someone else in pain.

Observational Learning as the Basis of Culture

• Cultural transmission is the transfer of information from one generation to another
• Maintained not by genetics but by teaching and learning.

Types of cultural transmission:

• Vertical (across generations)
• Horizontal (among peers).
• Cultural learning affords cumulative cultural evolution = Cultures evolve over many generations to build complex practices.
• In humans, cultural transmission is powerful and obvious because of our hypersocial nature, but other species also demonstrate cultural transmission.
• Diffusion chain = Individuals learn a behavior by observing a model, and then the learners serve as models from whom other individuals can learn.
• Although many species engage in observational learning, humans have a cooperative tendency to share knowledge and skills that is particularly powerful.

Explore classical conditioning: unconditioned vs. conditioned stimuli, Pavlov's experiment, and conditioned responses. Learn how classical conditioning can help understand how advertisers leverage emotional responses. Test your knowledge of this learning process now.