Classical, Operant & Observational Learning

• Learning involves experiences that cause changes in behaviors, mindset, skills, knowledge, personality which can appear immediately or later.
• Acquired change encompasses various learning processes and adaptation methods.

Three Prominent Learning Methods

• Classical conditioning allows learning about natural responses, existing habits, automatic responses, emotions, motives, or feelings.
• Operant conditioning involves decisive actions or behaviors, crucial for learning voluntary responses.
• Observational learning explains how humans develop as social beings.

Classical Conditioning

• Organisms learn to perform natural actions/exhibit emotions for reasons that don't typically cause them.
• This learning involves a natural response that the organism is already used to, elicited by a new reason.
• The organism learns to make an old response or show an emotion for a new, unrelated reason, linking the natural reason to a new one.
• A condition must exist where the natural reason for a natural response becomes associated with a new reason, strengthening the new reason to provoke that response.
• Organisms learn to make the same response under new conditions.
• Example of this is feeling the urge to have rich food on a Friday lunch time.

Operant Conditioning

• Operant Conditioning involves learning to make operative responses decisively, based on the results of those responses.
• Decision-making for future responses depends on positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, or punishment.
• Positive and negative reinforcement give favorable outcomes for actions where the organism decides to respond in the future.
• Punishment results in an unfavorable outcome, causing one to decide not to repeat an action.
• Negative reinforcement involves removing an unwanted situation/stimulus, thus increasing the behavior as a reward to remove the unpleasant thing.
• Punishment is the unpleasant consequence of a behavior decreases the frequency of that behavior
• Negative enforcement which is unpleasant in nature, leads to favorable consequences by removing that very unpleasant thing.
• Punishment is an unpleasant consequence that leads to stopping an action to avoid further punishment.

Observational Learning - Model Selection

• We learn social behaviors by observing others and using models.
• There are multiple reasons for selecting someone as a model, which are individualistic to each.
• Need-based dependency is the primary reason during early childhood for selecting parents as models.
• Need-based association involves relating to someone who has something we need.
• Vicarious learning occurs when we follow people who enjoy what we admire.
• Proximity, similarity, and other factors lead us to pick a model to learn from, if motivation and reason are present.

Differences Between Classical and Operant Conditioning

• Classical conditioning involves natural behaviors, while operant conditioning involves operant/decisive behaviors.
• Classical conditioning uses association, while operant conditioning uses reinforcement and punishment.
• Classical conditioning keeps the involved behavior mostly unchanged; operant conditioning modifies the behavior and generates new ones.