Conditioning and Learning

• Learning is acquiring knowledge and skills through experience, leading to enduring changes in behavior resulting from practice.

Habituation

• Involves adapting to unchanging, repeated stimuli.
• It is a basic form of learning.
• An example is blocking out the sound of a train that passes by regularly.

Evolution vs Learning

• Evolution involves changes in behavior passed down through generations in our genes.

Conditioning

• Before conditioning, meat powder acts as an unconditioned stimulus, creating an unlearned pairing and unconditioned response.
• A conditioned stimulus is a learned response, like salivation.
• Acquisition is the gradual strengthening of the conditioned response through learning.
• Extinction weakens the conditioned response.
• Spontaneous recovery happens when a weakened response reappears unexpectedly.
• Stimulus generalization occurs when a conditioned response is triggered by stimuli similar to the original conditioned stimulus, such as a bee and a wasp.
• Stimulus discrimination is the learned ability to differentiate between stimuli, like distinguishing a wolf from a dog.
• Higher order conditioning involves linking a neutral stimulus with a conditioned stimulus, allowing the neutral stimulus to become a conditioned stimulus itself.

Learning Phobias

• Classical conditioning principles can be applied to humans to create fear
• The Little Albert case demonstrated this, where a baby became scared of animals and the researcher after being exposed to a creepy mask.

Behavioral Therapy

• Behavioral therapy is inspired by classical conditioning
• Systematic desensitization is a technique aiming to replace anxiety with relaxation.
• With this method, when a person is scared of birds, they speak about birds in detail while relaxing.
• They may be shown pictures, videos without sound, and then with sound.
• Eventually, they can tolerate being in the same room as a bird, and eventually hold one.
• Aversive conditioning associates an unpleasant state with unwanted behavior.

Operant Conditioning

• Includes learning through associating voluntary behavior with its consequences.

• Reinforcement strengthens behavior, whether positive or negative.

• Punishment decreases behavior.

• Positive reinforcement involves adding a stimulus (like giving money) to increase behavior.

• Negative reinforcement involves removing a stimulus (like taking away curfew) to increase behavior.

• Positive punishment involves adding a stimulus (like giving chores) to decrease behavior.

• Negative punishment involves removing a stimulus (like taking away a phone) to decrease behavior.

Partial Reinforcement

• Fixed ratio reinforcement occurs after a fixed number of responses.
• Variable ratio reinforcement occurs after a variable number of responses.
• Fixed interval reinforcement occurs after a set amount of time.
• Variable interval reinforcement occurs after a variable timeframe.

Cognition

• Cognition plays a role through learned helplessness, beliefs about reinforcement, contrast effects, and self-evaluations.

Biological Constraints

• Biological constraints limit what can be learned or unlearnt

Classical vs Operant Conditioning

• In classical conditioning, the experimenter controls the delivery of the stimulus and responses are involuntary.
• In operant conditioning, the participant controls the delivery and responses are voluntary.

Cognitive Maps

• Cognitive maps involve training rats and blocking paths to observe navigation.
• Rats take the shortest detours as if they have an internal cognitive map.

Latent Learning

• Latent learning is hidden learning that exists without behavioral signs.

Observational Learning

• Observational learning involves learning by observing others.
• It encompasses cognitive processes such as attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation.

Memory

• Memory is the persistence of learning over time through encoding, storage, and retrieval of information.
• Recall involves retrieving information not currently in conscious awareness.
• Recognition involves identifying previously learned items.
• Relearning involves learning something more quickly when learned again.
• Memory models involve encoding, storage, and retrieval processes.

Three-Stage Memory Model

• Sensory memory holds sensory information briefly.
• Short-term memory holds information temporarily for analysis.
• Long-term memory provides relatively permanent storage.

Short Term Memory

-It briefly activates memory of a few items.

• Miller's magic number states that the capacity of short-term memory is 7 plus or minus 2 items.

Mnemonics

• Mnemonics are memory aids that use vivid imagery and organizational devices which require conscious effort.
• Single-use mnemonics include acronyms, rhymes, phrases, and personal meaning.
• Multiple-use mnemonics include the method of loci, using sequences of locations to remember items.
• The peg word mnemonic device uses already associated pairs.

Rehearsal

• Maintenance rehearsal repeats information to maintain it in short-term memory.
• Rehearsal transfers information into long-term memory.

Short term memory

• Verbal information confuses auditory information.
• Semantic information causes proactive interference.
• Visual mental rotation tasks also affect it.

Accuracy

• Technical accuracy recalls or recognizes exactly what was experienced.
• Content accuracy recalls or recognizes the meaning or content of what was experienced.

Autobiographical Memory

• Consists of structure, details, and interpretations.
• Includes personal memory, autobiographical fact, and generic personal memory.

Constructive Memory

• Reproductive memory is a highly accurate, verbatim recording of an event.
• Reconstructive memory remembers by combining elements of experience with existing knowledge.

Encoding Specificity Principle

• Retrieval is improved when conditions of recovery are similar to encoding.
• This includes context-dependent memory, mood-congruent memory, and state-dependent retrieval.

Sequence Effects

• The serial position curve shows that the first and last items in a list are best remembered.

Theories of Forgetting

• Motivated forgetting involves forgetting information for a reason.
• Encoding failure means information was not fully encoded.
• Retrieval failure means memories in long-term memory are temporarily inaccessible.

Decay vs Interference

• Reasons we may forget things: decay, information fades from memory, and is not influenced by other information.
• Interference: Other information disrupts learning.
• Proactive interference: Older learning interferes with new.
• Retroactive interference: Newer learning interferes with old.

Probe Digit Task

• A task with 16 digits.

Problems with forgetting

• Includes source amnesia and the sleeper effect.

Misinformation Effect

• The misinformation effect involves recalling a car accident differently after being asked leading questions.

Flashbulb Memories

• Vivid, detailed, long lasting, personally meaningful memories that people believe will never fade.
• Problems arise from emotion, interest, rehearsal, and overconfidence.

Memory Loss

• Retrograde amnesia is the inability to remember the past.
• Anterograde amnesia is the inability to form new memories.

Life Span Development

• Developmental psychology studies physical, cognitive, and social development throughout life.

Development Central Development Questions

• Continuity vs. discontinuity, sources of development, plasticity, individual differences, and active/passive roles.

Research Strategies

• Cross-sectional studies compare different ages at the same time.
• Longitudinal studies follow and retest the same people over time.

Prenatal Development

• Germinal period comes first (zygote).
• Embryonic period follows (major organs form).
• Fetal period is the third (organs begin to function).
• Teratogens can harm the embryo or fetus during prenatal development.

Physical Development

• Includes brain development.
• Adolescence begins at puberty.

Adolescence Development

• Development involves sex characteristics (primary and secondary).
• Landmarks include women's menarche and men's sperm production.

Adulthood

• Life span is the maximum possible age for a species.
• Theories include cellular clock and wear and tear.
• Life expectancy is the average number of years a species is expected to live.

Cognitive Development

• Cognition, according to Jean Piaget is development relies on schemas
• Schema is a concept that organizes and interprets information.

Assimilation vs Accommodation

• Assimilation interprets new info in existing schemas.
• Accommodation modifies schemas in response to new info.

Sensorimotor stage

• Object permanence: awareness that objects continue to exist even when not perceived.

Preoperational Stage

• Egocentrism: inability to take another's perspective.
• Theory of mind: understanding own and others' mental states.

Concrete Operational Stage

• Conservation: object properties remain the same despite changes in forms.

Formal Operational Stage

• Hypothetical deductive reasoning.

Social Emotional Development

• Parenting styles: authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and neglectful.
• Attachment is an emotional tie with others.

Attachment styles

• Attachment is assessed using the Strange Situation procedure, which tests the security of a child's attachment.
• Secure attachment: baby is secure with the parent, distressed by separation, and delighted by reunion.
• Insecure attachment: avoidant, resistant, or disorganized.

Consequences

• Consequences of attachment styles include the formation of internal working models.

Conflicts and Attachment Styles

• Relationships impacted by attachment styles
• Conflict, intimacy, and support affected by attachment style

Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Reasoning

• Preconventional level: Morality judged by rewards and punishments.
• Conventional level: Morality judged by social order and approval.
• Postconventional level: Morality judged by abstract principles like equity and justice.

Temperament

• Individual differences from social development
• Includes easy, difficult, slow-to-warm-up, and unclassifiable temperaments.

Social and Personal Development

• Peer influences and conformity.
• Identity crisis.

Adolescence Mental Health

• Mental health includes the stereotypic images of adolescents.
• Perceived sources of difficulty during adolescence.

Dying and Death

• Elisabeth Kubler Ross proposed five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.