Biological and Learning Psychology - Quiz 2

Biological and Learning Psychology

• Course covers principles of learning, studying and measuring behavior, and conservation psychology

Principles of Learning

• Classical conditioning: a type of learning where a neutral stimulus is paired with an unconditioned stimulus to elicit an unconditioned response
• Operant conditioning: a type of learning where behavior is modified by its consequences, such as reinforcement or punishment
• Observational learning: a type of learning where behavior is influenced by observing others

Classical Conditioning

• Unconditioned stimulus (UCS): a stimulus that naturally elicits a response
• Unconditioned response (UCR): the natural response to a UCS
• Conditioned stimulus (CS): a neutral stimulus that is paired with a UCS
• Conditioned response (CR): the learned response to a CS

Pavlov's Dog Experiment

• Demonstrated classical conditioning by pairing a neutral stimulus (bell) with a UCS (food) to elicit a CR (salivation)

Classical Conditioning in the 'Real World'

• Conditioned fear and anxiety: phobias can be developed through classical conditioning
• Advertising campaigns often use classical conditioning to associate products with pleasant emotions

Operant Conditioning

• Principles of operant conditioning: reinforcement, punishment, and schedules of reinforcement
• Reinforcement: a consequence that increases the frequency of a behavior
• Punishment: a consequence that decreases the frequency of a behavior
• Schedules of reinforcement: experimental procedures specifying how an operant response will be reinforced
• Fixed-ratio (FR) schedule: reinforcement is given after a fixed number of non-reinforced responses
• Variable-ratio (VR) schedule: reinforcement is given after a variable number of non-reinforced responses
• Fixed-interval (FI) schedule: reinforcement is given after a fixed period of time has elapsed
• Variable-interval (VI) schedule: reinforcement is given after a variable period of time has elapsed

Operant Conditioning in the 'Real World'

• Shaping by successive approximations: a technique used to teach complex behaviors by reinforcing small steps towards the final behavior
• Chaining: a technique used to teach complex behaviors by breaking them down into smaller steps

Observational Learning

• Occurs when responding is influenced by observation of others
• Social learning theory: learning can occur through vicarious reinforcement (modelling of a response)
• Necessary components of successful modelling: attention, retention, motor reproduction, and motivation
• Modelling and aggression: observation of aggressive models can increase aggression in observers

Studying and Measuring Behavior

• Behavior is what an animal does
• Tinbergen's four 'whys' of behavior: function, causation, ontogeny, and phylogeny
• Burghardt's (1997) additional question: what is the private experience of the animal presenting the behavior?

The Ethogram

• A descriptive catalogue of the behaviors that occur within a species
• Purely descriptive, no implication of whether behaviors are innate or learned
• Catalogue headings are not fixed, different categories are used by different authors/researchers

Innate Behaviors

• Fixed action patterns (FAPs): strongly biologically determined behaviors
• Rituals: stereotyped behaviors shaped by natural selection
• Displays: exaggerated ritualized signals
• FACIAL GESTURES ARE FAPs

Learning

• Modification of behavior as a result of experience
• Types of learning: associative learning, habituation, observational learning, latent learning, imprinting, and insight learning

Stimuli that Elicit Innate Behaviors

• Signals: behaviors or structures that alter the behavior of others
• Cues: features of the world that can be used as a guide to future action
• Ritualization: evolutionary process that stereotypes a cue into a signal
• Handicap: signal whose cost is greater than required by sheer efficacy
• Cost: loss of fitness resulting from making a signal

Types of Signals

• Index: signal whose intensity is causally related to quality being signaled
• Minimal-cost signal: signal whose reliability does not depend on its cost
• Icon: a signal whose form is similar to its meaning
• Symbol: a signal whose form is unrelated to its meaning

Why are Primates so Intelligent?

• Need to solve ecological problems (e.g., finding food)
• Need to solve social challenges (e.g., understanding kinship relationships)

Studying Behavior

• Beware of inaccurate nature of perception and different modes of perception
• The observer interacts with the subject
• Habituation: may benefit study animals and disadvantage their neighbors
• Wild vs captive: are they comparable?
• Ethics: experiments performed on wild populations may be unethicalHere are the study notes:

Behavioural Research Methods

• Sampling methods:
  • Focal animal (record everything about one particular individual)
  • All occurrences (everything that happens to all individuals)
  • Scan sampling (quickly scan all animals at regular intervals)
  • Instantaneous sampling (record the behaviour of animals at a specific point in time)
  • Sequence sampling (record specific sequences of behaviour)
  • 1/0 sampling (record whether a behaviour occurs or not)
• Heuristic value: only useful for suggesting hypotheses

Theoretical Revolution in the 1970s

• Kin selection: the principle that animals behave altruistically towards relatives because they share genes
• Coefficient of relatedness: the average probability that two individuals share the same allele through descent from a common ancestor
  • Parent-offspring: 0.5
  • Full siblings: 0.5
  • Half siblings: 0.25
  • Grandparent-grandchild: 0.25
  • Aunt-uncle vs niece-nephew: 0.25
  • First cousins: 0.125
  • Unrelated individuals: 0
• Hamilton's rule: altruistic behaviour is favoured by selection if the costs of performing the behaviour are less than the benefits, discounted by the coefficient of relatedness between actor and recipient

Research in Zoo Settings

• Study designs:
  • Baseline studies to understand what animals do and how they behave
  • Exploring how animals interact with each other
  • Monitoring the impact of different housing/husbandry routines
  • Testing the influence/effectiveness of enrichment items/techniques
• Assessing animal well-being in zoos:
  • Does the animal display species-typical behaviour?
  • Does the animal display 'abnormal' or aberrant behaviour?
  • Stereotypic behaviour (e.g. pacing, weaving, rocking) indicates compromised well-being
• Enrichment categories:
  • Food-based
  • Physical
  • Sensory
  • Social
  • Cognitive
• Non-invasive behavioural research with animals:
  • Behaviour is the most common measure for exploring animal welfare
  • Used to understand how an animal is coping with life in the zoo and how it responds to its environment

Zoo Visitor Research

• Zoo animal responses to people:
  • Unfamiliar zoo visitors (people they do not know)
  • Familiar zoo keepers/caregivers (people they know)
• Zoo visitor research in zoos:
  • Demographic studies to understand who zoo visitors are
  • Tracking studies to see what visitors do and where they go inside the zoo
  • Studying how visitor knowledge, attitudes, emotion, and behaviour change as a result of a zoo visit
• Impact of zoos on visitors:
  • Increasing visitor knowledge
  • Encouraging positive attitudes to animals and conservation
  • Influencing emotions (positive and negative)
  • Encouraging conservation behaviour change

Learned Helplessness

• Original dog experiments:
  • Triadic experiments with dogs (1967)
  • Theory of learned helplessness (1969)
• Criticism of the original theory of learned helplessness:
  • Does not rule out possibility of instrumental response
  • Possible neurochemical explanation
  • Results could be due to unpredictability (NOT uncontrollability)
• Original theory of learned helplessness:
  • Exposing organisms to uncontrollable outcomes will produce three deficits:
    • Cognitive deficit (belief that outcomes are uncontrollable)
    • Motivational deficit (lack of response initiation)
    • Emotional deficit (fear and eventually depression)
• Criticisms of the original theory of learned helplessness:
  • Goes beyond the experimental findings
  • Fails to explain why a third of subjects show no effect
  • Fails to explain why not everyone is depressed### Learned Helplessness
• Experiment: Participants were told noise would stop if they solved a puzzle correctly.
  • Group 1: Could stop noise and control environment.
  • Group 2: Could not stop noise and control environment.
• Described 4 experiments using 2 induction procedures (instrumental & cognitive) and 2 test tasks (instrumental & cognitive).

Problems with Experiments using Human Participants

• Amount and pattern of reinforcement (not all have used yoking).
• Yoking may produce "illusion of control".
• Instructional set: some experiments used different instructions.
• Perceived success/failure: most experiments have confounded uncontrollability and failure.
• Predictability/unpredictability: difficult to separate experimentally.
• People don't just give up altogether (like most of the dogs did).

Other Accounts of Human Helplessness

• Reactance (Brehm, 1966).
• Hypothesis testing (Levine et al., 1978).
• Egotism (Frankel & Snyder, 1978).
• State vs Action Orientation (Kuhl, 1981).
• Cognitive exhaustion (Sedek & Kofta, 1990).
• Secondary control (Rothbaum et al., 1982).
• Conditioned inattention (Lubow et al., 1981).

Revised Theory of Learned Helplessness (1978)

• When organisms experience uncontrollable outcomes, they explain the fact in terms of 3 attributional dimensions:
  • Internal vs External dimension: determines personal or universal helplessness (& accordingly self-blame).
  • Stable vs Unstable dimension: determines 'chronicity' (persistence).
  • Global vs Specific dimension: determines generalisability to new situations.

Depressive Realism Hypothesis (Taylor & Brown, 1988)

• Depressed college students were more accurate (realistic) in making judgments about their performance in an experimental task.
• Non-depressed college students tended to over-rate their performance.

Cognitive Theories of Depression

• Assume that depressed patients' cognitions of reality are distorted.
• For example, Beck's theory proposes three types of distortion:
  • Negative distortions about the self.
  • Negative distortions about the world.
  • Negative distortions about other people.

Beck's Cognitive Theory of Depression

• Depressives have negative schemas (sets of cognitions, beliefs, attitudes, etc) about:
  • The self (I'm unlikeable).
  • The world (nothing ever goes right).
  • Others (nobody cares whether I live or die).

Hopelessness Theory of Depression (Abramson, Metalsky, & Alloy, 1989)

• Based on learned helplessness theory.
• Assumes depressed people generalize inappropriately from situations in which outcomes are uncontrollable to situations in which they are controllable.
• Assumes depressed patients display an unrealistic attributional style.

Positive Illusions (Taylor, 1989)

• Cognitive theories of depression are incorrect in claiming that depressed patients distort reality, whereas mentally healthy people are realistic.
• Mentally healthy people distort reality (see world through 'rose-tinted glasses').
• Depressed patients are more realistic.

Other Applications of Helplessness Theory

• Martin Seligman has been a strong advocate of attributional retraining.
• To be both successful and happy, develop a healthy (‘optimistic’) attributional style.

Learned Optimism (Seligman, 1991)

• Develop a positive attributional style to successfully combat life's challenges.
• Pioneering the 'positive psychology' movement.

Ecological Learning Theory

• Enrichment based on behavior and ecology.
• For animals in all captive environments (lab, zoo, sanctuary, backyards/pets at home).

Ecological Learning Theory to Minimise Human-Animal Conflict

• For all areas where people and wildlife come into contact (near last remaining natural environments/national parks, tourism, etc).
• Biggest problem: feeding wild animals.

Non-Lethal Management: Predators and Livestock

• To protect sheep and goats:
  • Animal armor - protective collars.
  • Guardian dogs (e.g. Great Pyrenees, Komondor, Akbash, Anatolian shepherd, and Maremma).

Non-Lethal Animal Control

• Livestock guardian dogs in Namibia protect livestock herds from cheetahs to minimize cheetah-farmer conflict.
• Maremma dogs to protect bandicoots (Zoos Vic).

Disruptive or Aversive Stimuli

• Examples: scarecrow, radio-activated scare device, electric fence.
• Challenges:
  • Animals become habituated to aversive stimuli.
  • Stimuli may serve as discriminative stimuli for reinforcement.

Wildlife Tourism

• Issues related to close encounters with wildlife:
  • Ethical problems.
  • Stress and human disease.

Limits of Learning

• Physical characteristics:
  • The physical structure of an individual or species sets limits on what it can learn.
  • For example: chimpanzees can't learn to speak like humans because their anatomical vocal structures are not like ours.
• Learned behavior is not inherited.
• Individual differences:
  • Heredity does play a role in learning ability - but it is controversial.
  • Genes contribute to differences within and between species.
  • But environment also plays a role (e.g. enriched early learning environments).
• Critical periods:
  • Stages of development for optimal learning (e.g. imprinting in birds, maternal behavior in primates).
  • Do they occur in humans? First 12 years may be critical for learning language.
• Neurological damage:
  • Prenatal exposure to alcohol and other drugs can interfere with neurological development.
  • Exposure to neurotoxins (substances that damage nerve tissues) in infancy and early childhood are a threat to learning ability.

Biological Constraints on Conditioning

• Instinctive drift and animal ‘misbehaviour’:
  • Breland and Breland suggested that food reinforcement elicited innate food foraging and handling behaviors, which caused a decline in the effectiveness of an operant response that was reinforced by food.
  • Instinctive drift occurs when an animal's innate response tendencies interfere with conditioning processes.
• Conditioned taste aversion:
  • Aversions to food can develop if eating a particular type of food is followed by nausea.
  • Animals readily make connections between taste and nausea.
• Preparedness and phobias:
  • Martin Seligman suggests that 'preparedness' is a biologically programmed phenomenon.
  • Humans appear easily to develop phobias to spiders, snakes, heights, and darkness.

Behavior Systems Approach

• William Timberlake (Indiana University) developed a 'Behavior Systems Approach':
  • Integrates innate and learned behavior.
  • Takes environment and adaptive functions into account.
  • Learning modifies behavior systems that already exist.

Schedule-Induced Behaviour or Adjunctive Behaviours

• A variety of excessive (aberrant or 'abnormal') behaviours have been found to occur during fixed-interval schedules.
• Typically occur just after reinforcement (during the post-reinforcement pause).
• Examples: polydipsia (excessive drinking), excessive wheel-running, and excessive aggression.

Living Great Apes

• Adaptation (survival) function of behaviour:
  • Behaviour can evolve and change.
  • Sometimes behavioural change allows individuals to survive.
• Konrad Lorenz (1965) suggests that adaptive change in behaviour occurs through the action of two processes - ontogeny and phylogeny.

Phylogeny

• This kind of change is governed by principles of evolution by natural selection (Charles Darwin).
• Phylogenetic change takes place across generations within a species.
• Mechanism for change operates at the level of individual:
  • Individual carries the genes.
  • Genes are only passed on if the individual reproduces successfully.

Ontogeny

• Involves development or change in behaviour within the lifetime of an individual.
• Changes in behaviour occur in response to changes in the individual's environment and/or as a result of:
  • Maturation - pre-natal development of structures, growth, and age-dependent postnatal changes in an individual.
  • Learning - relatively age-independent changes in behaviour that occur as a result of experience.

Operant Conditioning

• An operant response is a behavior that operates on its environment.
• A discriminative stimulus is a stimulus that precedes a response and influences operant behavior by acting as a signal that behavior is likely to lead to a reinforcer.
• Schedules of reinforcement are experimental procedures that specify how an operant response will be reinforced.

Types of Reinforcement Schedules

• There are four basic schedules of intermittent reinforcement:
  • Fixed-Ratio (FR): Reinforcer is given after a fixed number of non-reinforced responses.
  • Variable-Ratio (VR): Reinforcer is given after a variable number of non-reinforced responses.
  • Fixed-Interval (FI): Reinforcer is given after a fixed period of time has elapsed.
  • Variable-Interval (VI): Reinforcer is given after a variable period of time has elapsed.

Patterns of Responding

• FR: 'break-and-run' pattern of responding with a high/rapid rate of response followed by a post-reinforcement pause.
• VR: high/rapid rate of response with no common, regular pausing.
• FI: 'scalloped' pattern of responding with a post-reinforcement pause.
• VI: moderate to low response rate with no/rare post-reinforcement pauses.

Operant Conditioning in the 'Real World'

• Shaping by successive approximations involves specifying target behavior, identifying a response to use as a starting point, and understanding the steps needed to achieve the target behavior.

Historical Timeline of Early Research

• 1967: Triadic experiments with dogs.
• 1969: Theory of learned helplessness.
• 1975: First human "helplessness" experiment published.
• 1978: Attributional reformulation.
• 1989: Hopelessness depression theory.
• 1991: "Learned Optimism" published.
• 1993: "Learned Helplessness" published.

Original Dog Experiments

• Dogs that received electric shocks in a classical conditioning experiment were unable to learn to escape from shocks in a shuttle box.
• The experiment found that being given uncontrollable electric shocks made dogs helpless.

Design of Yoked 'Triadic' Dog Experiments

• The experiment involved three groups: escapable shock, inescapable shock, and no treatment (control).
• The results showed that the group with inescapable shock had interference (two-thirds failed to learn) in the shuttle box.

Criticisms of Yoked 'Triadic' Dog Experiments

• The experiment has been criticized for being overly simplistic and not taking into account emotions and other factors.

Fear System of the Brain

• The fear system is a very old system in evolutionary terms and existed before humans experienced fear.
• The fear system is involved in many common psychiatric disorders, including anxiety disorders.
• The pathways connecting the emotional processing system of fear (amygdala) with the thinking brain (neocortex) are not symmetrical.
• The amygdala is designed to detect predators and is involved in the processing of emotions conveyed by the eye region of the face.

Body Mass Index (BMI)

• BMI is a measure of body fat based on height and weight.
• Adult humans have problems with milk consumption due to low levels of lactase enzyme.
• There is a global problem with obesity, and learning theory can be applied to understand and address this issue.