Classical Conditioning PDF
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This document describes classical conditioning, a type of learning where a neural stimulus becomes associated with an unconditioned stimulus to elicit a conditioned response. It also examines stimulus generalization, stimulus discrimination, and the little Albert experiment. It covers key concepts and definitions in the field of psychology.
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Classical conditioning - Definition: a type of learning where a neural stimulus becomes associated with an unconditioned stimulus to elicit a conditioned response - Unconditioned Response (UR): a natural unlearned reaction to an unconditioned...
Classical conditioning - Definition: a type of learning where a neural stimulus becomes associated with an unconditioned stimulus to elicit a conditioned response - Unconditioned Response (UR): a natural unlearned reaction to an unconditioned stimulus → e.g. salivating when hearing food is in your mouth - Unconditioned stimulus (US): a stimulus that naturally triggers an unconditioned response without any prior learning. → e.g. the food that makes the dog salivate - Conditioned response (CR): a learned response to a previously neutral stimulus, which has become a conditioned stimulus → e.g. salivating when hearing a bell - Conditioned stimulus (CS): a previously neutral stimulus that, after being paired with an unconditioned stimulus, triggers a conditioned response → e.g. the bell - Acquisition: the initial phase where the conditioned stimulus is paired with the unconditioned stimulus to establish a conditioned response - Latent inhibition: the phenomenon where a familiar stimulus takes longer to acquire meaning as a conditioned stimulus than a new stimulus - Renewal: the return of a conditioned response when an organism is placed back into the environment where the conditioning originally occurred, after extinction. - Stimulus generalisation - When a conditioned response is triggered by stimuli similar to the original conditioned stimulus - A dog that salivates to a bell may also salivate to a doorbell, even though its slightly different - Stimulus discrimination - The learned ability to differentiate between the conditioned stimulus and other stimuli that do not predict the unconditioned stimulus - The dog only salivates to a specific bell and not similar sounds - The little albert experiment - CS: baby albert was conditioned to fear a white rat - US: by pairing it with a loud sound - CR: causing Albert to show fear - Albert generalised this fear to other similar stimuli - Shows how emotions like fear can be conditioned - Demonstrates stimulus generalisation Self-prioritisation effect - Definition: refers to the phenomenon where individuals show a preference for processing information related to themselves over information related to others - Evidence: research demonstrates that individuals respond faster and more accurately to stimuli associated with themselves compared to those associated with friends or strangers - Implications: for understanding social cognition and how individuals navigate their social environments. Suggests that self relevance can significantly influence cognitive processing and decision making Self-recognition - efinition: refers to the ability of an individual to identify themselves as distinct from D others, often assessed through tasks like the mirror test where individuals recognise their reflections as themselves - Importance: considered an indicator of self-awareness and is linked to various cognitive and social abilities. Significant milestone in cognitive development - Debate: some argue that recognising oneself in the mirror does not equate to a deeper understanding of ones identity or existence Decision making and judgement - System 1 based judgement - Fast, automatic and intuitive way of thinking. Operates quickly and with little effort, relying on heuristics - Instinctive - Quick decisions based on limited information - Prone to biases and errors - System 2 based judgment - Reasoning and critical thinking - Difficult or unfamiliar tasks - More accurate, requires cognitive resources - Slower, more deliberate, and analytical way of thinking. Requires conscious effort and used for complex decision making - Prospect theory - Describes how people make decisions under risk and uncertainty - Loss aversion: people tend to prefer avoiding losses over acquiring equivalent gains - Value function: is concave for gains and convex for losses, indicating diminishing sensitivity to changes in wealth - Framing effects: the way choices are presented can significantly influence decision making - Heuristics and Fallacies - Heuristics are mental shortcuts where people judge the likelihood of events based on how easily examples come to mind - Conjunction fallacy: when people assume that specific conditions are more probable than a single general one. E.g. linda example - Availability heuristic: a mental shortcut where people judge the likelihood of events based on how easily examples come to mind. E.g. if someone frequently hears about plane accidents they may overestimate the danger of flying - Adjustments and anchoring - The cognitive bias where individuals rely too heavily on the first piece of information encountered (“the anchor”) when making decisions - Expected utility theory - A normative model that suggests individuals make decisions by considering the expected outcomes and their associated utilities Language - Aphasia - isorder that affects a person's ability to communicate, typically resulting from D brain damage - Broacas - Difficulty in speech production while comprehension remains intact - Difficulty in speech production - Results from damage to the frontal lobe - Slow, effortful production - Weniche - Fluent but nonsensical speech, significant difficulties in language comprehension - Whorfian hypothesis - The structure and vocabulary of language influence how its speakers perceive and think about the world - Strong: language determines thought - Weak: language influences thought - Associations between language and space - People often associate concrete words with specific spatial locations. E.g. “Attic” may be considered higher, and “basement” linked to lower - Associations between language and colour - Different languages may have varying associations with colours, influencing how speakers perceive and categorise colours. Heyes & Catmur - Mirror neurons - Definition: a class of neurons that fire both when an individual performs an action and when they observe the same action performed by another - Function: they are implicated in low level processing of observed actions - Example: yawning - Action understanding - Role: contribute to understanding others’ actions by providing a direct neural mechanism for recognising and interpreting actions - Limitations: while mirror neurons play a role in basic action understanding, they do not support complex social cognition or abstract reasoning - Autism - Implications: mirror neurons do not play a role in autism. This challenges the notion that deficits in empathy or social understanding in individuals with autism are primarily due to mirror neuron dysfunction - Empathy - Mirror neurons are associated with affective empathy, where observing someone in distress can evoke similar feelings in the observer Operant conditioning - A learning process where behaviour is influenced by the consequences that follow it strengthening behaviours through reinforcement and weakening them through punishment - Positive and negative reinforcement and punishment - rimary and secondary reinforcers P - Reinforcement schedules - Partial reinforcement: reinforcing behaviour only some of the time - Effect: slower learning but more resistant to extinction - Fixed ratio: reinforcement after a set number of responses. Example: a coffee shop rewards you with a free coffee after 10 purchases - Fixed interval: reinforcement after a set period, regardless of the number of responses. Example: receiving a paycheck every 2 weeks - Variable ratio: reinforcement after an unpredictable number of responses. Example: slot machines at a casino pay out after a random number of lever pulls - Variable interval: reinforcement after varying time intervals, regardless of the number of responses. Example: checking email, where responses may be rewarded unpredictably with messages. Social condition - The director paradigm - Purpose: assesses ability to recognise and account for another persons viewpoint - Used to: - Study perspective taking and cognitive empathy - Method - “Director” gives instructions about how to arrange objects in a scene but has a different point of view of the scene. Participants must understand the director's perspective to follow instructions correctly. - Affective Empathy - Refers to the ability to respond with an appropriate emotion to others emotional state. Involves sharing the feelings of others - Characteristics - emotional resonance - Compassion or distress in response to others emotions - Development - Appears earlier in development compared to cognitive empathy - Cognitive empathy - Measurement: self-report questionnaires - Definition: the ability to understand another persons perspective or mental state. Involves recognising and interpreting others’ thoughts and feelings - Characteristics - Mental processes and reasoning - Empathic concern - A motivational dimension that involves caring for the wellbeing of others and the desire to help - Measurement - Self report measures. E.g. interpersonal reactivity index (IRI) Motivation - Intrinsic motivation - efinition: refers to engaging in a behaviour because it is inherently interesting or D enjoyable. The activity itself is the reward - Impact on behaviour - Generally leads to higher levels of engagement - Characteristics - Driven by personal satisfaction - Autonomy - E.g. hobbies - Extrinsic motivation - Definition: involves performing a behaviour to achieve a separate outcome, such as rewards or recognition - Impact on behaviour - May undermine intrinsic motivation - Characteristics - Driven by external factors, e.g. money, grades, praise - Can be effective for tasks not inherently enjoyable - Key studies - Lepper and Greene (1973) - Expected rewards reduce amount of time children spend on activities they initially enjoy - Ailey et al. (2009) - Participants performed worse when expecting a reward Flashbulb memories - Vivid, detailed memories of emotionally charged, surprising events - E.g. liam payne's death, 9/11 - Capture the context (who, what were you doing, where) when you learned of the event - Talarico & Rubin (2003): feel more vivid than everyday memories but fade and change similarly Photographic memories - Often refers to an ability to recall images with near perfect detail, like a mental photo - Considered a myth Eidetic memories - The ability to vividly “see” an image in the mind for a short time after its no longer in view - Image remains in mind for several seconds to minutes - More common in children The working memory - Stroop effect - Participants asked to name the colour of the ink - Result: people usually experience slower reaction times and make more errors - Why?: - automaticity of reading - Cognitive interference: the brain has to suppress the automatic response (reading the word) to focus on a less automatic response (naming the ink colour) - entral executive: manages attention, coordinates information from different C sources, and different focus - Phonological loop - Responsible for the temporary storage and rehearsal of speech based and auditory information. It helps individuals remember and work with verbal and auditory material - words/numbers/sounds - Silently rehearsing key information - Visuospatial sketchpad - Responsible for temporarily storing and manipulating visual and spatial information. Allows individuals to mentally visualise and work with images, shapes and spatial relationships. - Visualising the problem Autobiographical memory - False memories: can be influenced by suggestive questioning, showing that participants often recalled incorrect details about an event due to changes in wording - Reconstructive nature: autobiographical memories are prone to false memories because it is reconstructive. Each time a memory is recalled, external information can influence the recollection. - What: memory for life events or things that have happened to us. DRM - Presenting participants with a list of related words and then testing their ability to recall and recognise a non-presented word, “critical lure” - Can endure false memories - Based on semantic relatedness Visual memory - Visual short term memory - A memory system that stores a limited amount of visual information for a few seconds. Smaller capacity than ionic but lasts longer - Function: holds onto visual information actively, making it accessible for immediate tasks, like comparing objects or remembering where something is placed - Example: when comparing two similar side-by-side, VSTM holds one image in mind while you look at the other spot the difference. - Relationship between ionic and VSTM - Retains more important visual details for ongoing cognitive tasks, allowing you to work with the information before it fades - Ionic memory serves as a fleeting “buffer” for incoming visual information, which is then either discarded or passed along to VSTM if its relevant - Ionic memory - A brief, high-capacity memory store that holds an exact image of visual information for a fraction of a second - Function: acts as a temporary “snapshot” of visual input, allowing the brain to capture scenes and objects before dismissal or transfer to STM. - xample: if you glance at a crowded room and then close your eyes, the brief E visual impression of the room remains in your mind an instant before it fades. Erroneous learning - Definition: learning approach using intentional errors for critical thinking and retention - purpose: - Enhances engagement and critical thinking - Promotes active learning and improving retention - Example - Maths: solved problem with intentional errors Visual statistical learning - Visual statistical learning is the ability to unconsciously detect patterns and regularities in visual stimuli. It helps us make sense of out visual environment without deliberate effort - Ensemble perception - Global over local processing: prioritises the overall appearance rather than individual specifics - Summary stats: brian quickly computes a statistical summary (average size/colour) of a group of objects - Efficiency in cognitive processing - Rapid and efficient: occurs almost instantly, allowing us to make quick judgements in dynamic environments - This process supports our ability to focus on the broader context and ignore irrelevant details Memory - Declarative memory - Semantic memory - Facts and general knowledge - E.g. knowing the capital of a city - Episodic memory - Personal experiences and events - E.g. remembering your last party - Stages of memory - Encoding - The initial processing of information to store it in memory - E.g. studying a fact to remember later - Maintenance - Keeping information active in memory - E.g. rehearsing a phone number - Retrieval - Accessing stored information when needed - E.g. recalling information during an exam - Non-declarative memory - Habituation and sensitization - Changes in response due to repeated exposure - .g. becoming accustomed to a noise (habituation) or heightened E sensitivity after a stimulus (sensitisation) - Associative learning - E.g. classical and operant conditioning - Learning associations between stimuli - Procedural learning - Memory for skills and habits - E.g. riding a bike