Conditioning and Learning Exam 1 Chapter 1 Learning An enduring change in the mechanisms of behavior involving specific stimuli and or responses that results from prior experience with similar stimuli and responses Learn to find new shelter when storms destroy our homes One of the biological processes that facilitate adaptation to one s environment We learn respiration digestion and resisting disease to survive life We learn to walk motor behavior Learn to predict events such as when and where food will be available Learning to withhold responses is just as important as learning to make responses learn to not cross the street when the traffic light is red learn to eat when we are hungry Procedural Learning Learning ways of doing things rather than learning about specific events Typically not governed by conscious controlled processes does not require awareness Declarative or Episodic Learning Learning about a specific even or fact usually accessible to consciousness The environment gains the capacity to trigger our behavior whether we like it or not Before Descartes most people thought of human behavior as entirely determined by conscious intent and free will realized that many things people do are automatic reactions to external stimuli Dualism the view of behavior according to which actions can be separated into two categories voluntary behavior controlled by the mind consciously and involuntary behavior controlled by reflex mechanisms Reflex a mechanism that enables a specific environmental event to elicit a specific response sensory input is reflected in response output involuntary behavior is reflexive reflex responses were believed to be innate and fixed by the connections of the nervous system they were thought to depend on a prewired neural circuit connecting the sense organs to the relevant muscles The responses to the stimulus would be the same for the person s entire life Descartes believed that the same nerves transmitted information from the sense organs to the brain and from the brain down to the muscles thought that free will and voluntary behavior are on human attributes human beings were thought to be the only ones who have a mind or soul Mentalism mind Reflexology reflexive behavior formulated the concept of the reflex Nativism a philosophy according to which human beings are born with innate ideas believed that all of the ideas people had were acquired directly or indirectly through experiences after birth the mind started out as a clean slate tabula rasa Empiricism a philosophy according to which all ideas in the mind arise from experience John Locke Hobbes believed that the mind operated just as predictably and lawfully as a reflex proposed that voluntary behavior was governed by the principle of Hedonism Hedonism the actions of organisms are determined entirely by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain behavior is controlled by positive and negative consequences Association a connection or linkage between the representations of two events two stimuli or a stimulus and a response so that the occurrence of one of the events activates the representation of the other Because you heard the word car when you saw a car considered using one to get to work or sat in one connections or associations became established between the word car and those other attributes of cars Aristotle Establishment of associations become associated Brown characteristics 1 contiguity if 2 events repeatedly occur together in space or time they will 2 similarity 2 things will become associated if they are similar in some respect 3 contrast 2 things will become associated if they have some contrasting Proposed that a number of factors influence the formation of associations between 2 sensations intensity of the sensations 1 2 how frequently or recently the sensations occurred together Ebbinghaus Invented nonsense syllables Nonsense Syllables a three letter combination two consonants separated by a vowel that has no meaning bap Bell Magendie showed that separate nerves are involved in the transmission of sensory information from sense organs to the central nervous system and motor information from the central nervous system to muscles o If a sensory nerve is cut the animal remains capable of muscle movements if a motor nerve is cut the animal remains capable of registering sensory information Swammerdam Glisson showed that mechanical irritation of a nerve was sufficient to produce a muscle contraction Disagreed with Descartes Demonstrated that muscle contractions were not produced by swelling due to the infusion of a gas the more intense the stimulus was the more vigorous the resulting response would be if you touch a stove the hotter the stove the more quickly you withdraw your finger Proposed that stimuli did not always elicit reflex responses directly o A stimulus could release a response from inhibition when this happened the vigor of the response would not depend on the intensity of the stimulus Suggested that complex forms of behavior actions or thoughts that occurred in the absence of an obvious eliciting stimulus were in fact reflexive responses In these cases the eliciting stimuli are so faint that we do not notice them New reflexes could be established through mechanisms of association ebbinghaus also was concerned with establishing the laws of association through empirical research Nervism all behavioral and physiological processes are regulated by the nervous system Argued that the human mind is a product of evolution Believed that nonhuman animals had the ability to wonder curiosity imitation ect Romanes suggested that intelligence be identified by determining whether an animal learns to make new adjustments or modify old ones in accordance with the results of its own individual experience Behavioral psychologists are like drivers who try to find out about an experimental car by taking it out for a test drive instead of first looking under the hood models are simpler more easily controlled and less expensive for a model to be valid it must be comparable to its target referent in terms of the feature or function under study This is called the relevant feature or relevant function Performance an organism s activities at a particular time Sechenov Pavlov Darwin Fatigue a temporary decrease in behavior causes by repeated or excessive use of the muscles involved in the behavior behavior may also be temporarily altered by a change in stimulus condition If the house lights