Learning Behaviorism and Conditioning Chapter 6 Psychology studied digestion Enter Pavlov Pavlov Pavlov s Dogs Now the History of Psychology Becomes Relevant Before psychology became a separate discipline behavior was studied by naturalists the human nervous system by medicine and philosophers wrote about the mind History of Psychology The first psychology labs were founded by William James 1875 and Wilhelm Wundt 1879 Both men were medical doctors with an interest in science and philosophy They believed it was possible to scientifically study the mind However the methods psychologists used were a mess Honestly there is still a lot of debate on how to study the mind using good scientific methods It was even crazier in the late 1800 s and early 1900 s Well scientific psychology was revolutionized by a Russian medical doctor physiologist who Pavlov won the Nobel Prize in 1904 for his work on digestion He is now more famous for an accidental discovery during his studies Pavlov did his research using dogs as subjects One of his studies measured how much dogs salivated before eating When the dogs were presented meat powder they would start salivating See IPad for picture of what the dob and salivating looked like At first the dogs would just salivate when food was present Eventually the dogs started salivating when they heard the footsteps of the research assistants bringing the food Did the dogs learn to associate the sound of footsteps with food Pavlov got curious and did a few experiments It turns out that Pavlov could not get the dogs to salivate in response to a metronome a tuning fork and a whistle How does this work The dogs were unconsciously learning to associate the sounds to food Learning is an enduring change in behavior or thought that is caused by experiences It can be as simple as learning to drown out an annoying stimulus Habituation to learning how to do Calculus What kind of learning were the dogs doing It was a kind of learning called classical conditioning and the study of it changed psychology forever Unconditioned Stimulus UCS The meat powder Unconditioned Response UCR Salivation when meat powder is presented Neutral Stimulus NS A tuning fork before learning Look at Photo on IPAD for what the steps in Pavlov s experiments with dogs looked like Classical Conditioning Conditioned Stimulus CS The tuning fork after it is paired with food Conditioned Response CR Salivation when the tuning fork is played Learning Back to Pavlov s Dogs Classical Conditioning A neutral stimulus is turned into a conditioned stimulus An unconditioned response becomes a conditioned response The dogs learned the tuning fork means food so they salivate What happened when Pavlov and his assistant stopped giving the dogs meat powder after hitting the tuning fork The dogs eventually stopped salivating This is called Extinction Sometimes a long time after extinction if an animal is presented the CS they will suddenly cover the conditioned response This is called Spontaneous Recovery Let s say a dog is conditioned to respond to a tuning fork with tuned to a C Then the dog hears a tuning fork to an A The dog salivates This is called Stimulus Generalization Let s say the dog only gets food after it hears tuning forks pitched to C but not A Eventually the dog stops salivating when it hears A forks but not C forks This is called Stimulus Discrimination Things in the Textbooks That Make Me Very Angry The Little Albert Study You may have heard of it It was unethical but that s not why its presence in textbooks makes me angry Back to a little more psychology history The Little Albert Study Pavlov showed that you could study learning by studying how an animal responds to a stimulus This stimulus response approach was observable and amenable to test in the lab John Watson was among the leaders of a movement to make psychology more scientific by studying behavior only He wrote a behaviorist manifesto Watson contributed a lot to behaviorism Unfortunately his most famous study is not as advertised in intro psych texts Look at photo in IPAD if you want to see Picture of The Little Albert Study Only one child never followed up results were descriptive rather than quantitative and there is a lot of interpretation Not good evidence that phobias are classically conditioned Phobias That said there is evidence that phobias are sometimes classically conditioned The Little Albert Study is not that evidence May phobias can be treated via classical conditioning One is successively exposed to the feared stimulus It may start with hearing the name of the feared object Then maybe you move to a picture Then you touch the object There are two ways to think about treating phobias An object can be thought of as a neutral stimulus until one becomes afraid of it Then it turns into a conditioned stimulus that elicits fear Treatment can be the extinguishing of fear You can also treat phobias by associating the feared object with something pleasurable Take flying You could reward someone afraid of flying every time they took a step towards flying But is this classical conditioning The book suggests it is But Operant Conditioning More history John Watson got fired from his job as a college professor because he started having an affair with his grad student He was drummed out of academia divorced his wife married his student and went into advertising In his place the next big champion of behaviorism came up through the ranks Harvard psychologist B F Skinner became the godfather of Radical Behaviorism Skinner didn t think psychology should mess with the black box of cognition He also believed that every behavior even very complex behaviors can be conditioned Operant Conditioning An animal s behavior is shaped by a series of reinforcers and or punishments Reinforcers Anything that increases the frequency of a behavior Punishment Anything that decreases the frequency of a behavior Positive Reinforcer Something desirable given to a person or animal for performing a desired behavior A reward Negative Reinforcer The removal of something negative as a reward for performing a desirable Positive Punishment Applying something unpleasant in order to decrease the frequency of a behavior Negative Punishment Taking something pleasurable away in order to decrease the frequency Types of Reinforcers behavior Types of Punishment of a behavior Is Punishing Kids Effective Yes but it has to be done right It is also important to reinforce desired