Week 1 Key words ideas behavior the way in which one acts or conducts oneself especially towards others learning the process by which changes in behavior arise as a result of experience interacting with the world nativist a person who believes that the bulk of our knowledge is inborn or native acquired during the past lifetimes of our eternal souls empiricist a person who believes that all ideas we have are the result of experience To Aristotle the mind of a newborn child is like a blank slate not yet written on behaviorism a purely experimental branch of natural science whose goal is the prediction and control of behavior in both animals and humans John Watson is the father of behaviorism mind body dualism the principle that the mind and the body exist as separate entities each with different characteristics governed by its own laws tabula rasa blank slate or tablet to be written on suggested by Locke Stimulus Response Theory behaviorism claimed that all behavior could be understood as a set of connections between stimuli and response It is believed that if you could specify all the existing factors you ought to be able to predict exactly whether and when a stimulus would provoke an animal to make a response evolutionary theory the study of how behavior evolves through natural selection The basic premise of evolutionary psychology is that learning has enormous value for survival allowing organisms to adapt a changing and variable world Plato c 427 347 ac most of our knowledge is inborn and acquired during past lifetimes of the soul nativist Aristotle 384 322 ac memory depends on the formation of associations for which there are three principles contiguity frequency and similarity empiricist Descartes 1596 1650 the mind and the body are distinct entities governed by different laws The body functions as a machine with innate and fixed responses to stimuli nativist Darwin 1809 1882 Natural selection species evolve when they possess a trait that is inheritable varies across individuals and increases the chances of survival and reproduction Watson 1878 1958 founder of behaviorism conducted research on how rats learn Skinner 1904 1990 most famous behaviorist of the twentieth century Developed an automated learning apparatus that was widely adopted by others who dubbed it the Skinner box He made many important contributions to our understanding of how animals learn the relationship between responses and consequences Greatest discoveries when trained with intermittent reinforcements rats learn to respond as quickly and as frequently as when they are rewarded on every trial in fact sometimes even better Key names Week 2 Key words ideas non associative learning a relatively permanent change in the strength of response to a single stimulus due to repeated exposure to that stimulus Changes due to such factors as sensory adaptation fatigue or injury do not qualify as non associative learning associative learning the process by which an association between two stimuli or a behavior and a stimulus is learned The two forms of associative learning are classical and operant conditioning elicited behavior occurs in response to specific environmental stimuli stimulus a sensory event from the outside world enters the system response the behavioral consequence of perception of the stimulus reflex arc a pathway from sensory stimulus to motor response fixed action pattern model action pattern sometimes used in ethology to denote an instinctive behavioral sequence that is relatively invariant within the species and almost inevitably runs to completion sign releasing stimulus releaser The essential feature of a stimulus which is necessary to elicit a response supernormal stimulus superstimulus is an exaggerated version of a stimulus to which there is an existing response tendency or any stimulus that elicits a response more strongly than the stimulus for which it evolved appetitive behavior Any behavior that increases the probability that an animal will be able to satisfy a need for example a hungry animal will move around to find food consummatory behavior any behaviour that leads directly to the satisfaction of an innate drive e g eating or drinking habituation the diminishing of a physiological or emotional response to a frequently repeated stimulus dishabituation the fast recovery of a response that has undergone habituation typically as a result of the presentation spontaneous recovery a phenomenon of learning and memory which was first seen in classical Pavlovian conditioning and refers to the re emergence of a previously extinguished conditioned response after a delay sensitization a non associative learning process in which repeated administrations of a stimulus results in the progressive amplification of a response Sensitization often is characterized by an enhancement of response to a whole class of stimuli in addition to the one that is repeated Dual Process Theory provides an account of how a phenomenon can occur in two different ways or as a result of two different processes Often the two processes consist of an implicit automatic unconscious process and an explicit controlled conscious process state system Opponent Process Theory emotional reactions to a stimulus are followed by opposite emotional reactions repeated exposure to the stimulus will cause less of an initial reaction and a stronger opposing reaction homeostasis the tendency toward a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements especially as maintained by physiological processes Week 3 Key CNS structures cerebral cortex frontal parietal temporal occipital primary motor cortex primary somatosensory cortex p 42 the tissue covering the top and sides of the brain in most vertebrates Largest structure of the human brain cerebellum slightly below the cerebral cortex contributes to the coordination of movement and is thus especially important for learning that involves physical action thalamus a structure that receives sensory information sights sounds touch and so forth from the peripheral nervous system and relays this information to other parts of the brain basal ganglia a group of structures important for planning and producing skilled movements such as throwing a football or juggling hippocampus including tri synaptic circuit inside the temporal lobes it is important for learning new information about facts or remembering autobiographical events amygdala important for adding emotional content to memories