Can animals learn anything?Latent LearningSlide 3Slide 4Slide 5Slide 6Slide 7Slide 8Slide 9Slide 10Can animals learn anything?•It’s very difficult to bypass natural response sequences •There are biological constraints on what can be learned throughconditioning.–Preparedness: Behaviors related to species survival are learned more easily –Instinctive drift: The tendency for a conditioned response to drift back toward instinctive behavior .Latent LearningRats appear to form cognitive maps. They can learn a maze just by wandering, with no cheese to reunforce their learning.Evidence of these maps is revealed once the cheese is placed somewhere in the maze. After only a few trials, these rats quickly catch up in maze-solving to rats who were rewarded with cheese all alongLatent learning refers to skills or knowledge gained from experience, but not aparent behavior until reward is given..Taste Aversion: associating a bad consequence (illness) with food We quickly learn to not eat what makes us sick. Very adaptive.+The researchers found that only Taste could be conditioned to generate Even after sickness was pairedLearned helplessness: a disruption in motivation, affect, and learning following exposure to noncontigent (uncontrollable outcomes)We fail to be motivated due to no clear control over consequences. First discovered by Martin Seligman in his work with dogsSeligman’s Learned Helplessness study:3 Groups of dogsGroup 1: Placed in a harness from which it could not escape from Group 2: Placed in a harness from which it could not escape from, and administered electric shocks. Dog could stop the electric Group 3: Placed in a harness from which it could not escape from, and administered electric shocks. Dog could press the lever, but the electric shock stopped randomly. *After a while, the dog stoppedAfter experience in the harness, all dogs were placed in the box that administered electrick shocks The dogs could easily jump over a small partition to avoid getting an electric shock Group 1 and Group 2 dogs easily figured it out quicklyGroup 3 dogs?They laid down and whined as they continue to receive the shocksImplications of learned helplessness?People in aversive environments, e.g., victims of abuse, may do little to escape Nursing homes that remove all control from patients, i.e., their actions have no control over their consequences, are less healthy than nursing homes that give patients choicesA child who performs poorly on math tests may feel that nothing he does will have any effect on his math performance. Later, with any type of math-related task, he may experience a sense of helplessnessA very similar effect to learned helplessness: learned unreliability Remember the marshmallow task?Researchers recently published a new study that re-examined what might matter for successful delayed gratificationThey found that if children found their environment to be unreliable (things that were promised were not delivered), they were bad at the marshmallow taskWhat are the implications of these results for understanding how children from different backgrounds are
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