Week 3 notes:

Table of Contents
COGNITIVE PROCESSES IN LEARNING ................................................................................. 6
Learned helplessness.......................................................................................................... 6
Latent learning and cognitive maps ................................................................................... 6
Insight and learning ........................................................................................................... 7
Observational learning: learning by imitation .................................................................... 8
Bandura’s experiment ........................................................................................................ 9
vicarious experience........................................................................................................... 9
Behaviourism backfires ...................................................................................................... 9
Conditioned taste aversion ................................................................................................ 9
Not all CS’s are equal ....................................................................................................... 10
Instinctive drift ................................................................................................................ 10
Autoshaping .................................................................................................................... 11
Further challenges: Innate biases ..................................................................................... 11

Rescorla:

What is learned in Classical Conditioning? What association is

learned?
• Stimulus (tone) ---- Response (salivation) (S - R)
• Stimulus (tone) ---- Stimulus (food) (S - S)
Rescorla (1973)
Stage 1: Conditioning CS + US UR light + loud noise freezing
After conditioning CS CR light freezing

Stage 2 Half the rats have the conditioning to the noise habituated (Repeated exposure to a
stimulus leads to decline in response) Half the rats are not habituated to the noise

Stage 3: CS (light) is presented Q. What has the rat learned? (habituated group)
When light (CS) was presented to the habituated group:
• Had no response! • Supports SS theory:
• What is learned in classical conditioning is an association between a CS and the mental
representation of the US
Cognitive view of Classical Conditioning
Rescorla (1988) • Role of expectation in conditioning
• CS as a predictor of the US
• Emphasises role of ‘contingency’ (Pavlov: contiguity) • a stimulus must provide the subject
information about the likelihood that certain events will occur

Rescorla: the importance of contingency

Timing of the CS and UCS Forward conditioning: CS --- US Simultaneous conditioning:
CS/US Backward conditioning: US --- CS If CS comes simultaneously or after the US, it
does not predict the US -no contingency
CS needs to reliably predict US - CS ineffective if presented often without US

Blocking effect: contingency + surprise

Conditioning is difficult to achieve when the organism already has a good predictor of the US
Blocking effect (Kamin, 1969)

Test: Group A will have a CR to the noise, but not the light Group B will have a CR to the
light, but not the noise

Overshadowing:
Reynold
Two pigeons trained with two compound cues:
one (+) predicted food when pecked; the other (-)
yielded nothing
• Tested with individual elements of the compound cues
• Birds pecked at single elements
• Implication: when two predictors are redundant, one is
disregarded
• Same conditions-different responses • information
processing must be considered
COGNITIVE PROCESSES IN LEARNING
Cognitive processes - how people represent, store and use information - may play an
important role in learning.

Learned helplessness
Learned helplessness appears to result when people believe that their behaviour has no
effect on the world.

Donald Hiroto (1974) (sound experiement) conducted an experiment to test the hypothesis
that people would develop learned helplessness after either experiencing lack of control or
simply being told that their control was limited.
- results supported Hiroto’s hypothesis that people, like other animals, tend to make
less effort to control their environment when prior experience leads them to expect
that their efforts will be in vain.

Latent learning and cognitive maps

Cognitive map a mental representation of the environment

They also form cognitive maps of their environments, even in the absence of any
reinforcement for doing so.

Latent learning, learning that is not obvious at the time it occurs.

The study of cognitive processes in learning goes back at least to the 1920s and Edward
Tolman’s research on maze learning in rats

In one study, for example, Tolman allowed rats to explore a maze once a day for several
consecutive days (Tolman & Honzik, 1930).
For rats in Group A, food was placed in the goal box on each trial. As shown in Figure 5.13,
these rats gradually improved their performance so that by the end of the experiment, they
made only one or two mistakes as they ran through the maze.

For rats in Group B, there was never any food in their goal box. These animals continued to
make many errors throughout the experiment. Neither of these results is surprising, and
each is consistent with a behavioural view of learning as driven strictly by associating
behaviour with reward.
Tolman argued that these results supported two conclusions.

First, the reinforcement on day 11 could not have significantly affected the rats’ learning of
the maze; it simply changed their performance. They must have learned the maze earlier as
they wandered around making mistakes on their way to the end of the maze. These rats
demonstrated latent learning— learning that is not evident when it first occurs.

Second, the rats’ improved performance immediately after the first reinforcement trial
could have occurred only if the rats had already developed a cognitive map; that is, a mental
representation of how the maze was arranged.

Tolman concluded that cognitive maps develop naturally, and without the need for
reinforcement, as people and animals gain experience with the world.

Research on learning in the natural environment has supported this view. For example, we
develop mental maps of shopping malls and city streets, even when we receive no direct
reward for doing so (Tversky & Kahneman, 1991). Having such a map allows you to tell that
visitor to your neighbourhood exactly how to get to the corner shop from where you are
standing.

Insight and learning

insight a sudden understanding about what is required to solve a problem

Experiments on insight also support the idea that cognitive processes and learned strategies
play an important role in learning, perhaps even by animals
Wolfgang Kohler – observed chimps by observing their problem-solving skills used to reach
food.
Three aspects of Kohler’s observations convinced him that animals’ problem solving does
not have to depend solely on trial and error and the gradual association of responses with
consequences.
First, once a chimpanzee solved a particular problem, it would immediately do the same
thing in a similar situation. In other words, it acted as if it understood the problem.
Second, the chimpanzees rarely tried a solution that didn’t work. Apparently, the solution
was not discovered randomly but ‘thought out’ ahead of time and then successfully
executed.
Third, the animals often reached a solution suddenly.

Some cases of ‘insight’ in his chimps might actually have been the result of a process known
as learning to learn,in which previous experiences in problem solving are applied to new
ones in a way that makes their solution seem to be instantaneous

Observational learning: learning by imitation

The biological basis for observational learning may lie partly in the operation of mirror
neurons in the brain (Fogassi et al., 2005)

The process of learning by watching others is called observational learning or social

learning. Some observational learning occurs through vicarious experience, in which an
individual is influenced by seeing or hearing about the consequences of others’ behaviour.
Observational learning is more likely to occur when the person observed is rewarded for the
observed behaviour. Observational learning is a powerful source of socialisation.
Bandura’s experiment
Albert Bandura showed nursery school children a film featuring an adult and a large,
inflatable, bottom-heavy ‘Bobo’ doll
Bandura found that children who saw the adult rewarded for aggression showed the most
aggressive acts in play (see Figure 5.14).
Their observational learning had come about through a secondhand or vicarious experience
in which a person is influenced by seeing or hearing about the consequences of other
people’s behaviour, especially people whom they perceive as being similar to themselves in
some way (Mobbs et ah, 2009).
The children who had seen the adult punished for aggressive acts showed less aggression,
but they still learned something.
When later offered rewards for all the aggressive acts they could perform, these children
displayed just as many as the children who had watched the rewarded adult.
Observational learning can occur even when there are no vicarious consequences; many
children in the neutral condition also imitated the model’s aggression.

vicarious experience
conditions that allow us to learn by watching what happens to others

Behaviourism backfires
• Lepper et al. (1973) “Magic marker experiment”
• Children allowed to play with magic markers
• Some rewarded for playing, some not
• Later, magic marker play recorded without the reward
• Those who had been rewarded played…?
• Interpretation: extrinsic reward undermines intrinsic motivation less when the reward was
removed

The importance of biology in learning

There are many learning behaviours that require a biological explanation, not simple S-R
learning
• Conditioned taste aversion
• Instinctive drift
• “Preparedness”

Conditioned taste aversion

Conditioned taste aversion – an avoidance reaction to the taste of food Conditioned taste
aversion
CS = taste (e.g., saccharin)
US = drug (LiCl), radiation
CR = nausea (animals will choose other flavours in a choice test)
Special features of conditioned taste aversions (CTA) -one trial learning -long-delay learning
-highly-specific!
CS equipotentiality challenged: Garcia & Koelling, 1966

Not all CS’s are equal

Garcia & Koelling, 1966
• Challenges “equipotentiality” assumption

CS-US “belongingness” : supports an ecological perspective

Instinctive drift
Instinctive Drift: Brelland & Brelland (1961)
• During operant learning the tendency for an organism to revert to instinctive behaviour •
Taught raccoons to do tricks like dropping coins into a piggy bank.
• After conditioning, the raccoons would start to rub the coins together and dip them into
the piggy bank but not drop them.

Autoshaping
• After classical conditioning where a light predicts a reward, pigeons will attempt to
consume the CS
– This tendency is used to promote operant pecking
• During autoshaping, food comes irrespective of the behavior of the animal.
They will continue to do so even when the result is to removal of the reward

Further challenges: Innate biases

Are we biologically predisposed to fear some stimuli more than others?
• Preparedness and phobias
• Mineka & Cook (1993): through observation, rhesus monkeys could acquire fear of
snakes, but not flowers