Chapter 5 – Learning

What is Learning?
 In the everyday sense, learning often refers to formal methods of acquiring new knowledge or skills, such as learning in the classroom or learning to play the
flute.
 In this broad sense of the word, learning occurs in every setting, not just in classrooms. And learning takes place at every age. Further, the psychological study
of learning is not limited to humans.
 Psychologists have often studied learning by observing and recording the learning experiences of animals in carefully controlled laboratory situations. Using
animal subjects, researchers can precisely control the conditions under which a particular behavior is learned. The goal of much of this research has been to
identify the general principles of learning that apply across a wide range of species, including humans.
o Learning - A process that produces a relatively enduring change in behavior or knowledge as a result of past experience.

 Conditioning - The process of learning associations between environmental events and behavioral responses.
 There are three types of conditioning that we will focus on in this unit
 Classical Conditioning
o Pairing stimuli together
 Operant Conditioning
o Using punishment and reward

Classical Conditioning

 One of the major contributors to the study of learning was not a psychologist but a Russian physiologist who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work on
digestion.
o Ivan Pavlov - first person to describe the basic learning process of associating stimuli that is now called classical conditioning
 classical conditioning - The basic learning process that involves repeatedly pairing a neutral stimulus with a response-producing stimulus until the neutral
stimulus elicits the same response.
o Neutral Stimulus (NS) - stimulus which initially produces no specific response other than focusing attention.
o unconditioned stimulus (UCS) - The natural stimulus that reflexively elicits a response without the need for prior learning.
o unconditioned response (UCR) - The unlearned, reflexive response that is elicited by an unconditioned stimulus.
o conditioned stimulus (CS) - A formerly neutral stimulus that acquires the capacity to elicit a reflexive response.
o conditioned response (CR) - The learned, reflexive response to a conditioned stimulus.
 Factors the Affect Conditioning
o that the more frequently the conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus were paired, the stronger was the association between the two.
o that the timing of stimulus presentations affected the strength of the conditioned response. He found that conditioning was most effective when the
conditioned stimulus was presented immediately before the unconditioned stimulus. (a half second was perfect)
o Stimulus generalization – The occurrence of a learned response not only to the original stimulus but to other, similar stimuli as well.
 Example: I was bit by a large dog. Now I am scared of all dogs.
o Stimulus discrimination - The occurrence of a learned response to a specific stimulus but not to other, similar stimuli.
 Example: I was bit by a spider. I am scared of spiders, not all bugs.
 Higher Order Conditioning
o A procedure in which a conditioned stimulus from one learning trial functions as the unconditioned stimulus in a new conditioning trial; the second
conditioned stimulus comes to elicit the conditioned response, even though it has never been directly paired with the unconditioned stimulus.
 Extinction and Spontaneous Recovery
o Acquisition - refers to the first stages of learning when a response is established. In classical conditioning, it refers to the period of time when the
stimulus comes to evoke the conditioned response.
o Extinction - The gradual weakening and apparent disappearance of conditioned behavior. In classical conditioning, extinction occurs when the
conditioned stimulus is repeatedly presented without the unconditioned stimulus.
o Spontaneous Recovery - The reappearance of a previously extinguished conditioned response after a period of time without exposure to the
conditioned stimulus.
 From Pavlov to Watson
o At about the same time Pavlov was conducting his systematic studies of classical conditioning in the early 1900s, a young psychologist named John
B. Watson was attracting attention in the United States.
 Watson, like Pavlov, believed that psychology was following the wrong path by focusing on the study of subjective mental processes
o In 1913, Watson directly challenged the early founders of psychology in his landmark article titled “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It.” Watson’s
famous article opened with these sentences:
 Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction
and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the
readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness.

 Behaviorism
 o Behaviorism - School of psychology and theoretical viewpoint that emphasize the scientific study of observable behaviors, especially as they pertain
to the process of learning.
o Watson believed that virtually all human behavior is a result of conditioning and learning—that is, due to past experience and environmental
influences. In championing behaviorism, Watson took these views to an extreme, claiming that neither talent, personality, nor intelligence was
inherited.
o Watson:
 I should like to go one step further now and say, “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them
up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select— doctor, lawyer, artist,
merchant-chief and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his
ancestors.” I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many
thousands of years.
o Conditioned Emotional Reactions
 In his studies with infants, Watson identified three emotions that he believed to represent inborn and natural unconditioned reflexes – fear,
rage, and love.
 They could be brought upon by specific stimuli Example: Fear = sudden dropping motion, loud noise
o Conducted the Little Albert Experiment (considered unethical in today’s standards)
 Watson and Advertising
o Shortly after the Little Albert experiment, Watson’s wife discovered that he was having an affair with his graduate student Rosalie Rayner. Following
a scandalous and highly publicized divorce, Watson was fired from his academic position. Despite his international fame as a scientist, no other
university would hire him. Banned from academia, Watson married Rayner and joined the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency.
o A pioneer in the advertising business his job was to make the consumer react with emotional responses like fear, rage, or love.
 Applied this to Johnson and Johnson Baby Powder and Pebeco toothpaste in 1920
 Baby powder – create doubts in the mother of caring for the baby
 Toothpaste – targeted young women who smoked and could end up with smoke stained teeth
o Modern advertising has taken this to an extreme
 Contemporary Views of Classical Conditioning – Cognitive Aspect
o According to the cognitive perspective, mental processes as well as external events are important components in the learning of new behaviors.
o Is it possible that Pavlov’s dogs were learning more than the mere association of two stimuli that occurred very close together in time? To answer
that question, let’s begin with an analogy
 Suppose that on your way to school you have to go through a railroad crossing. Every time a train approaches the crossing, warning
lights flash. Being rather intelligent for your species, after a few weeks you conclude that the flashing lights will be quickly followed by a
freight train barreling down the railroad tracks. You’ve learned an association between the flashing lights and an oncoming train, because
the lights are a reliable signal that predict the presence of the train.
 Now imagine that a friend of yours also has to cross train tracks but at a different location. The railroad has had nothing but problems with
the warning lights at that crossing. Sometimes the warning lights flash before a train roars through, but sometimes they don’t. And
sometimes they flash when no train is coming. Does your friend learn an association between the flashing lights and oncoming trains?
No, because here the flashing lights are an unreliable signal—they seem to have no relationship to a train’s arrival.
o Robert A. Rescorla – a psychologist that classically conditioned rats also assess the reliability of signals.
o In Rescorla’s 1968 experiment, one group of rats heard a tone (CS) that was paired 20 times with a brief electric shock (UCS). A second group of
rats experienced the same number of tone–shock pairings, but this group also experienced an additional 20 shocks with no tone. Then Rescorla
tested for the conditioned fear response by presenting the tone alone to each group of rats. According to the traditional CC model, both groups of
rats should have displayed the same levels of conditioned fear. After all, each group had received 20 tone–shock pairings. However, this is not what
Rescorla found. The rats in the first group displayed a much stronger fear response to the tone than did the rats in the second group.
o For learning to occur, the conditioned stimulus must be a reliable signal that predicts the presentations of the unconditioned stimulus.
o Rescorla says “is not a stupid process by which the organism willy-nilly forms associations between any two stimuli that happen to co-occur.” Rather,
his research suggests that “the animal behaves like a scientist, detecting causal relations among events and using a range of information about
those events to make the relevant inferences”
 Contemporary Views of Classical Conditioning – Evolutionary Aspects
o taste aversion - A classically conditioned dislike for and avoidance of a particular food that develops when an organism becomes ill after eating the
food. Also called One Trial learning (OTL)
 Could be a one time deal, defying regular rules of classical conditioning
 Taco Bell – Food Poisoning – Stay away for years
o John Garcia – Psychologist who found that taste aversions could be produced in lab rats under controlled circumstances.
 he found that the particular conditioned stimulus that is used DOES make a difference in classical conditioning
o biological preparedness - In learning theory, the idea that an organism is innately predisposed to form associations between certain stimuli and
responses.
 When this concept is applied to taste aversions, rats (and people) seem to be biologically prepared to associate an illness with a taste
rather than with a location, a person, or an object.
o Martin Seligman (1971) – A psychologist noticed that phobias seem to be quite selective. Extreme, irrational fears of snakes, spiders, heights, and
small enclosed places are relatively common. But very few people have phobias of stairs, ladders, electrical outlets or appliances, or sharp objects,
even though these things are far more likely to be associated with accidents or traumatic experiences.
 Seligman proposed that humans are biologically prepared to develop fears of objects or situations—such as snakes, spiders, and heights
—that may once have posed a threat to humans’ evolutionary ancestors.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Operant Conditioning

 Classical conditioning can help explain the acquisition of many learned behaviors, including emotional and physiological responses. However, recall that
classical conditioning involves reflexive behaviors that are automatically elicited by a specific stimulus.
 Most everyday behaviors don’t fall into this category. Instead, they involve nonreflexive, or voluntary, actions that can’t be explained with classical conditioning.
o operant conditioning - The basic learning process that involves changing the probability that a response will be repeated by manipulating the
consequences of that response.
 Thorndike and the law of Effect
o Edward Thorndike – American Psychologist who was the first to experimentally study animal behavior and document how active behaviors are
influenced by their consequences; postulated the law of effect.
 law of effect - Learning principle, proposed by Thorndike, that responses followed by a satisfying effect become strengthened and are
more likely to recur in a particular situation, while responses followed by a dissatisfying effect are weakened and less likely to recur in a
particular situation.
 Found this out via the Puzzle Box Exp.
 Cat in a box with different strings
 Cat uses trial and error to pull levers
 1 of the levers lets the cat escape
 Cats get better at escaping
 Driven by food reward outside of box
 B.F. Skinner and the Search for “Order in Behavior”
o B.F. Skinner – American psychologist who developed the operant conditioning model of learning; emphasized studying the relationship between
environment factors and observable actions, not mental processes, in trying to achieve a scientific explanation of behavior
 Operant - Skinner’s term for an actively emitted (or voluntary) behavior that operates on the environment to produce consequences.
 Studying = better grades on test (studying is the operant)
o In everyday language, Skinner’s principles of operant conditioning explain how we acquire the wide range of voluntary behaviors that we perform in
daily life. But as a behaviorist who rejected mentalistic explanations, Skinner avoided the term voluntary because it would imply that behavior was
due to a conscious choice or intention.
o Skinner defined operant conditioning concepts in very objective terms and he avoided explanations based on subjective mental states
 Reinforcement
o Reinforcement - The occurrence of a stimulus or event following a response that increases the likelihood of that response being repeated.
o Types of reinforcement stimuli (reinforcers):
 primary reinforcer - A stimulus or event that is naturally or inherently reinforcing for a given species, such as food, water, or other
biological necessities.
 Primary = Food, Sleep, Sex, Water, Air
 conditioned reinforcer - A stimulus or event that has acquired reinforcing value by being associated with a primary reinforcer; also called a
secondary reinforcer.
 Conditioned/Secondary = Money, Awards, Praise, Grades, Success, Power
o Positive Reinforcement - A situation in which a response is followed by the addition of a reinforcing stimulus, increasing the likelihood that the
response will be repeated in similar situations.
 Your backhand return of the tennis ball (the operant) is low and fast, and your tennis coach yells “Excellent!” (the reinforcing stimulus).
 You watch a student production of Hamlet and write a short paper about it (the operant) for 10 bonus points (the reinforcing stimulus) in
your literature class.
 You reach your sales quota at work (the operant) and you get a bonus check (the reinforcing stimulus).
o Negative reinforcement - A situation in which a response results in the removal of, avoidance of, or escape from a punishing stimulus, increasing the
likelihood that the response will be repeated in similar situations.
 Taking 2 aspirin (the operant)to remove a headache (the aversive stimuli). 30 minutes later, the headache is gone.
 You make backup copies of important computer files (the operant) to avoid losing the data if the computer’s hard drive should fail (the
aversive stimulus).
 This is known as avoidance behavior
 You dab some hydrocortisone cream on an insect bite (the operant) to escape the itching (the aversive stimulus).
 This is known as escape behavior
 You get a flu shot (the operant) in November to avoid catching the flu (the aversive stimulus).
 Enhancing the Effectiveness of Positive Reinforcement
o Make sure that the reinforcer is strongly reinforcing to the individual whose behavior you’re trying to modify.
o The positive reinforcer should be delivered immediately after the preferred behavior occurs.
o The positive reinforcer should initially be given every time the preferred behavior occurs. When the desired behavior is well established, gradually
reduce the frequency of reinforcement.
o Use a variety of positive reinforcers, such as tangible items, praise, special privileges, recognition, and so on. Minimize the use of food as a positive
reinforcer.
o Capitalize on what is known as the Premack principle— a more preferred activity (e.g., painting) can be used to reinforce a less preferred activity
(e.g., picking up toys).
o Encourage the individual to engage in self-reinforcement in the form of pride
 Punishment
o Punishment - The presentation of a stimulus or event following a behavior that acts to decrease the likelihood of the behavior’s being repeated.
o punishment by application - A situation in which an operant is followed by the presentation or addition of an aversive stimulus; also called positive
punishment.
 An employee wears jeans to work (the operant) and is reprimanded by his supervisor for dressing inappropriately (the punishing
stimulus).
 Your dog jumps on a visitor(the operant), and you smack him with a rolled up newspaper (the punishment stimulus)
 You make a comment (the operant) in your workgroup meetings, and a co-worker responds with a sarcastic remark (the punishing
stimulus).
o punishment by removal - A situation in which an operant is followed by the removal or subtraction of a reinforcing stimulus; also called negative
punishment.
 After she buys stock (the operant) in a “hot” new start-up company, the company fails and the investor loses all of her money (loss of
reinforcing stimulus).
 Because she was flirting with another man (the operant), a girl gets dumped by her boyfriend (loss of reinforcing stimulus).
o Even when punishment works, its use has several drawbacks.
 Punishment may decrease a specific response, but it doesn’t necessarily teach or promote a more appropriate response to take its place.
 punishment that is intense may produce undesirable results, such as complete passivity, fear, anxiety, or hostility
 the effects of punishment are likely to be temporary
 Alternatives to Punishment
o Strategy 1: Reinforce an alternative behavior that is constructive and incompatible
 if you’re trying to decrease a child’s whining, respond to her requests (the reinforcer) only when she talks in a normal tone of voice.
o Strategy 2: Stop Reinforcing the Problem Behavior
 Eliminating the reinforcer (extinction) … acting uninterested to stop gossip at work
o Strategy 3: Reinforce the Non-occurrence of the Problem Behavior
 if you’re trying to reduce bickering between your children, set an appropriate time limit, and then provide positive reinforcement if they
have not squabbled during that interval.
o Strategy 4: Remove the Opportunity to Obtain Positive Reinforcement
 a child’s obnoxious behavior might be reinforced by the social attention of siblings or classmates. In a procedure called time-out from
positive reinforcement, the child is removed from the reinforcing situation for a short time, so that the access to reinforcers is eliminated.
 Discriminative Stimuli
o discriminative stimulus - A specific stimulus in the presence of which a particular operant is more likely to be reinforced, and in the absence of which
a particular response is not reinforced.
 In other words, it is the environmental stimulus which precedes an operant response

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 Shaping and Maintaining behavior

o Skinner created the operant chamber/Skinner box
o Operant Chamber/ Skinner Box - The experimental apparatus invented by B. F. Skinner to study the relationship between environmental events and
active behaviors.
 A small cage with a food dispenser
 Attached is a device that records the # of operants made by the experimental animal (lever for rats – dish for pigeons)
 Food pellets are used for positive reinforcement
 Light in the cage functions as discriminative stimulus
 When its on, they can get food
o When a rat is first placed in a Skinner box, it typically explores its new environment, occasionally nudging or pressing the bar in the process. The
researcher can accelerate the rat’s bar-pressing behavior through a process called shaping.
 The operant conditioning procedure of selectively reinforcing successively closer approximations of a goal behavior until the goal behavior
is displayed.

 The partial Reinforcement Effect

o partial reinforcement effect - The phenomenon in which behaviors that are conditioned using partial reinforcement are more resistant to extinction
than behaviors that are conditioned using continuous reinforcement.
o continuous reinforcement - A schedule of reinforcement in which every occurrence of a particular response is reinforced. (weak)
o partial reinforcement - A situation in which the occurrence of a particular response is only sometimes followed by a reinforcer.
o extinction (in operant conditioning) - The gradual weakening and disappearance of conditioned behavior. In operant conditioning, extinction occurs
when an emitted behavior is no longer followed by a reinforcer.
 Schedules of Reinforcement
o schedule of reinforcement - The delivery of a reinforcer according to a preset pattern based on the number of responses or the time interval between
responses.
o Fixed-ratio (FR) schedule - A reinforcement schedule in which a reinforcer is delivered after a fixed number of responses has occurred.
 Paid $1 for every envelope you stuff
 o Variable-ratio (VR) schedule - A reinforcement schedule in which a reinforcer is delivered after an average number of responses, which varies
unpredictably from trial to trial.
 Gambling
o Fixed-interval (FI) schedule - A reinforcement schedule in which a reinforcer is delivered for the first response that occurs after a preset time interval
has elapsed.
 Paid biweekly or monthly (salary)
o Variable-interval (VI) schedule - A reinforcement schedule in which a reinforcer is delivered for the first response that occurs after an average time
interval, which varies unpredictably from trial to trial.
 Checking for new followers on instagram
 Behavior Modification
o Behavior Modification - The application of learning principles to help people develop more effective or adaptive behaviors.
 Stop smoking – To stop smoking I buy cinnamon candies that I eat every time I crave a cigarette. In turn, it allows me to save money
(candies are cheaper) while still fixing the oral stimulation needed at the time of the cravings.
 Piles on the floor--Before I go to class, I make a pile of the materials I will need in front of my door. The pile has to be in a location that I
will have to step over it before I walk out. Again, the pile serves as a discriminative stimulus for the behavior of picking up the pile. In fact,
I often have to admonish visitors not to pick up the pile!
 Put it on my chair--Over the years, I have conditioned my colleagues NOT to put items on my desk; they will be lost forever. Instead, I
reward them for putting those items on my chair. If they do, I am guaranteed to see them because I will not sit down without picking them
up and looking at them.
 Brat prevention--Children are good operant conditioners because they are so persistent. Take the following situation, for example. A child
is riding with an adult, and the child is thirsty. So, the child asks to stop and get a drink. The adult says no, the child asks again, and
again, and again... Finally, the adult gives in, saying, "All right, just this once." Big mistake, right? Why? The adult has now put the child
on a partial schedule, guaranteeing a repetition of the same behavior later on. Instead, the adult should have said, "All right, I'll get you a
drink IF you don't ask for one for the next 10 (time may have to vary, depending on the child) minutes." Then, the adult is providing the
child with positive reinforcement for being quiet.
 Breaking relationships--College students often want to end a relationship. Again, they should realize that the person being dumped should
not be placed on a partial schedule. If, for example, that person persists in calling, then the dumper should not reinforce the calling by
conversing. Further, if the dumper agrees to go out on occasion, real problems will occur. Many relationships show an off-and-on pattern
because of such partial reinforcement. (Of course, if the dumper is not really sure that the relationship is over, another set of problems
exists.)
 Contemporary Views of Operant Conditioning
o Edward Tolman – American psychologist who used the terms cognitive map and latent learning to describe experimental findings that strongly
suggested that cognitive factors play a role in animal learning.
o cognitive map - Tolman’s term for the mental representation of the layout of a familiar environment.
 Used rats and a maze to experiment with; rats eventually built a mental representation of the maze
 Example: Think of the route that you take to school
o latent learning - Tolman’s term for learning that occurs in the absence of reinforcement but is not behaviorally demonstrated until a reinforcer
becomes available.
 A reward or reinforcement is not necessary for learning to take place
 Tolman’s rats learned the maze just by exploring it for 10 days; without reinforcement
 Learned Helplessness
o Martin Seligman – American psychologist who is best known for his theory of learned helplessness and for founding the modern positive psychology
movement
o Learned Helplessness - A phenomenon in which exposure to inescapable and uncontrollable aversive events produces passive behavior.
 Discovered accidently with an experiment where dogs were shocked
 Dogs were put in a harness, and given a harmless shock after a tone
 Dogs were then put in a shuttle box where the dog could escape the shock if it jumped over a barrier
 Dogs did not escape, just laid down and whined while getting shocked
 Dogs had earned that shocks were inescapable
 Example:
 Students who have experienced failure in previous academic settings may feel that academic tasks and setbacks are beyond
their control. Thus, when faced with the demands of exams, papers, and studying, rather than rising to the challenge, they may
experience feelings of learned helplessness.
 If a student believes that academic tasks are unpleasant, unavoidable, and beyond her control, even the slightest setback can
trigger a sense of helpless passivity. Such students may be prone to engage in self-defeating responses, such as
procrastinating or giving up prematurely.
 For students who experience academic learned helplessness, establishing a sense of control over their schoolwork is the first step.
Seeking knowledge about course requirements and assignments and setting goals, however modest, that can be successfully met can
help students begin to acquire a sense of mastery over environmental challenges.
 Instinctive Drift
o Instinctive Drift - The tendency of an animal to revert to instinctive behaviors that can interfere with the performance of an operantly conditioned
response.
 Students of Skinner at the University of Minnesota, Keller and Marian Breland taught thousands of animals to perform complex tricks
 Trained a chicken to play baseball – pull a string hit the ball with a bat – instead of run to first base – it ran and chased the ball
 o Just like it would chase a bug
 Trained a raccoon to pick up two coins and put it in the box – easily learned to pick up the coins – he’d rub the coins together,
dip them into the box, and pull them out again
o Just like it would clean its food and dip it in a stream before eating

Observational Learning

 Albert Bandura – American psychologist who experimentally investigated observational learning, emphasizing the role of cognitive factors.
 Observational Learning - Learning that occurs through observing the actions of others.
o 2-3 day old infants have been studied and found that they will imitate a variety of actions such as opening their mouth, sticking out their tongues, and
making other facial expressions (some can do this within an hour of being born)
 Bobo Doll Experiment - the collective name of experiments conducted by Albert Bandura in 1961 and 1963 when he studied children's behavior after watching
an adult model act aggressively towards a Bobo doll. There are different variations of the experiment. The most notable experiment measured the children's
behavior after seeing the model get rewarded, get punished, or experience no consequence for beating up the bobo doll.
 Mirror Neurons - A type of neuron that activates both when an action is performed and when the same action is perceived.
o Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Such neurons have been directly observed in primate
species. Birds have been shown to have imitative resonance behaviors and neurological evidence suggests the presence of some form of mirroring
system. In humans, brain activity consistent with that of mirror neurons has been found in the premotor cortex, the supplementary motor area, the
primary somatosensory cortex and the inferior parietal cortex.