Exam 5: Section 3: Learning

Because he was flirting with another woman, a guy gets dumped by his girlfriend. The guy no longer flirts with other women in front of his girlfriends. This is an example of negative reinforcement.

It was Robert Rescorla who made the famous statement, "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."

While positive reinforcement increases or strengthens a response, negative reinforcement decreases or weakens a response.

It is frequently effective to over-reinforce a problem behavior until the reinforcer loses its reinforcing value and the behavior decreases.

In John Watson and Rosalie Rayner's Little Albert study the unconditioned stimulus was a loud clang, and the conditioned stimulus was a tame white rat.

Researchers in an experiment concerned with mirror neurons discovered that the neuronal activity in the brain of a monkey who simply watched another monkey pick up and eat a peanut was the same as the brain activity of the monkey actually performing these actions.

Julie always pays her electric bill on time each month to avoid incurring a late charge. Using operant conditioning terms, Julie's behavior is being maintained by positive reinforcement.

Albert Bandura proposed that instinctive drift occurs because of principles related to observational learning.

Contrary to what Pavlov believed, John Garcia's research on taste aversions showed that animals are able to form associations between some stimuli much more easily than other stimuli.

Conditioned reinforcers acquire their reinforcing value by being associated with primary reinforcers.

Tolman's research confirmed the traditional behaviorist view that rats learn nothing more than a sequence of left/right responses in learning to run a maze.

According to psychologist Robert Rescorla, classical conditioning involves cognitive processes in which the organism learns that the conditioned stimulus reliably predicts the unconditioned stimulus.

Classical conditioning is essentially the process of learning an association between two stimuli.

Your dog tends to salivate and get excited when you shake a box of dog biscuits. However, your dog does not drool when you shake a bag of cat food. This is an example of stimulus generalization.

Edward C. Tolman is credited with discovering the phenomenon called learned helplessness, which led him to claim that all learning involves cognitive expectations of success or failure.

Both Albert Bandura and Edward Tolman demonstrated that reinforcement was not necessary for learning to take place.

John has a part-time job with a local department store that pays him $10 for each bicycle that he assembles. In operant conditioning terms, this is an example of a fixed-ratio schedule of reinforcement.

If a classically conditioned dog salivates not just to the original tone, but also to a higher pitched and a lower pitched tone, the process of stimulus discrimination has occurred.

Psychologist Martin Seligman proposed that humans are biologically predisposed to learn to fear certain objects or situations that may have once posed a threat to humans' evolutionary ancestors.

Psychologists formally define learning as a process that produces a relatively enduring change in behavior as a result of experience.