Exam 5: Section 3: Learning

The startle reflex will occur in response to a sudden or unexpected noise. Using Pavlov's terms, the sudden noise would be termed the conditioned stimulus, and the startle reflex would be termed the conditioned response.

After a dog has gone through the process of extinction and no longer salivates to the sound of a bell, the conditioned response will spontaneously reappear if the dog is given a period of rest and the sound of the bell is again presented.

John Garcia's research demonstrated that taste aversions could be conditioned, but only after a minimum of five pairings of the CS (taste) and UCS (illness).

To avoid being stung by mosquitoes, you spray yourself with insect repellant before you start hiking through the woods. This would be an example of negative reinforcement.

A conditioned stimulus from one learning trial is used in place of an unconditioned stimulus in a new conditioning trial, where it is paired with a second conditioned stimulus. The second conditioned stimulus then comes to elicit the conditioned response, even though it has never been directly paired with the unconditioned stimulus. This is a description of a procedure called higher order conditioning.

Pavlov was the first psychologist to receive the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking research on classical conditioning.

Elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1996, Martin Seligman launched a new movement called positive psychology, which would emphasize research on human strengths, rather than human problems.

Albert Bandura's principles of observational learning have been applied in television dramas that have been designed to foster healthy behaviors in societies in many different countries.

To use the strategy of self-reinforcement, you should give yourself some type of reward before performing the task that you need to accomplish.

While at the airport, 7-year-old Ethan discovers a quarter in the coin return of a pay telephone. Ever since, Ethan checks the coin return of any pay telephone he sees. Using operant conditioning terms, the sight of a pay telephone is a discriminative stimulus.

In training various animals to perform tricks, Marian and Keller Breland discovered that certain natural behavior patterns interfered with the operant behaviors they were attempting to condition in some animals, a phenomenon called instinctive drift.

Pavlov classically conditioned a dog to salivate at the sound of a tone. He then repeatedly paired the tone with another stimulus, a bell. Later, when he rang the bell the dog salivated, even though the bell had never been paired with food. This example illustrates higher order conditioning (second-order conditioning).

When students repeatedly experience failure in academic settings and feel that they are unable to exert control over their schoolwork, they may develop learned helplessness.

The In Focus box discussing biological preparedness notes that researchers Arne Öhman and Susan Mineka have accumulated experimental evidence supporting the evolutionary explanation for the most common phobias, especially fear of snakes.

Whether an aversive stimulus is delivered or a reinforcing stimulus is removed, punishment means that the likelihood of a behavior decreases.

The vast majority of studies on media violence and aggressive behavior are correlational.

Martin Seligman and Steven Maier found that learned helplessness could be overcome in dogs by forcibly dragging them over the shuttlebox barrier to escape the electric shocks.

A Skinner box, or operant chamber, is a complex maze that a rat must successfully negotiate to get to a food reward in the goal box at the end.

B. F. Skinner strongly advocated the use of punishment to modify behavior.

When a dog has been classically conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell, the sound of the bell has gone from being a neutral stimulus to a conditioned stimulus.