Exam 7: Section 4: Learning

John Watson's approach to the study of learning focused on reinforcement and punishment.

In rats, birds, and humans, it is easier to condition an association between a taste and stomach sickness than a visual stimulus and stomach sickness.

Positive reinforcement is usually considered desirable and negative reinforcement usually is considered undesirable.

Edward Thorndike developed the law of effect.

Being raised by humans increases the likelihood that animals will imitate humans but does not affect how well animals imitate humans.

All species are biological predisposed to learn some things more easily than others.

Habituation and sensitization are forms of learning that can be demonstrated in the simplest of organisms.

Biological predispositions may interfere with the ability to learn an operant response.

In operant conditioning, occasionally not delivering a reinforcer when the behavior occurs may actually strengthen that behavior.

Slot machines arrange reinforcers according to a variable interval schedule.

Brain-imaging studies have revealed that watching a model perform a complex behavior, such as ballroom dancing, is a more effective learning strategy than actually practicing the complex behavior.

Operant behaviors are controlled more so by stimuli preceding the behavior than classically conditioned behaviors.

If connections between the amygdala and midbrain are severed, the physiological changes associated with fear conditioning will not occur.

The Little Albert study showed that fear conditioning in humans is quite different from fear conditioning in animals.

Bipolar cells fire while we observe others; their activity mirrors what we are observing.

Extinction is the equivalent of erasing the effects of learning.

The three-term contingency is defined as a stimulus producing an expectation leading to a response.

Through a process called stimulus generalization, Little Albert learned to fear anything that was white and furry.

Rescorla and Wagner argued that when the CS predicts the US, the occurrence of the CS will lead the organism to expect that the US is forthcoming.

Thorndike used the change in the time it took to escape from the puzzle box across trials as an index of learning.