2007-11-01 - Learning theories - Ch. 6
Read chapter six over the weekend. The last unit for us lasts until Christmas. It's a giant unit where we train mice. Watching the Zimbardo video today.
For every animal, the name of the game is survival. The rules are simple: find food and drink. Find shelter. And avoid predators and hostile environments. Those who are best equipped survive, and manage to mate, will pass on their genes to the next generation, this is the true meaning of the survival of the fit. Fortunately, nature lends a helping hand, it provides animals with a set of built-in, inherited skills that function at birth or shortly after, called reflexes like sucking, or some other reflexes are learned like quick and swift reactions to stimuli that pose a potential threat.
And nature also provides complex patterns of actions, called fixed-action patterns. These are sequences of actions that are triggered by particular environmental/biological factors and performed in the same way by each members of the species, such as birds that migrate at the same time each year, to the same place. When we look at animals that are "MORE EVOLVED", their behavior is a series of variations of the "same old play". The behavior of these animals is more adaptive to changing circumstances, which influences their capacity for learning.
Learning is how to profit from experience. It is the mechanism on how past experience guides future behavior. This is true of humans and other animals. From playing sports, to playing the flute, in the process of learning, an individual's behavior is modified, new habits and ideas are acquired and put into practice. The new behavior can change the environment itself, making it more conducive to the individual's well-being. Learning allows us to do two important things in the quest for survival: anticipating the future from the past experiences, and to control a complex and ever-changing environment.
Traditioanlly, learning has been done in laboratories, where it is easier to conduct controlled experiments with animals. Animals are like humans in important ways. As a result, behavioral psychologists have come up with new views, and these processes ... take it for granted ... we are all born to learn. Ironically the most important figure in the study of learning, Ivan Pavlov, was not interested in it at first, he was a noted Russian physiologist, won the 1904 he was originally interested in digestion and the salivary glands, he had dogs hooked up to feeders and he would test how much salivation took place, and the salivary reflex. Over repeated testings, a strange thing happened, the dog salivated before contact with the food. Just the sight of the food was enough to stimulate their drooling, then just seeing their food dish, or hearing the foot-steps of the doctors or assistants etc. What was going on to illicit this response? Pavlov figured it out by systematically varying the stimuli and measuring the reactions.
Metranomes, lights and bells were used as stimuli, and it did not matter what kind of stimuli was used, but it was the very signal that food was on its way. Pavlov had discovered a fundamental type of learning called classical conditioning where a new stimuli happens to cause an old pattern (genetic/inherited). Then there's this way to use a new stimuli to cause the same effect in the body. If the neutral/signaling stimuli is given alone, then a response occurs as if the original stimuli took place, the arbitrary stimuli has become a condition stimulus. And this is known as conditioning.
The learned connection can be gradually weakened when the "prize" is not presented. Pavlov's work led to a conclusion: any perceivable stimuli is capable of illiciting any reaction that the organism is capable of.
Classical conditioning can be so powerful that it can supress the body's immune system and make us sick. The immune system is a complex network that protects the body from disease. It releases antibodies to destroy dangerous invaders and toxins. The immune system can be conditioned to not wokr. The results can be devasting. At the University of Rochester Medical School, they can condition rats to dislike water. They have discovered that they also conditioned the rat's immune systems to shut down. Robert Adegt or Adent.
"We found that the more saccrin they consumed, the stronger to the aversion of whatever it was paired with, over a month's time, giving these animals repeated exposure to this substance than water, some of them died; this was where there was no reason for these animals to die, and when this happens in an experiment when it is not supposed to, this is troublesome and you look for a reason why, and the drug used to make the taste aversion was also an immunosuppressant, so we were also conditioning a supressive response. Every time the animal was exposed to sacchrin, there was an aversion response and an immune system response."
We can learn to become sick, or learn to die, from conditioning. There are relations between two stimulus environments, Edward Thorndike pioneered another type of learning. Thorndike was interested in how to learn complex solutions to puzzles. How do we and other animals learn the habits and new skills that enable us to find our way through life's mazes? By carefully quantifying the performance of experimental animals, there's instrumental conditioning. Thorndike's animals worked by trial and error. The actions that bought reward, the actions that were instrumental to achieving a goal, were learned. It's the consequences that most influence the learning process.
Thorndike's law of affect- learning is controlled by the consequences, which those behaviors that are followed by good consequences are selected and repeated, while the others (leading to bad / no consequences) are not repeated. Another psychologist was John B. Watson.
Watson thought that learned, observable behavior was the only thing worth studying. He spoke of the unlimited power of conditioning and environmental control to mold the behavior of humans and animals alike. He used infants as subjects in the 1920s. Watson showed that strong emotions could be learned in one situation by condintioning, and then generalized, and transferred to other simular situations, without having to learn the original conditioning. Watson and his assistant had taught babies to fear rats that they liked at first.
Little Albert- each time a rat appeared, they made a loud noise, and soon the infant began to cry about the rat, ... so they used instrumental conditioning when she moved away and they rewarded her by stopping the sounds. The once fearless children were easily startled by harmless thing. This study was controversial because of the children. This experiment could not be conducted today because of ethics.
A few years after the demonstration of Watson, Jones became a behavior therapist and .... but these techniques came too late for Watson's subjects. Little Albert's fate remains unknown.
Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner built about the ideas of Pavlov on experimental control and conditioning, Thorndike's consequences, and Watson's focus on observable behavior. "Human behavior is distinguished by a particular change in evolution which made it possible for the emergence of special cultures, .. mental processes, their intentions and so on." For many psychologists, behavior is explained as an effect of internal (mental/neural) processes. Behavior is the outward expression of what is going on inside. Skinner disagreed- he investigated behavior relative to environmental.
Antecedants, behavior, consequences.
In the early 1940s, Skinner began to observe the response of a pidgeon. The pidgeon picked at a disk, followed by a reinforcers, which is anything that increases the rate of responding. This was also using the Skinner box. Example: pidgeon turning his head to the left in a Skinner box where there is a controlled stimulation. By gradual stages, there is reinforcements in numerous steps leading to a final pattern, i.e. you have to wait until the pidgeon makes the changes or connects the pattern ... schedules of reinforcement without a researcher being present, enormous amountso f data being collected. The rate at which the pidgeon pecked could be measured, which varied directly with the reinforcing consequences. The rate could be controlled by controlling the timing of the consequences. The pidgeon's behavior could be changed by chaniging the consequences. This is known as operant conditioning.
Operant conditioning - the change that takes place when those consequences have a particular effect, and we call these reinforcing or not, and that's what the organism has done, it is now more likely to be done again, because the reinforcing consequences have been ... rearranging the consequences, to shape a form of behavior, to keep that behavior, or what the change is like. Through operant conditioning, Pidgeons have been trained to do lots of feats, like playing a piano, or walking up musical instruments, or doing math.
Operant conditioning is one important aspect of learned behavior. Skinner says that behavior/antecedants/consequences. Any behavior followed by a consequence will change in its rate of occurence in direct relationship to the changes in the consequence. This is true of pidgeons and humans. Searching for internal agents to explain behavior is unnecessary, according to Skinner.
Skinner's psychology are controversial. His ideas have been applied beyond the laboratories. There are many applications of learning theory in school and on the job. Canine's for Independence. Complex sequences of consequences. The dogs learn to retrieve objects. They learn to pull wheel-chairs, or push elevator buttons. We've seen some of the ways that individuals learn to change their situation. What if they learn that nothing makes a difference? Can we use conditioning to overcome learned helplessness? Yes.
This woman is doing behavior therapy for agoraphobia, the fear of public places, which imprisons women in their homes. There's no attempt to find out what caused the behavior, only identifying the sources of reinforcement that keep the problem going. Learn to cope with the emotions, rearranging new consequences for the desired behavior. So learning can be positive. SOmething more than behavior has changed- there is also a change in our knowledge, which can direct our future actions, which must be remembered and called into play on demand, learning without memory is impossible, memory without learning is useless. So next time we will look at how we remember and why we forget.