2007-11-05 - Classical and operant conditioning
If you watched, on Friday, Zimbardo did a good job discerning the two types of conditioning. What I don't like is how the book represents conditioning. They consider it learning. Learning theory comes in all of the different schools of psych, so there's cognitive, Freudian, and then there's behaviorial learning theory, what this is is conditioning. Behaviorial learning theory and conditioning are the same thing. You are all conditioned. Skinner had the theory that all of life is conditioning, that you learn from stimulus and response in your environment and that you have very little own responses / your own ideas. Debate that.
There's classical conditioning. Classical conditioning is the easiest, and most simplified. Pavlov discovered classical conditioning. He discovered it when he was testing the salivation of the dogs, and he found that as the stimuli were paired with the response that the dog wanted (food). Pavlov was a physiologist, and he was measuring how much saliva the dogs would produce, that's what he was trying to do, and he noticed that there was a varying rate of salivation that shouldn't have been there, and he started to pay attention to that. Generally, when you present food to the dog, they start to salivate, and the same with humans, sometimes it is just the smell of food, or sometimes just seeing the food, but it comes down to it that food makes you salivate. The stimulus is food, the response is drooling or salivation. Hopefully you have some social structure around your responses. Pavlov noticed that the dogs would salivate when it didn't make sense. First he started, and as the people who took care of the dogs, the keys were jingling, and before the dogs were presented with the food, the dogs started to drool. If you jingled your keys, would the dogs tend to drool? No, not normally. It is not a normal response. So one of the things is that this is called S-R conditioning- stimulus-response. You have a normal, natural stimulus that ellicits a normal, natural response.
You can diagram it very easily, in nicely little square, not a Punnet square, you just multiply, you have an unconditioned (not learned, but natural) response. That's an unconditioned stimulus. Then you have an unconditioned response. With Pavlov's dogs, the unconditioned stimulus was food. That ellicits the unconditioned response of drooling. Very simple. But he started noticing something else. He found that when you presented, eventually he used a bell to prove it, if you rang a bell, and presented food, the dogs would drool because there was food, so if you ring the bell, present food, the dogs drool, and it could be as quick as two or three trials before they get this down. This is called pairing. The conditioned stimulus is now the bell, and the conditioned response is drooling. The unconditioned response and the conditioned response are always the same in this square-like diagram. The difference is that they have learned to do it based on the conditioned stimulus. If you ring a bell, you could expect that it would not normally make a dog drool, and this is still classical conditioning. Stimulus-response. Normal natural response, you give food they drool. If you want to start conditioning them, the classical part is the natural, the conditioning part is the learning. They learn that if a bell is rung, they might get food, so the drooling happens anyway. So you pair those two stimuli together.
What happens if you stop presenting food all together when you ring the bell? The response will become extinct (extinction- when you stop pairing to the point where the response is no longer ellicited). You have to occassionally give them food so that they will continue to make the association of bell-and-food.
How did they condition Little Albert? What was the normal stimulus? The normal stimulus was the loud noise, the gong, that created a startle, so the response was that the baby would cry. That's the normal natural response. You can pretty much bet almost always that if you give a baby a rat, they will not cry. What do babies do when they find something new? They will put it into their mouth. They are not afraid. Fear is learned. The gong ellicits the response. But you want to pair it so that the baby is fearing the rat. What do you do if you want to pair it? You have to present the rat, then the gong. Then, eventually, just present the rat and they will cry. What happens when the baby starts to see anything that's fuzzy? And it cries? What's the baby done? That's known as association. Give a rat, they cry, give a bunny, they cry, this is all known as generalization- "anything that is fuzzy is scarry." If they only cry when they see the rat, that's called discrimination and they know that's the thing that causes the fear. You can give them an orange, show them a rat, they start to cry. Show them the orange, the rat, then they cry, pretty soon you just have to present the orange and they cry. You can actually chain off of these.
A phobic- somebody who loses the ability to function because of their fear. A simple fear is not qualified as phobia (even "I don't want to touch one or see one").
Aversion - like when you're sick, and you eat too much pizza, that's classical conditioning, you've paired that experience, and that's related to the phobias.
Bannana troubles
Make sure you get this down: classical conditioning is natural responses (like flinching, hunger), if your family decided to cook dinner at exactly 6:00 every day, and you could smell it cooking at that time every day, you would start to pair 6:00 with being hungry. Zimbardo and flinching was the gun, and he had startling, and he paired it with the relax, and all he had to do was say relax and you would flinch. You start with a natural pairing, and then add something that is unnatural.
Operant conditioning
This is what Skinner used to train pidgeons to play the piano. It does not worry about natural-stimulus-response. It was looking at behaviors and how you could either decrease or increase your desired behaviors. The operant conditioning concept is inc/dec desired behavior. To have it do a behavior, you give it a good consequence, and otherwise a bad consequence, so this is like drog training.
A- Antecedent
B- Behavior
C- Consequence
Antecedent- whatever is happening before the behavior, the command, whatever is in the environment that is causing it. Consequence- whatever is happening to inc/dec the behavior. Consequence is sometimes told as a punishment, but that's not the idea. Consequence is not necessarily bad. Consequence either increases or decreases behavior. There are lots of different consequences. If you want to promote it then there's a reinforcer. If you want to decrease the behavior it's punishment..
One of the best ways to teach a dog, get the dog's attention, there's one that's driven by toy, and then there's another one that has a personality driven by the biscuit. You put it over his nose and then by the time he sits, you give him the reward. You eventually just have to say "sit" and he'll sit.
Observational/social learning