Learning & Behavior Study Guide Exam 2
Evolutionary Psychology: Learning, Biology and the Brain
Hegel—thesis (consciousness mind) anti thesis (beh) synthesis (cog/beh)
Taste Aversion: powerful disinclination toward eating or drinking certain substances. Easily learned—sometimes after a single exposure—are highly resistant to extinction and demonstrate biological constraints
What are 3 characteristics of taste aversion that classical conditioning doesn’t explain very well?
1. Conditioning results from the repeated pairing of stimulus and response events; but taste aversion learning often occurs in a single trial
2. Learning is thought to depend on contiguity—near simultaneity of events; TAL the unconditioned response (violent illness) sometimes occurs minutes or hours after CS
3. Any neutral stimulus can be associated with any US if paired with it often enough, but in TAL organisms often display a marked selectivity in their learning. Certain associations are never learned but others are learned readily
Latent Inhibition: describes the observation that unreinforced pre-exposure to a conditioning stimulus reduces the likelihood that it will be associated with a subsequent conditioned response; illness is attributed to new food not similar (evolutionary, unconscious phenomenon) EX. spy fits into neighborhood, creepiness of attractive guy
Blocking: phenomenon in classical conditioning in which conditioning to a specific stimulus becomes difficult or impossible because of prior conditioning to another stimulus
Rescorla-Wagner model: based on the notion that contiguity is neither sufficient nor necessary to explain classical conditioning; related among events- expectancies, associative strength
Biological explanation: learning what goes with what, searches its memory to see what events could have been used to predict the occurrence; what is learned is a connection or an expectation (maps)
Higher order conditioning: 2nd order conditioning, CS takes on the role of an US. Ex.
Hegel—thesis (consciousness mind) anti thesis (beh) synthesis (cog/beh)
Taste Aversion: powerful disinclination toward eating or drinking certain substances. Easily learned—sometimes after a single exposure—are highly resistant to extinction and demonstrate biological constraints
What are 3 characteristics of taste aversion that classical conditioning doesn’t explain very well?
1. Conditioning results from the repeated pairing of stimulus and response events; but taste aversion learning often occurs in a single trial
2. Learning is thought to depend on contiguity—near simultaneity of events; TAL the unconditioned response (violent illness) sometimes occurs minutes or hours after CS
3. Any neutral stimulus can be associated with any US if paired with it often enough, but in TAL organisms often display a marked selectivity in their learning. Certain associations are never learned but others are learned readily
Latent Inhibition: describes the observation that unreinforced pre-exposure to a conditioning stimulus reduces the likelihood that it will be associated with a subsequent conditioned response; illness is attributed to new food not similar (evolutionary, unconscious phenomenon) EX. spy fits into neighborhood, creepiness of attractive guy
Blocking: phenomenon in classical conditioning in which conditioning to a specific stimulus becomes difficult or impossible because of prior conditioning to another stimulus
Rescorla-Wagner model: based on the notion that contiguity is neither sufficient nor necessary to explain classical conditioning; related among events- expectancies, associative strength
Biological explanation: learning what goes with what, searches its memory to see what events could have been used to predict the occurrence; what is learned is a connection or an expectation (maps)
Higher order conditioning: 2nd order conditioning, CS takes on the role of an US. Ex.