CHANGING DIRECTIONS IN THE STUDY OF CONDITIONING

RECOGNIZING BIOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS ON CONDITIONING

• Instinctive drift: occurs when an animal’s innate response tendencies interfere with conditioning processes• Breland’s Miserly Raccoons

CONDITIONED TASTE AVERSION

• Conditioned only through the pairing of taste stimuli and stimuli inducing nausea• Shows that just any stimulus and just any

response will not necessarily condition

PREPAREDNESS

• DEF: a species-specific predisposition to be conditioned in certain ways and not others• May influence instinctive drift, conditioned taste

aversion, and phobias…

PHOBIAS

• Can be about anything• Martin Seligman: evolutionary forces programmed

acquisition of certain fears

EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE ON LEARNING

• Mechanisms of learning are similar across species• Adapted to environment• Used to increase survivability and sexual

reproduction

COGNITIVE PROCESSES IN CONDITIONING

• Signal Relations: CS-UCS relations that influence whether a CS is a good signal• “Good” signal allows for accurate prediction of

the UCS• Helped change view of conditioning from reflexive

response to information processing

RESPONSE-OUTCOME RELATIONS AND CONDITIONING

• Organisms try to discover what leads to what (contingencies) in the world around them• Stimuli are signals that help minimize aversive

experiences and maximize pleasant experiences

D E F : O C C U R S W H E N A N O R G A N I S M ’ S R E S P O N D I N G I S I N F L U E N C E D B Y T H E O B S E R V A T I O N O F O T H E R S , W H O A R E C A L L E D M O D E L S

OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING

ALBERT BANDURA

• Demonstrated both classical and operant conditioning can take place vicariously through observational learning• We are conditioned by observing other’s

conditioning

BASIC PROCESSES OF OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING

• Attention: you must pay attention to another’s behavior and its consequences• Retention: you must store a mental

representation of what you witnessed• Reproduction: enact a modeled response;

depends on ability• Motivation: must be motivated to enact the

modeled response

ACQUISITION VS. PERFORMANCE

• We have many acquired learned responses• We choose which will be reinforced• Reinforcement influences performance, not

learning necessarily