6.3: Cognitive Models of Learning

Brain-imaging studies show that classical and oper ant conditioning are related to different brain regions.

Classically conditioned fear reactions are often based in the amygdala, whereas operantly conditioned responses are based in brain areas rich in dopamine.

The two types of conditioning interact.

We've found that classical conditioning leads to certain phobias, such as a dog bite and the CR of fear.

We might expect the CR of fear to fade away over time with repeated exposure to the dogs.

This often doesn't happen.
Many people with phobias have been afraid of their fear for a long time.
Only about 20 percent of people with phobias get over their fears.

Classical and operant conditioning are needed to explain the persistence of anxiety disorders.

Classical conditioning can be used to help people acquire phobias.

Many people fear dental procedures.

If they have a dogphobia, they may cross the street whenever they see someone walking toward them with a dog.
It's absolutely necessary to recall the negative dentist.

People with dogphobia are negatively reinforcing their fear by avoiding dogs whenever they see them.

They're conditioning themselves to make their fears persist.
They are exchanging short-term gain for long-term pain.
The way to treat anxiety disorders is to force people to confront their anxiety.
This is the exact recipe for exposure therapy, the bestsupported treatment approach for anxiety disorders.

Think of a bad habit that you want to change.

Operant conditioning can be used to help you change a bad habit into a good one.
Be sure to identify what is reinforcing the bad habit, how to extinguish it, how to reinforce the new habit, and what schedule of reinforcement you might use.

Latent learning and observational learning are supported by the evidence.

Early behaviorists didn't think that thought played much of a role in learning.

Skinner believed that humans and other intelligent animals think.

He didn't believe that thinking is different from other behavior.
This view is more parsimonious than using different laws of learning for thinking.

He argued that cognitive psychology invokes meaningless concepts to explain behavior.

Most psychologists agree that the story of learning in humans is incomplete without at least some role for thinking.

The link between S and R isn't automatic for S-O-R psychologists.

The S-O-R principle helps to explain what happened.

Your first intelligent animal may have seen your criticism as constructive feedback, but your second friend may have seen it as a personal attack.

Take a person who has been conditioned by tones and shock to sweat.

If she's told that no more shocks are on the way, her skin conductance response will stop.

The role of expectations in learning is emphasized by S-O-R theorists.

Some of us don't like criticism, but we do like to point out that classical conditioning occurs only if the CS regularly predicts to it well.

According to the occurrence of the UCS.
If we repeatedly S-O-R psychologists, the difference will be dependent on our present relationship between the UCS and the CS.

Organisms show classically conditioned reactions only when the CS reliably forecasts the UCS, suggesting that they're building up expectations about what comes next.

We need to tell the story of a pioneer psychologist and his rats to explain psychology's gradual transition from behaviorism to cognitivism.

Edward Chace Tolman was one of the first serious challenges to the radical behaviorist account of learning.

Learning reinforcement wasn't the end-all of learning.

Who was one of the Figure 6.9 Tolman and Honzik's Maze Trials?

We don't show them many things we learn.

H. Honzik demonstrated this point in a systematic manner.

When the group got to the end of the maze, they never received reinforce Graph from Tolman and Honzik.

The first group learned in rats.

The rats in this group received no reinforcement for the first 10 days, and then on the 11th day the number of errors dropped dramatically.

In reinforcement, we can see that.
The rats in the third group showed a large and abrupt behavior, even though they weren't showing it.

Within a few days, their number of errors didn't differ much from the number of errors among the rats who were always reinforced.

The rats in the third group had been learning.

Once there was a learning that was not directly observable, they became mini maze masters.

If you are like most college students, you were confused on your first day.

You probably developed a mental sense of the layout of the campus over time so that you don't get lost.
According to Tolman, that internal spatial map is a cognitive map.

Three investigators had rats run through a maze in order to get reinforcement.

The rats were put in little moving "trolley cars" in which they could observe the layout of the maze, but not experience the thrill of running through it.
The second group of rats did just as well as the first group when they were given the chance to run through the maze.
As rodents, they'd acquired cognitive maps too.

The behavioral models of Syndicate were challenged by the research of Tolman and others.

It suggested that thinking, in the form of cognitive maps, plays a central role in some forms of learning.

By placing people in "virtual rooms" that they've never encountered and then monitoring their brain waves, they've examined how the brain performs in "unsupervised learning" environments, those that involve no instructions, reinforcers, or punishers.

In your own words, tell me how this graph supports the hypothesis that the rats were learning on their own.

Observational learning is considered a form of latent learning by many psychologists.

We can take our cue from someone else who is reinforced for doing something.

We don't have to learn everything firsthand because of observational learning.

It's generally a good idea to have a parachute on before jumping out of a plane, but most of us aren't experts in skydiving.
We wouldn't be here to talk about it if we hadn't learned this useful piece of advice by trial and error.

Children have a lot of spare time from serious mistakes.

Observational learning of maladaptive habits can contribute to our learn behavior.

Albert Bandura and his colleagues showed that children can learn to act aggressively by watching aggressive role models.

The researchers asked preschool boys and girls to watch an adult interact with a large Bobo doll, a wobbly doll that bounces back to its original upright position after being hit.

The experimenters randomly assigned some children to watch the adult model playing quietly and ignoring the Bobo doll, and others to watch the adult model punching the Bobo doll in the nose, sitting on it, and kicking it around the room.

Bandura and his coworkers brought the children into a room with an array of appealing toys, including a miniature fire engine, a jet fighter, and a large doll set.

The experimenter told the children that they needed to move to a different room when they began playing with the toys.
The investigators wanted to make the children more aggressive so they interrupted.
The experimenter brought them into a second room, where they found a Bobo doll identical to the one they'd seen.

Bandura and his colleagues found that exposure to the aggressive model caused more aggression against the Bobo doll than exposure to the non aggressive model.

The children who'd watched the aggressive model yelled at the doll, and mimicked many of his verbal insults, were also the ones who imitated many of his verbal insults.

They replicated these results when they showed the aggressive models on film.

The research literature addressing this question is so vast that it can easily occupy an entire book.

Some of the research highlights will be brief.

Children who watch violent television programs are more aggressive than other children, according to hundreds of investigators using correlational designs.

Give yourself a favored reinforcer if you answered no.

Highly aggressive children are more likely to tune in to aggressive television programs.

BanDURA'S BOBO DOLL STUDY tracks individuals' behaviors over time.

There is more compelling evidence for a link between media violence and aggression in these studies.

They don't demonstrate a causality because they are not true experiments.
The studies don't randomly assign participants to conditions, but instead they choose which television shows to watch.
Unmeasured personality variables, like impulsivity, or social variables, like weak parental supervision, might account for the Ruling Out Rival Hypotheses findings.

We shouldn't conclude that a cold is caused by a scratchy throat and a runny nose, only that they're early signs of a cold.

The link between media models and aggression has been examined by other investigators.

In most of these studies, researchers have exposed subjects to either violent or non-violent media presentations and seen if subjects in the former group behaved more aggressively, such as yelling at the experimenter or delivering electric shocks to another subject when provoked.

The studies suggest a correlation between media violence and laboratory aggression.
The conclusion may hold for the relation between violent video games and aggression, although the link is controversial and less well established.
Some researchers argue that the link between violent video games and real-world violence is due to the tendency of aggressive children to watch these games and engage in physical aggression.

One investigator conducted a field study of a small, isolated mountain town in Canada that had no television before 1973.

Two years later, children in Notel showed a marked increase in physical and verbal aggression, compared to children in two other Canadian towns that already had television.
The Canadian government constructed a large highway that connected Notel to nearby towns at the same time that Notel received television.

There are four lines of evidence--correlational studies, longitudinal Study of Individuals Who Watched studies, laboratory studies, and field studies--each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

Television in childhood is violent and laboratory studies are strong in internal validity.

The correlation doesn't show that all four types of studies point in the same direction.

Scientific conclusions are the most convincing when we base them on find SOURCE.

It's clear that media violence is only a small part of the puzzle.

In a new city, you are standing in line behind someone using an ATM.

This one is slightly different from the other ones you've seen, and it's annoying.
You watch as the person in front of you inserts her card, pushes a few buttons, and grabs her money from the slot at the bottom of the machine.
Now it's your turn, and you know what to do.
Although the question of how our brains engage in observational learning is still shrouded in mystery, neuroscientists have recently begun to identify a potential biological basis for it.

When an animal imagines what it would like to do, it becomes activated.

When a being performed monkey sees another monkey that is stationary or a piece of food that another monkey grabbed, they don't become active.

When a monkey sees another monkey grabbing, they become active.
These neurons seem to have very specific behaviors.
One mirror neuron in a monkey only fires when the monkey itself or a person it's observing eats a peanut, and a different mirror neuron in a monkey only fires when the monkey itself or a person it's observing eats a peanut.
Researchers have identified what appears to be a mirror neuron system in humans, but they've yet to identify individual ones.
No one knows what mirror neurons do.

Some neurosciences think that these neurons play a central role in feeling others' emotional states and emulating their movements.

Some psychologists theorize that mirror neuron abnormality is a key factor in the development ofautism, which is often associated with difficulties in adopting the perspectives of others.

The function and nature of mirror neurons have become controversial in recent years.

It's not clear whether these neurons play a role in empathy or psychological conditions characterized by deficient empathy.
The findings are at best correlational.