6.4: Biological Influences on Learning

Learning 229 that empathy deficits contribute to mirror neuron abnormality rather than the other way around.

The role of mirror neurons in humans is a mystery.

tent learning and observational learning were not the only holes poked in behaviorist theory.

Wolfgang Kohler was a German psychologist during World War I.

Kohler, one of the founding fathers of Gestalt psychology, posed problems to four Chimpanzees in the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa around the same time that the first latent learning stud ies were being conducted.

Sultan was a genius of an ape and he was good at solving puzzles.
Kohler put a bunch of bananas outside of the cage, well out of Sultan's reach, along with two bamboo sticks.
The sticks were long enough to reach the bananas.
Sultan came up with the idea of sticking one bamboo stick inside the other, creating an extra-long bamboo stick.

Kohler argued that his Chimpanzees seemed to experience the "Aha reaction" we discussed previously.

The chimp seemed to get the solution to the problem and climb to the top box.

Kohler's conclusions weren't without flaws.

His observations were anecdotal.
It's difficult to rule out the possibility that some of Kohler's Chimpanzees had Ruling Out Rival Hypotheses engaged in trial and error before figuring out each problem.

Kohler's work suggests that some smart animals can learn from explanations rather than trial and error.

Learning was seen as distinct from biology by most behaviorists.

The animal's learning history and genetic makeup were like two ships in the night.
Our biology influences the speed and nature of our learning in fascinating ways.
There are three powerful examples.

In the 70s, psychologist Martin Seligman went out to dinner with his wife.

His favorite topping is sauce bearnaise.
Seligman became violently ill after attending the opera.
His love of sauce bearnaise did not help his recovery.
Seligman couldn't taste saucenaise without feeling like throwing up.

The delay between UCS and CS can be as long as six or eight hours.

There is little evidence of generalization when it comes to conditioned taste aversions.

One of the earliest childhood memories of one of your text's authors was eating a delicious piece of lasagna and then becoming violently ill several hours later.
For more than 20 years, he avoided lasagna at all costs, but still enjoyed spaghetti, manicotti, veal parmigiana, and virtually every other Italian dish.
He had a huge struggle to get over his fear of lasagna.

The differences make sense from an evolutionary standpoint.

We wouldn't want to have to go through food poisoning again and again.
We would sometimes be dead after the first trial, which would be incredibly unpleasant.
Classical conditioning frowns on the long lag time between eating and illness because it's necessary for learning.
The delayed association between UCS and CS is adaptive because it teaches us to avoid dangerous foods.

Patients with cancer often experience nausea and vomiting as a result of their conditioned taste aversions.

Even though they realize that the food is not related to the treatment, they still develop an aversion to it.
Health psychologists have a way around this problem.
They aren't fond of a novel food before treatment.
The taste aversion becomes conditioned to the scapegoat food rather than the patients' preferred food.

One of his colleagues helped demonstrate the biological influences on taste aversions.

Rats exposed to X-rays, which make them nauseated, developed aversions to a specific taste but not to a specific visual or auditory stimuli.
The rats are more likely to associate nausea with taste after a single exposure.
It's not much fun, but it's adaptive.
In the real world, poisoned drinks and foods make animals sick.
Animals are more likely to develop aversions to stimuli that cause nausea in the real world.

A belief held by many traditional behaviorists is that we can classi cally condition all UCSs equally.

Those associated with taste are easily conditioned to certain UCSs, such as those associated with nausea.
Martin Seligman felt nauseated at the thought of sauce bearnaise, but not at the thought of the opera or his wife.

Many patients with cancer who are undergoing the event or events that might have led to this aversion have been helped by psychological science.

The equipotentiality assumption is challenged by research on phobias.

People aren't always afraid of things with which they've had the most unpleasant experiences if we look at the distribution of phobias in the general population.

Many people who fear the dark heights, snakes, spiders, and blood have never had a frightening encounter with them.
Many of us have been cut, bruised, burned, or otherwise hurt by razors, knives, and the edges of furniture, ovens, and electrical outlets.

Figure 6.11 shows aversion.

The process for conditioning a taste aversion in a laboratory rat can be seen here.

There is a box with radiation.

This natural y causes nausea.

The rat doesn't respond when it is given a neutral water.

The rat is put in a radiation box with water to develop a taste aversion.

The rats get sick from being in a box of radiation, but they also drink the water.

When the rat is not in a radiation box, it will show nausea and aversions to the water.

The rat has developed a dislike for water.

According to Seligman, steep cliffs and poisonous animals posed a threat to our early human ancestors because of their tendency to learn stimuli.

The survival value ances of household items and appli others didn't because they weren't around back then.
Prepared fears are emotional legacies of natural selection, according to Susan Mineka.

A videotape of rhesus monkeys reacting in horror to snakes was shown by Mineka and Michael Cook.

rhesus monkeys who've never been exposed to snakes show no fear of them, but within less than half an hour, the monkeys acquired a fear of snakes.
The researchers edited the videotapes to make it appear that the same monkeys were reacting in horror to flowers, a toy rabbit, a toy snake, or a toy crocodile.
The doctored videotapes were shown to different groups of monkeys who had never seen flowers, rabbits, snakes, or crocodiles.
The altered videotapes made the monkeys fear the toy snake and toy crocodile, but not the flowers or toy rabbit.
This finding is understandable.
Snakes and crocodiles were dangerous to our primate ancestors, but flowers and rabbits weren't.

An illusory correlation is a statistical mirage, it's the perception of a nonexistent association between two variables.

One team of investigators gave intermittent electrical shocks to subjects who were afraid of snakes and others who were not, while they watched slides of snakes and damaged electrical outlets.

The correlation between the shocks and the slide stimuli was random.

A correlation has been established between the occurrence of snake slides and the coyote eating a sheep carcass with high levels of snake fear.

People with low levels of snake fear will avoid sheep.
The people who were on the lookout for snakes used this technique to keep from overestimating the number of snake coyotes attacking their livestock.

They showed no overestimation for electrical outlets, even though they're more closely linked to our minds than are snakes.

This finding shows that snakes pose a threat to our primate ancestors, but not electrical outlets.

The laboratory evidence for readiness isn't always consistent.

Some authors suggest that the result of an alternative explanation is Ruling Out Rival Hypotheses.

Without a UCS, have important alternative appeared alone many times.

Because few of us have regular encounters with snakes, cliffs, deep water, and so on, these stimuli may be more easily conditioned to aversive outcomes.

According to Mineka and Cook, genetic influences may play a role in the acquisition of monkeys and their fear of snakes.

The monkeys didn't have a lot of negative experiences with dogs, such as bites.

Only half of people with a dogphobia have ever had a scary encounter with a dog, suggesting a role for the same holds for people with many other phobias.
It is unlikely that classical evolutionary predispositions alone can explain all cases of fear.
Some people seem to be developing fears.

Animal trainers Marian and Keller Breland teach animals to perform tricks for circuses and television advertisers.

Traditional methods of operant conditioning were used by students of B. F. Skinner at Harvard.
Virtually all contemporary animal trainers do the same.

The Brelands discovered that their little charges didn't always behave as they were supposed to.

In one case, they tried to teach the animals how to deposit money into a bank.
They ran into a problem after fully training the raccoons to pick up the coins.
The raccoons dropped the coins into the bank, but instead of rubbing them together, they started rubbing them together again.

The raccoons had reverted to rinsing.

They were treating the tendency for animals to return to the token like pieces of food, like the small hard shells they extract from the beds of ponds.

Reinforcement learning 233 times.

Rats have been observed to drift in other animals.
The reasons for such drift are not fully understood by psychologists.
Instinctive drift suggests that we can't fully understand learning without taking into account innate biological influences, which limits what kinds of behaviors we can train through reinforcement.

Evaluate popular techniques for enhancing learning.

Perhaps because learning new things requires so much time and effort on our part, many mental health professionals have marketed a motley assortment of techniques that supposedly help us to learn more quickly, or more easily, than we currently do.
We'll look at three popular techniques.

Imagine if you could master all of the information in this book while getting a few nights of sleep.

You could pay someone to record the entire book and play it back to you.

It's time to say goodbye to those late nights in the library or dorm room.

Hope springs eternal in many areas of psychology.

Some extraordinary claims have been made about the potential of this technique.

Is the evidence strong enough to boost our confidence or make us feel better about ourselves?

These claims are quite remarkable.

Things that sound too good to be true often are.

The early findings on sleep-assisted learning were encouraging.
One group of investigators exposed sailors to a form of communication while they slept.
The sailors mastered the code three weeks faster than the other sailors.
The claim that people could learn new material while asleep was supported by other studies from the former Soviet Union.

The recordings may have awakened the subjects, since these early positive reports neglected to rule out a crucial alternative expla Ruling Out Rival Hypotheses nation.

They should have an alternative to ensure they were asleep while listening to the tapes.

It's probably because subjects hear snatches of them while drifting in and out of sleep that sleep-learning recordings work.

If you want to reduce stress, we recommend skipping the audio recordings and getting a good night's rest.

That's not to say that sleep can't help with learning.

Sleeping between study sessions focused on learning a new language helps students retain more information about the language up to half a year later, according to evidence.

Other companies promise fast techniques for learning.

New students at colleges and universities are overwhelmed.

They aren't prepared for the large amount of reading they have to read in their courses, such as having to read lengthy chapters on learning in their introductory psychology textbook.

Study skills courses and workshops have become popular among freshmen.

As a first semester freshman at "Princetown" University, you find yourself falling hopelessly behind in your schoolwork.

You received a D+ in introductory psychology, an F in introductory physics, and a C- in introductory basketweaving, despite studying for about 20 hours for each of them, despite you having just had your first round of exams.
There is an ad for a study skills course in a coffee shop.
Learning methods such as those based on operant conditioning and distributed practice are used.
Several that didn't involve study skills and consistently did no better studies show that these techniques can improve your test by up to 10 percent.
They don't work for everyone, but they don't think it's effective.

We have to evaluate all claims with a 4.

We need to know more about the six principles of scientific thinking in order to evaluate this claim.

Rival hypoth claims that the study skil's course has been excluded, but it's not clear if that's true.

It's possible that the study test performance can be up to 10 percent, but it's also possible that the skills course doesn't work for everyone.
Some of the reported improvements resulted from the mere operant conditioning and distributed practice, as well as the placebo effects, which are well-supported learning principles.

The principle isn't relevant to the scenario.

In principle, the claim could be altered.

The course might be worth checking out if it is an appropriate skills course.

SaltT uses a mixture of techniques, such as generating expectations for enhanced learning, getting students to visualize information they're learning, playing classical music during learning, and breathing in a regular rhythm while learning.

Learning 235 techniques allow learners to gain access to intuitive aspects of their minds that are otherwise unavailable.
A recent book on accelerated learning claims to allow students to double their learning capabilities in 10 minutes or less and to release their inner genius and become the student they were always meant to be.

The extraordinary claims don't come close to matching the ordinary claims.

Is the evidence as strong as the Druckman & Swets?

Many of the studies conducted on accelerated learning compared this method with a control method in which students did little or nothing.

One of the major components of accelerated learning is boosting learners' expectations, which could be why there are few positive results reported.

Science teachers don't always agree on how to teach this important skill.

A psychology professor who's teaching operant conditioning might set her students up with a friendly rat, a maze, and a plentiful supply of cheese and ask them to figure out which variables affect the rat's learning.

In one study, investigators looked at the ability of third- and fourth- graders to identify the variables that affect how quickly a ball rolls down a ramp.

Only 23 percent of students assigned to a discovery learning condition solved a slightly different problem on their own, compared to 77 percent of students assigned to a direct instruction condition.

In the long term, discovery learning may encourage students to learn how to pose scientific questions on their own.

It's ill-advised to use a stand-alone approach because many students never figure out how to solve their own scientific problems.
Discovery learning may be a bad idea for people with weak cognitive skills, who are often slow to learn new tasks on their own.

Their preferred way of getting information.

Others are "spatial" learners who prefer to visualize problems in their heads, while others are "verbal" learners who prefer to talk through problems.
Matching different methods of instruction to students' learning styles is claimed to boost learning dramatically by some educational psychologists.
Children who are verbal learners should learn faster and better with written material, children who are spatial learners should learn faster and better with visual material, and so on.
In one survey conducted across five countries, between 93 percent and 97 percent of teachers believed that matching instruction styles to students increased students' learning.

Learning Styles of careful research

Inter designed to assess people's learning styles can give very different answers.

Most of us are a blend of multiple styles, and that's probably because few of us are solely analytical orholistic learners.
Tailoring different methods to people's learning styles doesn't result in enhanced learning according to studies.
The view that students with certain learning styles benefit from being provided with motivation and from specific types of instructional materials is popular skills to reach these standards, work best regardless of students' in education.
The research doesn't support matching learning styles.
Like a number of other theories about learning styles.

The improvement might have been due to factors other than the technique.

Although students may experience the illusion of learning more from PowerPoint(r)-based lectures than from other lectures--and may enjoy such lectures more--the evidence that they actually learn more is weak.

A variety of learning fads may be related to this illusion of learning.

We gradually learn the CR through acquisition.

After repeated 6.3: Cognitive Models of Learning presentation, the CR decreases in magnitude and eventually disappears.

Research shows that individuals can acquire higher-order conditioning.

Correlational studies are classically conditioned responses to the original studies.
It's possible to learn that media violence contributes to aggression, even though it's related to a host of different stimuli.

Operant conditioning is learning through trial and error.

Classical conditioning and operant conditioning involve the same processes.

Thorndike's law of effect tells us that if a response is followed by a reward, it can lead to avoidance reactions.

They showed (stimulus-response) connections.

According to research, evolution Reinforcement can be either positive or negative, withdrawal of an outcome.

Proponents of sleep-assisted learning claim that there are four major schedules of reinforcement.

There are variable interval, variable ratio and early fixed interval.
The reports of successful learning during sleep appear attrib four schedules, which differ along two dimensions: consistency of Utable to a failure to carefully monitor subjects' EEGs to administering reinforcement (fixed or variable) and the basis ensure that they were asleep.
There are studies of accelerated learning of reinforcement.

shaping is a fundamental tech direct instruction and is often less effective and efficient than day life.

Some psychologists claim to have anique of animal training.

The use of operant conditioning prin styles with different teaching methods has been harnessed by psychologists, but studies that have ciples to develop token economies and other therapeutically matched learning styles with teaching methods have typically useful applications.

Negative results probably came from operant conditioning principles.