Learning. Well, we've talked about learning indirectly all through the development chapter.
Now let's talk about it more formally. We're going to talk about
classical conditioning, operant conditioning,
and observational learning per se. Three
major paradigms that affect every single one of us in this room
and have dramatic pragmatic implications for your life
and the life of your family and the life that you live at your work and in your
school.
If you understand these well, you'll be able to change your own behavior
dramatically
and you'll be able to change the behavior of others and I hope you'll do that
benevolently because you'll be able to do it effectively.
People are like, Oh, I don't want to manipulate anybody's
behavior and I would say well you do that all the time. We all want to manipulate other people's
behavior.
If you don't believe me, the next time somebody asks you to go see a movie that you don't want to see
see if you don't try to manipulate their behavior. They say, come on let's go see this movie and you go,
I don't want to see that one. Let's go see this one.
What are you trying to do? Change them.
Change their inclination, get them to behave in a way that's more consistent
with your own inclination. We all want our way
and we all realize that it helps to get our way when we get along with others
and give them their way and that's our reciprocal determination, right?
We try to work cooperatively so that if you get your way this time, reciprocity
would dictate that next time
I ought to get my way but learning in and of itself is much more specific.
Relatively durable change in behavior, knowledge due to experience,
and those are terms you ought to know.
But I'm going to get right on into classical conditioning.
Classical conditioning: Learning
where a previously neutral stimulus comes to evoke a physiological
response originally evoked by another stimulus.
That should make no sense to you at this point. Let's do it again.
I point those other things out because you should know them.
I don't need to tell you every single thing. You have a book, I hope,
and you are reading in it, I hope. You certainly have my full set of notes which you are
reading, I hope,
and that nothing in the previous slide was not definitional,
that you should be able to read it and understand the terms I'm using here
forward. If not,
reread it and if you have questions ask me. Ivan Pavlov has an asterisk beside
his name
because he's famous for
working with some dogs, Pavlov's dogs. Well he worked with other animals besides dogs
and he became famous because he is associated with something
and what we're talking about with learning is associations,
learning associations, and people learn the association of Pavlov's dogs and a bell
and people sometimes bring me
a little wet nap package from Hooters and on a wet nap package it says,
does the name Pavlov ring a bell? Now that's interesting
on a couple of levels. One, why would Hooters bother to print that on their wet nap,
right? Well, slobbering is what you do when you eat right and you need to wipe
it up so maybe there's that association.
People slobber at Hooters for other reasons and maybe there's that
association, male peoples usually not always though,
right? But interestingly,
he's that profound that people know him all these years later.
His name is associated with the slobbering dog phenomenon
and if you're a good critical thinker
you should wonder to yourself, well who cares about slobbering dogs?
I'll show you why in a minute but it's going to take some backup to get us there.
Classical conditioning is something that affects every single person on this
planet,
including dog people, right?
Most people who love the dogs, they call them what, they talk to them like they're people, right?
Well, we share a lot with other animals
and classical conditioning is one of those things we share.
What you can do to a dog through classical conditioning you could do to a person if
you could make them stand for it.
It's powerful. Slobbering dogs has implications
for drug addiction, conditioned taste aversions,
all kinds of one trial learning. Things that we just
think are totally unrelated to slobbering dogs.
Slobbering dogs is not a pleasant thing.
He won a Nobel Prize. Ivan Pavlov was not a psychologist, he was a physiologist, he was
interested in studying
digestion, right? So the digestive tract
starts in the mouth and it ends under the tail, right, of the dog.
Now if you have your choice of which end to start on, which end are you going to pick?
I'm going to go with Pavlov and start on the mouth first, right?
So he starts looking at the first process
of digestion which is salivation.
Before you get food in your mouth, your mouth starts watering.
Now, we now know that there are enzymes in
in the saliva that help to break down the food but back then they were just starting
to study this and they would attach
a little test tube, they would cut a fistula into the dog's cheek,
not pleasant, surgical procedure, to attach
a catch basin that would then measure, as accurately as you could at the time,
how much saliva was produced when you presented the dog
with certain kinds of stimuli, food-related stimuli,
right? So he's looking at how long does the dog go between eating,
does it salivate more, does it salivate less, does it salivate more to certain kinds of food stimuli
and not others,
and something started to go wrong with the research.
The dogs started salivating before they ever got there with the food,
starts messing with the measurements.
And what was happening was simple
on one level but nobody had really pulled it apart until Pavlov.
So he didn't get the Nobel Prize prize for
digestion, he got it for what is called
now classical conditioning. Give the dog food.
The dog salivates.
Give the dog food, the dogs salivates.
Give the dog food,
the dog salivates. That dog is salivating and I didn't give it any food yet, what's wrong with that dog? in a thirty it was wrong with that dog
That dog had learned to associate previously neutral stimuli,
like footsteps, with the presentation of food
such that the previously neutral stimulus of footsteps
came to evoke a physiological response meaning it made salivation occurr,
which was originally evoked by another stimulus which was the food itself,
the meat powder. Interestingly you've got to salivate,
right? Salivation provides lubrication for mastication, I already told you, you all a bunch
of masticators,
right? Everybody gotta have a lubrication or you choke to death on
your food.
So it turns out that salivating before food arrives
from a functionalist point of view is actually
helpful. If you ever go see the Bays Mountain Wolves,
right, they feed them those dead deer they catch off the highway, right?
They scoop them up, take it to Bays Mountain if you see a road kill deer,
they'll throw it in the freezer. They have pack behavior,
right? When you're in the wild, what, you better eat and eat fast, yeah?
So if there's anything in the environment that predicts food is coming,
if you can start salivating quicker, that one bite you get
before the other ones come and bump you out of the way might be
the difference between survival and non-survival over time.
So there's this adaptive mechanism happening where this dog is learning
and we don't think the dog is sitting there with higher consciousness going, you know what?
Every time that guy comes in he's bringing food. Next time he comes in I think I'm
going to salivate,
right? He doesn't think like that and we don't either
but we do the same kinds of stuff and also, interestingly enough,
Pavlov didn't work with bells.
His other people in his lab worked with bells. The unconditioned stimulus is unlearned.
You can say unconditioned equals unlearned if that helps you to understand this
process. You'll need to know these terms for your test cause you'll need to break it
down.
Unconditioned stimulus evokes an unlearned and an unconditioned response.
So, in our Pavlov dog scenario,
the food is an unconditioned stimulus. You don't have to learn
to slobber to food, and what follows is the response.
The response is salivation. You don't have to learn that so
Pavlov figured there are certain inborn unlearned
reflexes that we have as species. If I make a BAM real loud noise people will jump.
You don't have to learn to do that. It's inborn.
It's universal. It's shared by everybody in the species.
Likewise, when you smell food,
you don't have to think about salivation. It just happens.
So you have an unconditioned or unlearned stimulus that produces
an unconditioned response. That's pretty straight forward. That we had to begin
with.
But now there's some previously neutral stimulus.
Footsteps was previously neutral.
If you ring a bell, that's previously neutral,
right? A dog don't give a damn about a bell.
You ring the bell, what's the dog going to do, salivate the first time?
No, it's previously neutral. He'll just look at you with that quizzical look like what's that?
Yeah, they turn their head back and forth when they're...
they don't know what it means. Doesn't mean salivate though.
So with regard to salivation, ringing a bell
or footsteps is a previously neutral stimulus but it comes to have an
association.
The association then becomes strong enough that the conditioned stimulus itself
provokes
the response. It's eliciting the response
so that the conditioned stimulus is now pulling forth from the animal,
us included, a response that it did not use to do because it's been associated with
an unconditioned stimulus.
And now we just change the name. It's the same response. In this case, it's still
slobbering,
it's still salivation, but because it's in response to the conditioned stimulus
we re-label it, right? When it's salivation to food,
food is the unconditioned stimulus and the salivation is an unconditioned response.
But if you salivate to a bell ringing,
well now the salivation is in response to something that was previously neutral.
Same response but for a different reason, so it's re-labeled
as conditioned response.
So, as I just implied,
classically conditioned responses are elicited,
drawn forth from the animal body. Unconditioned stimulus and eventually
the conditioned stimulus has been paired with it.
That's going to be an important distinction when we start talking about
operant conditioning. Classical conditioning has to do largely with
physiological processes
that are pulled from us. You've had that moment where you were
driving and you saw the blue lights come on
and you had that little butterfly sense in your stomach, yes?
Whoo. And what did you do also? You didn't hit the brake rather reflexively?
That physiological thing that's happening, that makes you feel the butterflies,
is adrenalin and that's classically conditioned.
The trying to hit the brake is a behavior you could have voluntarily controlled.
The first one you couldn't, the second one you could but it happened so
automatically that you don't perceive that you could. That would be
operantly conditioned behavior. When
blue lights came on when you were a baby, did you start having butterflies in your
stomach and
start throwing your foot around? Nope.
You learned to do that through what? Association. What kind of association?
Well,
we're really talking about contingencies here. If
then statements, dependencies between
events, and sometimes we perceive events to be related that aren't
actually related but if you believe that they are they can have a very powerful
effect. In fact, that's how you get
superstitious behavior, through erroneous
contingencies. The dependency between event, an event can be stimulus contingent
or response contingent, the latter being
operant in nature,
mostly. So, in other words, ie.
if then statements. If the light turns red,
I should stop, right? Why?
Because if I don't, I could cause a crash or get pulled over,
right? So I start learning these relationships
and I don't have to experience them directly to learn them well.
I probably had that experience
early on in driving because throughout your entire learning history you watch
parents drive
and potentially get pulled over. You watch people on TV
get pulled over by blue lights and bad things happen
such that you start associating those. That's observational learning. So what we see is
overlap between these types of learning, so I'm trying to be careful to keep
each thing in its order so that you can see the differences
and the similarities because they're important.
Now, here's a technical drawing.
I hope you appreciate the difficulty of this. Unconditioned stimulus. You need to know
UCR, UCS,
CS, CR. Food. That's represented by the little
brown balls up there. Dog salivates.
The old tongue hanging out, dribbling with slobber.
That's the normal thing. That's unlearned.
It's unconditioned, right? Unconditioned stimulus,
unconditioned response. Different trial,
meaning a different time, ring a bell. Dog may look at you funny but dog doesn't
salivate. Now
order matters. The bell precedes the food. There's different variations on conditioning
but the most effective is when the previously neutral stimulus
almost immediately precedes the actual unconditioned stimulus.
So I ring the bell, give the food, dog salivates, not to the bell but to the food,
right? Ring the bell, give food, ring the bell, give food, ring the bell, give food, ring
the bell, give
food. There's an association building such that eventually
I'll be able to ring the bell and the dog will salivate without the food.
Now I've got a little bit of a re-labeling. This previously neutral thing is now our
conditioned stimulus
because it produces the response the food used to produce
and still does. Now I've got the same behavior but in
conjunction with this new conditioned stimulus so I re-label it.
Is everybody on the same page at this point? Any questions at this point?
Alrighty.
It gets a little more complicated.