Now,
stimuli can vary in their qualities;
intensity, duration, frequency, physical resemblance to one another,
So, I got a bell ringing. Ding,
feed the dog, bing, feed the dog, right?
Well that bell is a stimulus. It has an auditory sound to it. I could do the same
thing with a light.
I could flash a light of a certain hue. Now
dogs seeing in black and white still detect shades of difference, right,
and so I could flash a light of a certain hue
and that hue only predicts food. All the other Hughes don't predict food.
So, I do it, food, do it, food, do it, food, and then I can turn on the light
of that hue, and I'll get salvation just as if I was ringing the bell and doing it. That's
what
Pavlov found out. It didn't really matter what the stimulus was
that was previously neutral. Anything would do it so
let's say I'm going at a wavelength of 550 nanometers.
I don't know where that is on the spectrum. Anybody know? I don't know, ya'll know ROYGBV
right? Red, orange, yellow, green,
Let's just say it's a pure green for the sake of argument. It's in the
middle of the spectrum
right, ultrared,
that way, ultraviolet that way. So I got this purer
550 nm controlled stimulus. Flash it, give the food, flash it, give the food. Now
I flash it, I get salvation. But let's say I go slightly this way.
So, I'm now flashing a light that's a little more yellow than the pure tone.
Not the hue that had been associated,
right, with the food but it's kind of like
the hue that was associated with the hue and I get a partial response.
That's stimulus generalization. I'm getting a response to a stimulus that's not
the conditioned stimulus but is close enough to it,
right? So, in terms of my friend
I might have hung out with somebody that looked like my friend. It wouldn't be the
conditioned stimulus but he might have looked enough like my friend to create
that sense of craving. To the degree that you get no response
it's discriminated which is the opposite of how most people think about
discrimination.
When most people think about discrimination socially, as we'll see in the
social chapter,
they're talking about treating every single person as if they fit one label,
that's often erroneous, right? What are they doing?
They're taking that label and they're generalizing it to everybody who fits that
label, but in this case
discrimination is actually distinguishing
from, in other words making
fine distinctions, not generalizing,
right? So I now go out here to a red
a red hue and I get no salivation. That's stimulus
discrimination. I go way out here and I get a violet
and I get no no salivation. That's stimulus discrimination,
and I find it easier to make it look like that
because that's a little bit a little bit
academic in the other way. You ever been bit by a dog?
I've been bit by a dog. I don't
hate all dogs, right, but I did
have a strong aversion to the dog who bit me
after it bit me because the next time I went near that previously neutral
stimulus that applied the unconditioned stimulus of pain,
right, I then had an adrenaline response which made me feel uncomfortable.
That's a physiological thing and this is where I say it applies to
operant and classical conditioning. This is classical conditioning,
that sense of foreboding you have is cognitive but that
feeling of your butterflies in your stomach or your heart fluttering or
your heart
rate changing or your breath changing or tremoring in your hands or clamminess,
those things are physiologically
conditioned in a classical sense. So that sense
of that nervousness that was physical was classically conditioned
to the dog that bit me, right?
You see? Previously neutral but
what if I've started feeling that way to a dog that was kind of like that dog,
maybe another German Shepherd but not the same one.
Then that would be stimulus generalization causing that
feeling that I was having physiologically. If I went the other way,
I still got a large dog and it has a similarity
to the stimulus right? So, it's causing a response
but if I get far enough away from it in terms of size or appearance or whatever.
Now I'm not having the same physiological response. Doesn't mean I
couldn't
eventually acquire that but now it's stimulus generalization,
or excuse me discrimination. Out here where I have no response with Kitty
right, Kitty is not similar enough to the dog to cause it, it's
stimulus discrimination. Now,
operant side of the house says if I feel
this uncomfortable feeling that comes with the fight-or-flight response
I leave. As we'll see, leaving is a voluntary behavior, right?
Avoiding the situation is a voluntary behavior. It could become that I
now start avoiding all dogs that resemble this because it causes me
this aversive feeling and so now I'm going to be more likely
to avoid them because leaving is negatively reinforced because it removes
the aversive feeling.
So, I'm more likely to leave or avoid the situation. We'll talk more about that. Everybody
get the concept of stimulus generalization and discrimination?
With our conditioned stimulus, we're going to get the response.
With things that are close enough to the individual organism that resemble
it enough,
whether it's a bell or a tone or a hue or a sign
or a physical creature or object,
I'll get some response but not as strong a response as the original conditioned
stimulus.
The further away I get from that conditioned stimulus in terms of resemblance,
the less likely I am to get the response.
Now, this is important for survival.
You talk about the functionalist William James.
We can go back to that.
What does that do for us?
Well, pain, fear, and sickness as I said before
you can establish these aversions in one trial. To get a dog to slobber to a bell
or to get you to slobber to a bell which we could do just as easily with the
exact same procedure,
right? We would have to do it over and over and over and over again to establish in
multiple trials
though the acquisition phase. But pain, fear, and sickness only require one trial.
Touch the stove how many times? One time
and you learn it, right? Get assaulted on a corner at gunpoint,
how many times do you have to have that happen before you now have that aversion
to that corner?
One time. Stick your finger in a light socket,
one time. Put a 9 volt battery on your braces,
I did that one time. That was all it took. It was well established.
Now, you may have had a food that you ate when you were younger
that you can't stand to eat or smell now. Anybody got that condition?
That's normal. That's normal. It can last a lifetime
because of this classical conditioning and the operant conditioning combined,
Mowrer's two factor theory.
What happened? You ate something, you got sick,
then smelling or seeing that food again
gave you that oouuuu feeling, right? Did you ever drink too much?
Not ya'll of course. Some people drink too much, right?
They drink too much Jack Daniels for example and they (sound of vomit)
puke everywhere. They get really really sick
and then the next time they see or smell that brown liquor they go
ooouuu... not voluntary, right? It's an involuntary reaction. It's a physical
quiver, alright? Maybe it was shrimp
that made you sick, and the next time you saw the shrimp and smelled the shrimp, you went ooouuuuu.
I don't want that. But you don't think about it. It just happens. That's a classically
conditioned reaction
that does what functionally? Makes you avoid things that might kill you.
If you can imagine being in the wild and coming up on some berries,
being very hungry, you ate them but they were poisonous and you didn't know that,
if you survived, the last thing you'd ever want to do is eat those berries again,
and your body is prepared to help you do that.
Now, what's interesting and different between poison berries
and shrimp that make you sick or the brown liquor that makes you sick
is that in the latter two cases, it's not actually the shrimp that made you sick.
It was bacteria that made you sick, right? It wasn't
the brown liquor, it was the alcohol inside of it.
So, now let's look at stimulus generalization and discrimination.
So somebody who gets sick on sea food may say, OH, I don't like any seafood
right, to the degree that more types of seafood give them the same feeling. That's
stimulus generalization, right? So another person might go I can't drink Jack Daniels
anymore, it makes me feel queasy,
and I can't drink Wild Turkey either cause it's so similar
to the other one. But it wasn't the brown liquor cause then they can go and drink a beer,
right? Why can they do that? Because the unconditioned stimulus wasn't the brown
liquor, it was the
alcohol in the liquor. Now, the alcohol is in the beer
but the beer is dissimilar in smell and taste from the original
conditioned stimulus of brown liquor that they can now ingest it without any
problem.
Same thing with the shrimp, right? So
may be the shrimp did it, but if you could eat clams
or if you could eat something else that doesn't make you sick you may not feel that way.
Now the key is this. You can undo this! You can extinguish this yourself. It's how
you get rid of phobias.
It's also how you get rid of conditioned taste aversion. Most people don't because they just
avoid the food. Why do they avoid the food?
Made them sick and it feels weird to smell it but if they make themselves smell it,
if they make themselves eat it, and it's properly cooked, or they
don't take too much of it in the case of the liquor, right, and they don't get sick
again
then guess what happens? You get an extinction of that reaction.
So, my son, I think he was five at the time, maybe four,
used to like to go get vanilla ice cream with sprinkles
at this place that was in Blacksburg where we lived at the time, and if you
offered to go do that he'd be happy to do it any day.
We'd go on occasion when I had a little extra money in my pocket,
so it wasn't an everyday thing. One day I said, you want to go get some vanilla
ice cream with sprinkles, he's like, absolutely and we go.
He eats it but he feels a little weird at that point. Later, we're going to go to the
high school football game cause his older sister
is the lead snare in the band and we always go up to watch the game.
He likes sports and she's playing so we go to the game. It's like literally two
blocks from our house
and he's looking a little pinked. I'm like are you OK man?
He's like yeah. You want to go? Yeah. We go cause if you're a dad that's kind of what happens. I say
you okay? You say you okay. We go on.
Alright, we went and we're walking across the parking lot and all of the sudden he projectile vomits, blooh...
like Godzilla, looked like this big beam of stuff coming out
cause I happened to be looking down. And it all goes out in the parking lot. It's this
white milky mixture with all these little colors swirled in it.
It's vanilla ice cream with sprinkles in a new form,
right, and I'm like, damn, you're sick!
And you know how it is after you throw up sometimes you feel better?
I'm like do you want to go home. He's like, no. I'm okay now.
So, I'm a dad. We go see the game and I don't think anything else about it.
Later I take his temperature, he's got a fever. He's got an illness, right?
I don't think anything about it but a few weeks go by, I'm like you want to go get some vanilla ice cream and
sprinkles, he's like,
no, that's okay.
Now, this is at least a couple hours after he's eaten the food so it seems like for
conditioned taste aversions, you have this long period where usually like you got to ring
the bell, give the food, ring the bell, give the food, for food it sometimes takes
hours to become sick after you've taken in some kind of a virus or a bacteria
and so here it was a totally unrelated event that I recognized
after the second time. He said no the first time. The second time, like you want to go get some ice cream? He's like
no, that's okay.
He's not cognitive at five or four years old.
He just doesn't want to go, right? So,
I realize this and I do I'm like, Oh! Conditioned taste aversion!
So what do I do? I bribe him to eat
vanilla ice cream with sprinkles. I convince him to do it.
I put some pressure on it and he eats it
and he what? Doesn't get sick. Therefore
the power of that stimulus to cause the
aversion is gone and now he eats ice cream fine. However, had I not done that, it would
have been very easy for him to go
a lifetime not wanting vanilla ice cream anymore
and at the age that he got as an adult he might never know why that was because
what happened was
so early in his life that he may not remember the occurrence and he probably
doesn't remember the occurrence. I remember it
because it fit perfectly with what I was teaching. I said I can use that.
That's a good example, very real world. A non-real world example
was coyote attacks. So, coyotes kill sheep.
Ranchers don't like coyotes killing sheep so ranchers kill coyotes
and people who like coyotes get upset about that and they say, well can't you think of something
else to do besides kill them?
And they say, well, they're eating the sheep. Well, maybe you could think of something else.
So Garcia, the first Hispanic to earn a PhD in psychology,
and other colleagues had this idea and they tested it out and it was amazing. I
saw a film or I might not have believed it.
You'll just have to believe me, cause I don't have the film, it's very rare.
They took captured wild coyote
kept it in a pen, didn't feed it, coyote's hungry,
right? They now put it into another pen
and they give it sheep mutton. It's got the hide and the little bits of fat and flesh
on the hide and the coyote does what coyotes do when they're hungry, eats
it up. Unbeknownst to the coyote it's laced with lithium chloride tablets,
right? Coyote eats it and about 20-30 minutes later
it's going, bleh (sounds of vomiting), doing that projectile vomiting, right?
You know how dogs do, they
alright, (vomit sounds), so it's puking its guts out which was by design,
coyote doesn't know what's going on. They then take coyote back to the original pen where they were holding him and they
don't feed him.
Coyote stays hungry. Next day they bring coyote in to this
other pen and and there's a live sheep there and the coyote
is hungry and you think, this is going to be bad. Sheeps
are not really good at defending themselves. So, it does what all of them do.
Prepares to die. And the coyote comes at it to go for that throat
and gets right up into that, that wool,
that hide, smells the sheep that was, right, previously not only neutral
actually pleasurable because it was what you ate to live. And he goes...
bbbuuuuu....you can see the coyote like shiver
and then back up and appraise the situation,
and then it goes back cause it's hungry and it tries it again and this time moves
even further back.
The sheep just stands there like this prepared to die
and eventually probably just by accident moves forward a little bit and the coyote
moves backwards
and the sheep moves forward and the coyote moves backwards, and pretty soon the sheep is running the coyote
around the pen.
Coyote is terrified of the sheep because of what? Conditioned taste aversion,
right? Now, that shows you the difference between lab and reality, right?
In a lab, it shows a really powerful effect. How are you going to do that in reality?
And they try, they put like, they put the hide of sheep up on polls laced with,
but there's too many coyotes and eventually they're going to get hungry
enough that they're going to do what?
They're going to persevere through that aversion. They're going to kill it. They're
not going to get sick and they'll extinguish that conditioned reaction.
So, powerful, and another implication is in cancer treatment. Today we do much better
than we used to. Back when I was in school,
it was in 1996, I watched a video on chemotherapy where I saw a physician liken
chemotherapy to throwing a hand grenade in the body and hoping you kill
more bad cells than good.
So, people get really really really sick on it,
right? It makes them not want to eat. It makes them not want to do anything.
And so back in the old days, they would often tell patients, look honey, you're not
going to want to eat
much of anything after you get this treatment, so what I would do is go out and
treat yourself before you come into treatment, right? Go out and have a really big
meal,
something you really love and it enjoy it cause you're not gonna feel like eating for a
week.
And guess what they did by accident? Condition people to hate their favorite
foods
and that conditioning is also tied into things like hospital settings and dentists.
Dentists cause pain. Dentist was previously neutral,
eventually people want to avoid the dentist because it becomes a stimulus
associated with pain,
and these phobias, conditioned responses and aversions can last a
lifetime
after being learned in only one trial. However, extinction
can occur.