Chapter 7: Learning

Robert Rescorla

________ and Allan Wagner showed that an animal can learn the predictability of an event.

Spontaneous Recovery

________: the reappearance, after a pause, of an extinguished conditioned response.

Instinctive Drift

________: the tendency of learned behavior to gradually revert to biologically predisposed patterns.

Arthur Schopenhaue

________ said that important ideas are first ridiculed, then attacked, and finally taken for granted.

Palvov

________ started an experiment from seeing that seeing food, the food dish, or the person serving the food, caused a dog to instinatiously salivate.

Variable interval schedules

________ tend to produce slow, steady responding.

Pavolv

________ tried to understand the acqusition, intial learning, by asking "How much time should elapse between presenting the NS (the tone, the light, the touch) and the US (the food) ?.

Preparedness

________: a biological predisposition to learn associations, such as between taste and nausea, that have survival value.

Skinner box

A rat in a(n) ________ learns that a light reliably signals a food delivery, the rat will work to turn on the light.

Habits

________ form when we repeat behaviors in a given context.

Intellectual history

________ is often made by people who risk going to extremes in pushing ideas to their limits.

Early behaviorists

________ believed that rats and dogs learned behaviors could be reduced to mindless mechanisms, so there was no need to consider cognition.

Reinforcement

________: in operant conditioning, any event that strengthens the behavior it follows.

Ivan Pavlov

________ conducted famous experiments in the twentieth- century.

Businesses

________ use behavior modeling to help new employees learn communications, sales, and customer service skills.

discrimination

In operant conditioning, ________ occurs when an organism learns that certain responses, but not others, will be reinforced.

Humans

________ have brains that support empathy and imitation.

nonverbal organisms

Shaping can also help us understand what ________ perceive.

Pavlovs dogs

________ also learned to respond to the sound of a particular tone and not to other tones.

Salvation

________ in response to the tone is learned and is called conditioned response (CR)

ratio schedules

Fixed- ________ reinforce behavior after a set number of responses.

CR

Conditioned Response (________): in classical conditioning, a learned response to a previously neutral (but now conditioned) stimulus (CS)

shock

If a(n) ________ always is preceded by a tone, and then may also be preceded by a light that accompanies the tone.

CS

Conditioned Stimulus (________): in classical conditioning, an originally neutral stimulus that, after association with an unconditioned stimulus (US), comes to trigger a conditioned response (CR)

Skinner

________ believed that thoughts and emotions were behaviors that follow the same laws as other behaviors.

Unpredictable reinforcement

________ is what makes gambling and fly fishing so hard to extinguish even when they dont produce the desired results.

Extinction

________: the diminishing of a conditioned response; occurs in classical conditioning when an unconditioned stimulus (US) does not follow a conditioned stimulus (CS); occurs in operant conditioning when a response is no longer reinforced.

Stimulus

________: any event or situation that evokes a response.

Law of Effect

________: Thorndikes principle that behaviors followed by favorable consequences become more likely, and that behaviors followed by unfavorable consequences become less likely.

Generalization

________: the tendency, once a response has been conditioned, for stimuli similar to the conditioned stimulus to elicit similar responses.

Physical punishment

________ may increase aggression by modeling violence as a way to cope with problems.

classical conditioning

Unconditioned Response (UR): in ________, an unlearned, naturally occurring response (such as salivation) to an unconditioned stimulus (US) (such as food in the mouth)

Criminal behavior

________ is influenced more by swift and sure punishers than by the threat of severe sentences.

Cognitive Learning

________: the acquisition of mental information, whether by observing events, by watching others or through language.

Mirror Neurons

________: frontal lobe neurons that some scientists believe fire when we perform certain actions or observe another doing so.

variable ratio schedules

Because reinforcers increase as the number of responses increases, ________ produce high rates of responding.

Complex animals

________ can learn to associate their own behavior with its outcomes.

positive reinforcer

A(n) ________ is any stimulus that, when presented after a response, strengthens the response.

Rewards

________ are most likely to increase productivity if the desired performance is both well defined and achievable.

Extrinsic Motivation

________: a desire to perform a behavior to receive promised rewards or avoid threatened punishment.

Childrens brains

________ enable their empathy and their ability to infer anothers mental state, an ability known as theory of mind.

B F Skinner

________ (1904- 1990) was a college English major and aspiring writer.

Skinners response

________ was that External consequences already haphazardly control peoples behavior Applications of Operant Conditioning.

Intrinsic Motivation

________: a desire to perform a behavior effectively for its own sake.

response rates

Overall, ________ are higher when reinforcement is linked to the number of responses (a ratio schedule) rather than to time (an interval schedule)

Behaviorism

________: the view that psychology (1) should be an objective science that (2) studies behavior without reference to mental processes.

particular taste

When a(n) ________ accompanies a drug that influences immune responses, the taste by itself may come to produce an immune response Operant Conditioning.

better predictor

Although the light is always followed by the shock, it adds no new information; the tone is a(n) ________.

Food cravings

________: Classical conditioning makes dieting difficult.

Negative reinforcement

________ increases the frequency of a preceding behavior.