March 21, 2013 Study Guide: Biology, Cognition, and Learning I. Biological Constraints on Conditioning A. Limits on Classical Conditioning 1. In 1956, learning researcher Gregory Kimble proclaimed, Just about any activity of which the organism is capable can be conditioned andthese responses can be conditioned to any stimulus that the organism can perceive, and 25 years later he acknowledged that he had been proven wrong. 2. Each species predispositions prepare it to learn the associations that enhance its survival. 3. John Garcia challenged the prevailing idea that all associations can be learned equally well and in an experiment with Robert Koelling, he noticed that rats were no longer drinking water from the plastic bottles in the radiation chambers possibly because they associated the plastic tasting water to the sickness triggered by the radiation. 4. Rats were exposed to particular tastes, sounds, and sights (CS) and later to radiation and drugs (US) which caused nausea and vomiting (UR), which showed that if sickened the rats would later avoid that flavor. This violated the notion that for conditioning to occur, the US must immediately follow the CS. The rats also developed aversions to tastes but not to sights or sounds and this contradicted the behaviorists idea that any perceivable stimulus could serve as a CS. 5. Taste aversion is when species avoid a certain food because of a previous sickness. 6. When you eat something that sickens you, you will develop an aversion to the taste, but not to related sights or sounds. 7. This research also helped protect the predator and prey, for example coyote and wolves were tempted to eat sheep carcasses laced with a sickening poison and then developed an aversion to sheep meat and in a different situation, two wolves later penned with a live sheep feared it. 8. Nausea, anxiety, pain, and other bad feelings serve as a good purpose. 9. Michael Domjan and his colleagues report that conditioning is even speedier, stronger, and more durable when the CS is ecologically relevant-something similar to stimuli associated with sexual activity in the natural environment. 10. The tendency to learn behaviors favored by natural selection may help explain why we humans seem to be naturally disposed to learn associations between the color red and sexuality, for example in females enhanced bloodflow produces the red blush and because of situations like these, people may pair red with sex. 11. Studies show that men and women find each other more attractive with something red on them or near them. 12. Ex. When chemotherapy causes nausea and vomiting more than an hour following treatment, can patients develop classically conditioned nausea to sights, sounds, and smells associated with the clinic and when they return to the hospital, these feelings can return. B. Limits on Operant Conditioning 1. Nature sets limits on each species capacity for operant conditioning. 2. Ex. You can use food as a reinforcer to condition a hamster to dig or to rear up, because this is what they do to search for food, but you cannot get them to do things like wash their faces because those behaviors arent associated with food or hunger. 3. Biological constraints predispose organisms to learn associations that are naturally adaptive. 4. Marian Breland and Keller breland witnessed the power of operant conditioning as they spent half a century training 15,000 different animals for movies, amusement parks, etc. 5. Instinctive drift occurs as the animals revert to their biologically predisposed pattern, for example the pigs were taught to pick up large wooden dollars and deposit them in a piggy bank but a short while after, they dropped the coin and pushed it with their snout instead. II. Cognitions Influence on Conditioning A. Cognitive Processes and Classical Conditioning 1. Robert Rescorla and Allan Wagner showed that an animal can learn the predictability of an event, for example if a shock is always preceded by a tone, and then may also be preceded by a light that accompanies the tone, a rat will react with fear to the tone but not to the light, the more predictable the association, the stronger the conditioned response=awareness. 2. Associations can influence attitudes, for example when British children viewed novel cartoon characters alongside either ice cream (Yum!) or Brussels Sprouts (Yuk!), they came to like best the ice cream associated characters. 3. Without any conscious memory for the pairings, the participants formed more gut-level liking for the characters associated with the positive stimuli. 4. Conditioned likes and dislikes are even stronger when people notice and are aware of the associations they have learned. 5. People receiving therapy for alcohol dependence may be given alcohol spiked with a nauseating drug and to some extent it will work. When there is awareness of the nausea being induced by the drug the associations are weakened. 6. Even in classical conditioning, it is not simply the CS-US association but also the thought that counts. B. Cognitive Processes and Operant Conditioning 1. B.F. Skinner granted the biological underpinnings of behavior and the existence of private thought processes. 2. For Skinner, thoughts and emotions were behaviors that follow the same laws as other behaviors. 3. Animals on a fixed interval reinforcement schedule respond more and more frequently as the time approaches when a response will produce a reinforcer; the animals behave as if they expected that repeating the response would soon produce the reward. 4. Cognitive map- a mental representation of the layout of ones environment. For example, after exploring a maze, rats act as if they have learned a cognitive map of it. 5. Latent Learning- learning that occurs but is not apparent until there is an incentive to demonstrate it, for example children may learn from watching a parent but demonstrate the learning only much later, as needed. 6. There is more to learning than associating a response with a consequence; there is also cognition. 7. Promising people a reward for a task they already enjoy can backfire. 8. Excessive rewards can destroy intrinsic motivation-the desire to perform a behavior effectively and for its own sake, for example rewarding children with toys or candy for reading diminishes the time they spend reading. 9. If I have to be bribed into doing this, it must not be worth doing for its own sake. 10. Extrinsic motivation- a desire to perform a behavior to receive promised rewards or avoid threatened punishment, for example reading this chapter since there is a grade at stake. 11. Rewards used to signal a job well done can be effective. III. Learning by Observation A. Observational Learning 1. Observational learning- learning by observing others, for example watching our sister burn her fingers on a hot stove teaches us not to do that. 2. Modeling- the process of observing and imitating a specific behavior. 3. Albert Bandura is the pioneering researcher of observational learning. 4. Example: child watches teacher pound, kick and throw around the large inflated Bobo doll and yelled Sock him in the noseHit him downKick him, later the teacher takes away the childs toys and says they are for the other children and when the child is left alone with the Bobo doll, the child reacts the same way the adult had and says the same things. 5. By watching a model, we experience vicarious reinforcement or vicarious punishment, and we learn to anticipate a behaviors consequences in situations like those we are observing. 6. fMRI scans show that when people observe someone winning a reward their own brain reward systems activate as if they themselves literally had won the reward. B. Mirrors and Imitation in the Brain 1. A monkey used for an experiment attached to wires that buzzed when the monkey moved, showed some form of sensation when it saw others eating and its buzzer buzzed. 2. Mirror Neurons- frontal lobe neurons that some scientists believe fire when performing certain actions or when observing another doing so. The brains mirroring of anothers action may enable imitation and empathy. For example, when a monkey grasps, holds, or tears something, these neurons fire, and they likewise fire when the monkey observes another doing so. 3. Rhesus macaque monkeys rarely made up quickly after a fight unless they grew up with forgiving older macaques. 4. Our catch-phrases, hem lengths, ceremonies, foods, traditions, vices, and fads all spread by one person copying another. 5. By 8 to 16 months, infants imitate various novel gestures. By 12 months, they look where an adult is looking. By 14 months, children imitate acts modeled on TV. By 2 and a half young humans surpass chimps at social tasks. 6. 2-5 year olds over imitate, no matter where they are located in the world. 7. Humans like monkeys have brains that support empathy and imitation 8. Regardless, childrens brains enable their empathy and their ability to infer anothers mental state, an ability known as theory of mind. 9. The brains response to observing others makes emotions contagious; through its neurological echo, our brain stimulates and vicariously experiences what we observe. 10. Observing others postures, faces, voices, and writing styles, we unconsciously synchronize our own to theirs-which helps us feel what they are feeling, for example seeing a loved ones pain, our faces mirror the others emotion. 11. The pain imagined by an empathic romantic partner has triggered some of the same brain activity experienced by the loved one actually having the pain. 12. Brain activity underlies our intensely social nature. IV. Applications of Observational Learning A. Prosocial Effects 1. Prosocial behavior- positive constructive, helpful behavior. The opposite of antisocial behavior 2. Many business organizations effectively use behavior modeling to help new employees learn communications, sales, and customer service skills. 3. People who exemplify nonviolent, helpful behavior can also prompt similar behavior in others, for example Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King who both drew on the power of modeling, making nonviolent action a powerful force for social change in both countries. 4. Socially responsive toddlers who readily imitate their parents tend to become preschoolers with a strong internalized conscience. 5. Models are most effective when their actions and words are consistent, for example to encourage children to read, read to them and surround them with books and people who read. 6. Exposed to a hypocrite, they tend to imitate the hypocrisy-by doing what the model did and saying what the model said. B. Antisocial Effects 1. Critics note that being aggressive could be passed along by parents genes. 2. Young monkeys separated from their mothers and subjected to high levels of aggression grew up to be aggressive themselves. 3. The lessons we learn as children are not easily replaced as adults, and they are sometimes revistited on future generations. 4. TV teaches children that bullying is an effective way to control others, that free and easy sex brings pleasure without later misery or disease, or that men should be tough and women gentle. 5. During the first 18 years, most children in developed countries spend more time watching TV than they spend in school. At 75 years of age one spent watching a total of 9 years of TV. 6. TV viewers are learning about life from a storyteller; in the late twentieth century the average child watched 8000 TV murders and 100,000 acts of violence before finishing elementary school. 7. Between 1998-2006 prime time violence increased by 75% and between 1996-97 it was revealed that more than 3000 cable programs aired with 6 in 10 shows featuring violence; 74% of violence being unpunished, 58% did not show victims pain, nearly half involved an attractive predator, and half of the violence being justified, this all causes the violence viewing effect.