November 16, 2012

Conditioning concepts

Acquisition phase where neutral stimulus is repeatedly pair with unconditioned stimulus.
Person or animal is acquiring recognition. A gradual rise in the association of things. Then
theres a spike, and this association accelerates. Response from the person or organisms
starts slowly then spikes. Eventually, it flattens off again, and you get a stable pattern of
responding. Once the response curve flattens off, we call that learning, because thats
when the association has taken hold, becoming permanent. Goal : you want dog to drool in
response to stimulus regularly fairly stable fully conditioned stimulus
Second-order conditioning this is what they wanted to get to at some point in
behaviourism. They wanted to explain complex conditioning. The idea that you could pair
a new conditioned stimulus with a previous conditioned stimulus. ASK you deal with preexisting behaviors and instincts.
Extinction you present the conditioned stimulus by itself. You start off with a fairly regular
curve, then it drops off dramatically. Because the animal is used to some sort of reward for
the stimulus that theyre no longer getting. Results in extinguishment of the conditioned
response. If you do this too long, the conditioned response will become extinguished.
Spontaneous recovery - has to do with the permanency of the conditioned response.
Pavlov noticed that given a break, the dog gives a better response. You wait a day after
the extinction process. Then the next day, theres a spontaneous recovery; it returns to a
higher response. Why? Maybe residual response left after extinction.
Generalization involves idea that a dog/person can generalize a sound/visual stimulus to
other sounds/other visual stimuli. When you generalize, you start off with a certain pitch,
of a bell maybe. Until its associated with something. What if you change the pitch of the
bell? If the dog reacts the same, it has generalized all sounds. you end up developing
what looks like a normal curve. The mean, or peak of curve is the original stimuli. A
chicken will have a very spiky graph will only respond to a very small range of stimuli
Discrimination opposite of generalization. When organism can detect difference between
old stimulus and new stimulus. Is the animal able to detect the difference at all?

John B. Watson

Little Albert
Psychological Care of Infant and Child
Observational methods
Freud was doing his thing. Watson did something else. He was hellbent on getting rid of
psychological language. Hated pleasure and non-pleasure.
What makes him famous? Give me a dozen healthy infants, well formed.
Psychology is very organized around the political. Watson is responding to this thing in
Europe, that they had been talking about how wealth is innate, or cleverness is innate.
Watson, responding to this, says, NO. This is all purely environmental. By modifying the
environment, I can modify the individual.
The goal of a public school has changed. Now theyre focusing on vocations.
Watson wanted to see if humans reacted the same way dogs did.
Second major contribution human research.

Hybridization: Homo erectus migrated out of Africa into Eurasia. Homo sapiens evolves from
homo erectus and then also disperses, migrating out of Africa. Then, they encounter their
cousins, the Neanderthals. The homo sapiens that are in Eurasia then interbreed with the
Neanderthals, resulting in gene flow. This accounts for the 1-4 percent specific gene similarities.
No hybridization: Homo erectus migrated out of Africa into Eurasia. However, there are already
differences in genes due to geographic isolation, so by the time homo erectus evolves into homo
sapiens, theres already something differences in their genes. ** READ AGAIN.