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How does the role of expectation in conditioning challenge behaviorists ideas?
Familiar events are familiar and already have expectations associated with them, which means that making new conditioning difficult
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What is the role of the Amygdala in fear conditioning?
- If connections linking the Amygdala and the Midbrain are disrupted a rat does not show its behavioral freezing response
- If connections between the Amygdala and the Thalamus are severed the Autonomic responses associated with fear cease
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Any species that forges for food needs to
Develop a mechanism to learn what food is poisonous and what isnt
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To have adaptive values an animal's mechanism of determining what is poisonous and what isn't should
- Have rapid learning that occurs in one or two trials.
- Have conditioning that acne take place over very long intervals, perhaps up to several hours because toxic foods don't always affect them immediately
- Develop an aversion to the smell or taste of the food rather than its ingestion
- Have learned aversions occur more often with new foods than familiar ones
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How has cancer patients' discomfort been eased by our understanding of food aversions?
They realized that their bodies were having an aversion to the last foods they ate before treatment and started giving them unusual candies before chemo
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Biological preparedness
A propensity for learning particular kinds of associations over others
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Operant conditioning
A type of learning where the consequences of an organisms behavior determine whether it will be repeated in the future
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The cerebellum plays an important role in
Eye blinking conditioning
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The Amygdala plays an important role in
Fear conditioning
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Classical conditioning was embraced by
Behaviorists such as John B. Watson
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John B. Watson viewed classical conditioning as
A foundation for a model of human behvior
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As a behaviorist Watson believed that
No higher level functions, such as thinking or awareness needed to be invoked to understand behavior
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Later researchers showed that the underlying mechanism of classical conditioning
Turned out to be more complex and more interesting than the simple association between a CS and a US that behaviorists believed in
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Classical conditioning involves
Setting up expectations and is sensitive to the degree the CS functions as a genuine predictor of the US, indicating that classical conditioning can involve some degree of cognition
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The evolutionary aspects of classical conditioning show that
Each species is biologically predisposed to acquire particular CS-US associations based on its evolutionary history
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In short classical conditioning
Is not an arbitrary mechanism that merely forms associations. Rather it is a sophisticated mechanism that evolved precisely because it had adaptive value
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Classical conditioning can be though of as an
Exercise in pairing neuronal stimulus with a meaningful event or stimulus.
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Ivan Pavlov's initial work
Paired a neural tone (a CS) with a meaningful act: dinnertime (a US)
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As Pavlov and others demonstrated
The pairing of a CS and US during the acquisition phase of classical conditioning eventually allows the CS, all by itself to elicit a response called a conditional response (CR)
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What are cognitive maps and why are they a challenge to behaviorism?
- They are mental representations of the physical features of the environment.
- They are a challenge because that would mean that rats aren't just being conditioned
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Latent learing
Something that is learned but it is not manifested as a behavioral change until sometime in the future
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Cognitive map
A mental representation of the physical features of the environment
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Why might cognitive factors have been a factor in people's trust of Bernie Madoff?
They caused people to ignore red flags because they considered him trustworthy
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How do specific brain structures contribute to the process of reinforcement?
The release of dopamine as a reward system in the brain encourages reinforcment
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What explains a rat's behavior in a T maze?
It will forage for food. If it finds food in the right half of a T maze it will check the left half of a T maze next. It will also remember that there is no food in the right because it already ate it
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Studies with both animal and people
highlight the operation of a neural reward center that impacts learning
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Like Watson, Skinner tried to explain behavior without considering
Cognitive, neural or evolutionary mechanisms. However as with classical conditioning this approach turned out to be incomplete
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Operant conditioning as devolved by B.F. Skinner is
A process where behaviors are reinforced and therefore become more likely to occur, where complex behaviors are shaped through reinforcement, and where contingencies between actions and outcomes are critical in determining how an organism's behaviors will be displayed
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Operant conditioning has
Clear cognitive components: Organisms behave as though they have expectations about outcomes of their actions and adjust their actions accordingly.
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Cognitive influences can sometimes
Override the trial by trial feedback that usually influences learning
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The association mechanisms that underlie Operant conditioning have their roots in
- Evolutionary biology.
- Some things are relatively easily learned and others are difficult, the history of the species is usually the best clue as to which will be which
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Observational learning
A condition where learning takes place by watching actions of others
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What did the Bobo doll experiment show about children and aggressive behavior?
When a preschooler was allowed to watch an adult abuse a Bobo doll they were twice as likely to copy those actions (observational learning)
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Diffusion chain
A process where individuals initially learn a behavior by observing another individual perform that behavior and then serve as a model from which other individuals learn the behavior
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What do mirror neurons do?
They may play a critical role in the imitation of behavior as well as the prediction of future behavior
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What are the cognitive differences between chimpanzees raised among humans vs raised in the wild?
Chimps raised around humans were much more likely to show specific observational learning than chimps who didn't
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Observational learning is based on
cognitive mechanisms such as attention, perception, memory or reasoning
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Observational learning also has roots in
Evolutionary biology and for the most basic of reasons: it has survival value.
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Observational learning has important
Social and cultural consequences, as it appears to be well suited for transmission of novel behaviors across individuals
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The mirror neuron system becomes active during
Observational learning, and many of the same brain regions are active during observation and performance of a skill.
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Observational learning is closely tied to
Parts of the brain that are involved in action
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Eating and catching rates of birds in Alaska vs Colorado
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Where are mirror neurons found?
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Just important to memorize yo
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Three groups of rats in a maze
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Cognitive Psychology
- A term first used by Ulrich Meister in the 1960s to describe a new area of psychological inquiry
- Cognition refers to all processes where the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered and used
- Concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations
- Vague description lets it be involved in everything a human could do
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