Learning

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Learning
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What is it to learn?
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Classical Conditioning

• Pavlov
• experiments on digestive system of dogs

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Meat powder
Salivation
NO RESPONSE
Tone
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Meat powder
Salivation

Tone
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Classically conditioned aversion response
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Loud noise
Aversion
NO RESPONSE
RAT
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Loud noise
Aversion

RAT
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Extinction
Aversion
RAT
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Extinction
NO RESPONSE
RAT
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Generalization and Discrimination
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White, furry
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White
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Furry
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Green, hard
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Operant Conditioning

• Positive reinforcement
• Negative reinforcement
• Punishment

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Positive reinforcement
B
B, Reward
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Punishment
B, Punish- ment
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Negative reinforcement
B
Aversive, B stimulus
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Punishment

• swift
• sure
• severe

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Behaviorism as a Philosophy
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• Philosophy vs. Psychology
• psychology empirical observations of the way
  people actually behave
• philosophy questions such as What can be known?

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• Behaviorism defines an epistemology
• What can--in principle--be known?

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• What can be known?
• only legitimate subject matter for psychology
• observable,
• measurable,
• publically verifiable,
• external behaviors

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The case against mentalisms
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• Mentalisms terms that refer to internal mental
  states and processes

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Why did I hit you?
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• I was angry
• because you saw me standing there
• and you didnt care if you stepped on my toe
• because you are inconsiderate
• because you think youre better than others

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• I was angry
• because you saw me standing there
• and you didnt care if you stepped on my toe
• because you are inconsiderate
• because you think youre better than others

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• the problem with mentalisms
• the internal mental state doesnt cause the
  behavior and doesnt explain the behavior

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• at best, internal mental states accompany the
  behavior
• they do not add any increment of knowledge beyond
  knowledge of the behavior

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I was angry at you

• I hit you

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• Functional analysis of behavior

S
R
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We see the behavior, we see the antecedent

• Why infer an intervening mental state?

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Criticisms of Behaviorism
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• Ethical concerns
• prediction and control of behavior
• Generalizability
• Restricts and trivializes the subject-matter of
  psychology
• Truth claim
• Problem of rewards
• Empirical refutation

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• Truth claim
• The theory claims that all human
  behavior--including theorizing--is determined by
  environmental contingencies
• The theory is true

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therefore, alternative theoretical claims are
also merely the product of environmental
contingencies and are no more or less true
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The problem of rewards
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• Captain Crunch functions as a reward only if the
  person likes it, finds it rewarding, prefers it
  to something else (ketchup)
• were right back where we started--with mentalisms

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Social Learning Theory
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Behaviorism

• S

R
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Social Learning Theory
O
S
R
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Organism

• Cognitive factors
• Attending
• Perceiving
• Deciding on an appropriate response

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Modelling
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• Bandura, 1960s
• Children who observed adults beating a Bobo doll
  later imitated the behavior
• they were not directly rewarded for the behavior

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• Modelling (Imitation, Social Learning)
• behavior reproduced in the absence of
  reinforcement
• Vicarious reinforcement
• behavior reproduced if someone else is rewarded

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• Expectancies
• the confirmation of our predictions is in itself
  rewarding
• Perceived self-efficacy
• the belief that one can perform a specific
  behavior

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