How do we learn how to behave?
What does learning mean?

• Learning is relatively permanent.
  • Change in behavior,
  • Change in capacity for behavior
• Due to experience.
  reflexes, instinct, learned behaviors

reflexes we are born with!

instinct?: gut instincts?

• Inborn
• Elicited by environmental stimuli
• Not due to experience
• more complex than reflexes
• example: yawning - contagious yawning

Nonassociative learning: Changes in magnitude of the behavior:
1. habituation

• decreases the magnitude of the reaction.

2. sensitization

• Increases the magnitude of the response.
• ex) being aware of filler words.

We have limited cognitive ability.
Need to focus on the important.
Habituated to harmless, sensitized to harmful.

Not always good:
ex) Habituating to violent video games desensitizes violences?

Associative Learning: Forming connections

Classical Conditioning

• Unconditioned Stimulus & Unconditioned Response
  • No training, no conditioning, the stimuli already elicits a response.
• Neutral Stimulus
  • No reliable response.
• Conditioned Stimulus & Conditioned Response.
  • Make a neutral stimulus a conditioned stimulus, eliciting a response.

Acquisition

Extiction and Spontaneous Recovery

Inhibition vs Excitatory CS

Generalization vs Discrimination

Higher-order Conditioning

Latent Inhibition

Cognitive and Biological influence on Classical Conditioning:

The element of surprise

Taste Aversion

Applying Classical Conditioning:

Overcoming Fear

Addiction

Attitudes and Prejudice

2. Operant Conditioning:

• Learning from consequences (association between behaviors and their outcomes)
• Organism operates on (does something to) the environment
• Change behavior.

spontaneous recovery

generalization:

• Games are not generalized to the real-world:
  • Violence in games does not translate to physical violence.