LEARNING

• Behaviorist Perspective: A relatively permanent change in behavior that arises from practice or experience.
• Cognitive Perspective: Mental change that may or may not be associated with changes in behavior.
• Associative Learning: Occurs when we make a connection or an association between two events.
• Conditioning: Occurs through observing and imitating another’s behavior.
• Classical Conditioning: Learning process in which a neutral stimulus becomes associated with an innately meaningful stimulus and acquires the capacity to elicit a similar response.
• Stimulus: Something that causes a response.
• Unconditioned Stimulus (UCS): A stimulus that you did not have to be taught to react to.
• Unconditioned Response (UCR): A response from a stimulus that you did not have to be trained to react to.
• Conditioned Stimulus (CS): A stimulus that you have to be taught to react to.
• Conditioned Response (CR): A response to a stimulus that you had to be trained to react to.
• Neutral Stimulus: A stimulus that doesn’t mean anything to you yet.
• Pavlov studied how a person could control a dog’s behavior, focusing on dog drool.
• Pavlov rang the bell as he showed the dog food, causing the dog to drool.
• Conditioned Fear and Anxiety: Many of our phobias and fears are a result of classical conditioning.
• Acquisition: The learning of the conditioned response.
• Extinction: A gradual weakening and disappearance of the conditioned response.
• Stimulus Generalization: An organism that has learned a response to a specific stimuli responds in the same way to stimuli that are similar to the original stimulus.
• Counterconditioning: A fear reduction technique in which pleasant stimuli are associated with fear-evoking stimuli so that the fear evoking stimuli lose their aversive qualities.
• Flooding: A behavioral fear-reduction technique based on principles of classical conditioning.
• Systematic desensitization: A technique in which a hierarchy of fear-evoking stimuli is presented which the person remains relaxed.
• Attention: The process of focusing on a specific stimulus or task.
• In adults, aversive conditioning is often used to combat addictions such as smoking or alcoholism.
• Variable-ratio Schedule: Reinforcement of a behavior after an unpredictable (variable) number of responses.
• Retention: The process of remembering information over time.
• Secondary Reinforcer: Reinforcers that acquire their positive value through an organism’s experience and are learned or conditioned reinforcers.
• Variable-interval Schedule: Reinforcement of a behavior at unpredictable (variable) time intervals.
• Studies have shown the amount of violent TV watched by children in elementary school is correlated with their aggressiveness as teenagers and with their criminal behavior as adults.
• Homicides doubled between 1957 and 1974, coinciding with the introduction of television.
• Reproduction: The process of reproducing a specific behavior.
• Observational Learning: The acquisition of knowledge and skills through the observation of others (who are called models) rather than by means of direct experience.
• Albert Bandura: Pioneer of research in observational learning.
• Observational Learning influenced debates on the effect of television violence and parental role models.
• Primary Reinforcer: Reinforcers which are innately satisfying and do not take any learning on the organism’s part to make it pleasurable.
• Bobo Doll Experiment: Reinforcement and punishment leads to imitating a behavior.
• Aversive Conditioning: In aversive conditioning, client is exposed to an unpleasant stimulus while engaging in the targeted behavior.
• Fixed-ratio Schedules: Reinforcement of a behavior only after a specified (fixed) number of responses.
• Mirror Neurons: Mirror neurons provide a neural basis for observational learning.
• Social Influence on Observational Learning: Television: More hours children spend watching violent TV or playing violet video games, more at risk for aggression and crime as teens and adults.
• Overjustification Effect: When external rewards undermine the intrinsic satisfaction of performing a behavior.
• Operant Conditioning: A form of associative learning in which the consequences of a behavior change the probability of the behavior’s occurrences.