CHANGING DIRECTIONS
IN THE STUDY OF
CONDITIONING
RECOGNIZING BIOLOGICAL
CONSTRAINTS ON CONDITIONING
• Instinctive drift: occurs when an animal’s innate
response tendencies interfere with conditioning
processes
• Breland’s Miserly Raccoons
CONDITIONED TASTE AVERSION
• Conditioned only through the pairing of taste stimuli
and stimuli inducing nausea
• Shows that just any stimulus and just any response
will not necessarily condition
PREPAREDNESS
• DEF: a species-specific predisposition to be
conditioned in certain ways and not others
• May influence instinctive drift, conditioned taste
aversion, and phobias…
PHOBIAS
• Can be about anything
• Martin Seligman: evolutionary forces programmed
acquisition of certain fears
EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE ON
LEARNING
• Mechanisms of learning are similar across species
• Adapted to environment
• Used to increase survivability and sexual
reproduction
COGNITIVE PROCESSES IN
CONDITIONING
• Signal Relations: CS-UCS relations that influence
whether a CS is a good signal
• “Good” signal allows for accurate prediction of the
UCS
• Helped change view of conditioning from reflexive
response to information processing
RESPONSE-OUTCOME RELATIONS AND
CONDITIONING
• Organisms try to discover what leads to what
(contingencies) in the world around them
• Stimuli are signals that help minimize aversive
experiences and maximize pleasant experiences
OBSERVATIONAL
LEARNING
DEF: OCCURS WHEN AN ORGANISM’S RESPONDING IS INFLUENCED
BY THE OBSERVATION OF OTHERS, WHO ARE CALLED MODELS
ALBERT BANDURA
• Demonstrated both classical and operant
conditioning can take place vicariously through
observational learning
• We are conditioned by observing other’s
conditioning
BASIC PROCESSES OF OBSERVATIONAL
LEARNING
• Attention: you must pay attention to another’s
behavior and its consequences
• Retention: you must store a mental representation
of what you witnessed
• Reproduction: enact a modeled response;
depends on ability
• Motivation: must be motivated to enact the
modeled response
ACQUISITION VS. PERFORMANCE
• We have many acquired learned responses
• We choose which will be reinforced
• Reinforcement influences performance, not
learning necessarily