More about
Learning
Chapter 8
Biological Aspects of Learning
 Instinctive
Drift: tendency of an animal to
revert to instinctive behaviors that
interfere with a conditioned response. The
concept originated with B.F. Skinner's
former students Keller Breland and Marian
Breland when they tried to teach a
raccoon to put tokens into a piggy bank.
 Gregory
Kimble: “Just about any activity
that an organism is capable of can be
conditioned”. He was proven wrong
many times. An animal’s capacity for
conditioning is constrained at times by its
biology. Environments are not the whole
story.
 For example:
 Taste Aversion: Garcia:
Learned Helplessness
Martin Seligman
 The hopelessness and passive resignation
an animal or human being learns when
unable to avoid repeated aversive events

John Garcia
 Taste
aversion is a learned response to
eating spoiled or toxic food. When taste
aversion takes place, you avoid eating
the foods that made you ill. Taste aversion
can be so powerful that sometimes you
also avoid the foods that you associate
with an illness, even if the food did not
cause the illness
Wolfgang Kohler
 Insight
Learning: type of learning or
problem solving that happens all-of-asudden through understanding the
relationships various parts of a problem
rather than through trial and error.
 Sultan the chimp
 Video clip: Kohler Chimpanzees
 Video clip: Pigeon, box, and banana
Cognitive Learning
 Learning
by experience, touching,
listening, or perceiving
 Acquisition of problem-solving abilities
and with intelligence and conscious
thought.
Social Learning Theory
 Albert
Bandura: social learning theory:
behavior is learned from the environment
through the process of observational
learning.
 Clip: Bobo doll experiment
Social and Emotional Learning
 Social
and emotional learning (SEL) is the
process through which children and
adults acquire and effectively apply the
knowledge, attitudes and skills necessary
to understand and manage emotions, set
and achieve positive goals, feel and show
empathy for others, establish and
maintain positive relationships, and make
responsible decisions.
Superstitions
 Learning
and Superstitions: see clip on BF
Skinner and superstitious behavior
Behavior Modifications
 Biofeedback:
a technique that involves
using visual or auditory feedback to gain
control over involuntary bodily functions.
This may include gaining voluntary control
over such things as heart rate, muscle
tension, blood flow, pain perception and
blood pressure.
Self-Control
 separates
us from our ancient ancestors
and the rest of the animal kingdom,
thanks to our large prefrontal cortices.
Rather than responding to immediate
impulses, we can plan, we can evaluate
alternative actions, and we can refrain
from doing things we'll regret. We can
also take advantage of these innately
human abilities by developing wisdom
and willpower.
Problem Focused Coping



Taking Control – this response involves
changing the relationship between yourself
and the source of stress. Examples: escaping
from the stress or removing the stress.
Information Seeking – the most rational
action. This involves the individual trying to
understand the situation (e.g. using the
internet) and putting into place cognitive
strategies to avoid it in future. Information
seeking is a cognitive response to stress.
Evaluating the pros and cons of different
options for dealing with the stressor.
Emotion-focused coping
 involves
trying to reduce the negative
emotional responses associated with
stress such as embarrassment, fear,
anxiety, depression, excitement and
frustration. This may be the only realistic
option when the source of stress is outside
the person’s control.
 Drug therapy can be seen as emotion
focused coping as it focuses on the
arousal caused by stress not the problem.
External locus of control
 The
belief that events in one’s life,
whether good or bad, are caused by
uncontrollable factors such as the
environment, other people, or a higher
power.
Internal locus of control
 The
belief that events in one’s life,
whether good or bad, are caused by
controllable factors such as one’s
attitude, preparation, and effort.