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Psychology - Learning
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Lecture notes of 10 pages for the course Psychology at UCT
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Chapter 7: Learning
- The majority of our behaviour is learnt
- Learning: a process by which experience produces a relatively enduring and adaptive
change in an organism’s capacity for behaviour.
- NB to remember is that changes in behaviour (performance) don’t necessarily indicate that
we have learnt something; there are often other factors involved.
Adapting to the environment
- Learning represents a process of personal adaption (how an organism’s behaviour changes
in response to environmental stimuli encountered).
- Habituation & sensitization – simplest forms of learning in which we change our responses
to just 1 stimulus over time.
- Habituation: decrease in strength of response to a repeated stimulus. You get used to it; it
doesn’t affect you as much as it did perhaps the first couple of times.
- Sensitization: increase in the strength of the response to a repeated stimulus. You become
focused on one particular sound/stimulus. Eg. Not being able to sleep because of a mosquito
buzzing around your room.
- Both of these forms of learning serve as adaptive functions. By habituating to uneventful
stimuli we can conserve energy, and by sensitizing to others we can protect ourselves from
threatening circumstances.
- Groves and Thompson proposed that both habituation and sensitization occur at the same
time and compete to det. our behaviour performance (which is therefore the net result of
the two learning processes).
Classical/Pavlovian conditioning: associating one stimulus with another
- Classical condition: when an organism learns to assoc. 2 stimuli (eg. song & pleasant event),
such that 1 stimulus (song) comes to elicit a response (feeling happy) that was originally
elicited only by the other stimulus (pleasant event). eg. Hearing a song at a pleasant event
and feeling happy, the next time you hear that song you will respond by feeling happy.
- Also basic form of learning, but unlike the previous 2, it involves changing behaviour in
response to associations between stimuli.
Pavlov’s Research
- Pavlov realised that dogs began to salivate before the food was presented, because they
heard the experimenter’s approaching footsteps. The associated the footsteps with being
fed.
BASIC principles:
Acquisition: period during which a response is being learned.
1. Eg. conditioning dog to salivate to tone, at the beginning tone will only make
dog prick up its ears, but not salivate, therefore at this point the tone will be a
neutral stimulus (one that does not elicit a particular response).
2. However, naturally when you place food in a dog’s mouth, it will salivate,
because salivation is a reflex action. The food will be considered an
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