Learning (Lectures 19-24)
Lecture 19: Introduction, the history of animal learning, & non-
associative learning (Mon 4 Nov)
Introduction to animal learning:
From philosophy and natural history to psychology
The birth of experimental psychology
The reign of behaviourism
The cognitive approach
Learning: the process by which changes in behaviour arise as the result of experience interacting with
the world.
Memory: the record of our past experiences, which are acquired through learning.
Lessons from Clever Hans: a horse that could answer questions
Pfungst was asked to investigate what alternative explanations might there be for Hans’s behaviour.
He kept the horse away from cures, had people other than the owner question the horse (he could still
answer), prevented Hans from seeing the questioner and prevented trainer or questioner from
knowing the question in advance. Only when the audience (including the psychologist), the horse
wouldn’t be able to answer. The horse was extremely sensitive to reading the posture of people in the
audience that knew the answer to the question.
This case illustrates a number of issues fundamental to scientific research and the study of learning:
the value of scepticism, the value of careful observations under controlled conditions, the problem of
observer-expectancy effects.
Morgan’s Canon: In no case is an animal activity to be interpreted in terms of higher psychological
processes if it can be fairly interpreted n terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of
psychological evolution and development.
Philosophical traditions: timeline
Mind, learning and memory have been topics of intense fascination for millennia. Early
approaches were primarily philosophical and didn’t use the scientific methods, but many key
questions were identified:
-Are we shaped by an inherited nature or by experience (nature vs nurture)
-What is the nature of mind and of memory?
-How are complex ideas and memories formed?
Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Darwin, James, Pavlov.
Nature vs nurture:
-Nativists: humans are shaped primarily by their biological inheritance: fixed at birth, born
great or not. Plato (proposed were born w innate differences in skill and talent and
suggested sorting by quality after birth), Descartes (proposed that most of our knowledge is
innate, not from experience)
-Empiricists: humans are shaped primarily by their experience: endless possibilities with the
right experiences. Aristotle: proposed that knowledge and talent are matters of training and
experience, not inheritance. Locke proposed that we are born as blank states (tabula rasa),
completely equal and without innate knowledge and all of our habits and skills are due to
experience.
Current approaches?
Most modern researchers acknowledge that we are shaped by both nature and nurture.
Still. sharp disagreements persist over relative importance in different domains (IQ,
personality…)
Empiricists believe we are shaped by experience. But how do we gain such complex ideas
from experience?
, Learning (Lectures 19-24)
Aristotle proposed that ideas are built by rules of association: 1. Contiguity – Experiences
near each other in time/space are joined together. 2. Frequency – Experiences often
repeated are connected more strongly. 3. Similarity – Experiences similar to one another are
connected.
Associationism was further elaborated by other empiricist thinkers, including: Aristotle,
Locke, William James.
James proposed that experience links ideas in the mind. • Remembering one idea would
spread along links (you go to a dinner party: taste of food to topics of conversation to smell
of perfume, to sound of music; then you go dancing and some of the experiences there
remind you of previous experiences, smell of perfume, sound of music), retrieving a complex
episode. James proposed that these links would be physically formed in the brain, providing
an early link between psychology and neuroscience.
Summary:
Mind, learning, and memory have been topics of intense fascination for millennia. • Three
key areas of debate: Nativism versus empiricism: Are we shaped by experience or fixed at
birth? Nature of the mind: How does the mind differ from physical objects, if at all? Rules of
the mind: Are there rules by which the mind generates ideas from experience? •
Associationism, founded by Aristotle and elaborated by Locke and James, proposes that
contiguity, frequency, and similarity are guiding principles for forming complex ideas. • These
traditions still shape research but were limited to discussion. By adding research, scientific
approaches have greatly advanced our understanding of these topics.
Evolution and Natural Selection
• Evolution: the theory that species can change over time, and that all existing species are
descendants of common ancestors
• Natural selection: the notion that heritable traits that provide reproductive advantages
become more common in a population, leading over time to changes in existing species and
even the evolution of new species
“One might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species
had been taken and modified for different end.” Charles Darwin, 1845
But how do species evolve? Charles Darwin set evolution on firm ground, proposing a
plausible mechanism: natural selection.
Experimental Psychology: Pavlov
• In studying digestion, Pavlov identified new rules for making associations between ideas.
• In dogs, measured anticipation of eating as the amount of saliva produced.
• While seeing food always caused salivation, Pavlov found that a doorbell rung before food
(e.g., a doorbell ringing) would also come to cause salivation.
• Thus, pairing the doorbell with food forged a new connection between these ideas, a
process now called classical, or Pavlovian, conditioning.
• Pavlov used classical conditioning to experimentally study the laws of association.
Learning rules:
• Frequency: Repeated pairings increase the strength of association, with a characteristic
learning curve.
• Contiguity: The association between bell and food is extinguished when the bell is
presented alone, ending contiguity.
• Similarity: Salivation responses will generalize to stimuli similar to the doorbell, though the
, Learning (Lectures 19-24)
less similar, the less effective.
Experimental Psychology: Thorndike
• In the United States, Edward Thorndike also pioneered experimental approaches to
learning.
• Thorndike placed cats in a “puzzle box”—a small chamber they disliked with a pulley that
allowed them to escape.
• With repeated exposures to the box:
• Cats initially tried many behaviors.
• Cats would often escape “by accident” at first.
• Behaviors that opened the box became more frequent over time and behaviors that weren’t
useful disappeared.
• Law of effect: Behaviors with positive effects are repeated; behaviors with negative effects
are not.
• Likened learning to natural selection of behavior
Experimental Psychology: Summary
These two innovators bridged between philosophical and scientific approaches to learning:
Pavlov: laws of association with classical conditioning in dogs Thorndike: law of effect as
cats learn to solve a puzzle
Key advances not only in understanding learning, but in studying learning and memory:
• Experimental approach: Manipulate an independent variable and observe a dependent
variable.
• Quantitative: Put observations on a numerical scale (e.g., % times cat escaped).
• Evolutionary approach: Based on similarity of species, nonhuman animals can be studied
to understand humans; there is inspiration from natural selection in understanding learning.
