Detailed and comprehensive Lectures notes on learning and conditioning. Covers all content received for the topic in this course.
Essential!!
To your success in academics!!
Learning: Any relatively permanent change in behaviour
- Allows us to adapt to our environment
- Results in physical change in brain
- Brought about by experience or practice
Categories of behaviour
Reflexes
- Involuntary responses to stimuli
- Very fast, reliable responses controlled by the CNS
- Eg. blush, cough, sneeze
Learned behaviour
- Consciously learned behaviours from the environment
- Eg. get a fine when speeding, therefore, you do not speed again
- Eg. get a sticker for good work so I deliver good work again to get another (i.e. reward)
Theoretical perspectives
Humanistic theories (Maslow & Rogers)
- Focus on the potential for personal growth and development in life
- Concept of self-determined potential
Abraham Maslow (Major contributor)
- Concept of self-actualisation
- Educator as a facilitator and not teacher
- Superiority of experiential learning over spectator knowledge
Behaviourist theories (Watson & Skinner)
- Emphasis on importance of scientific methodology
- Believes that only observable behaviours can be scientifically investigated
- Emotions, motivations and thoughts are considered subjective therefore cannot
be quantified or measured
- If learning has occurred, then some sort of observable external behaviour should
be apparent
Cognitive theories (Kohler & Piaget)
- What goes on in the mind determines the observed behaviour
- Emphasises that the mind influences behaviour
, - Explains learning by using internal processes such as thinking and memory
- Learning involves cognitive processes and connections from prior learning that
could be applied to the new situations
Social learning theory
- Learning can be based on the observation and imitation of other people’s behaviours
- Eg. children learn by imitating parents
Associative learning
- Formation of association between stimuli and responses
- Can be voluntary or involuntary
- Predict future from past behaviour
- Antecedent: What happens before the response
- Consequence: What happens after the response
Classical Conditioning: Involuntary, automatic behaviour
- Process by what we learn to associate events or stimuli that frequently happen together
with each other
- Learn to anticipate events
Conditions:
- CS must come before the US
- CS and US must come very close together in time (contiguity)
- CS must be paired with the US a few times for learning to take place
- CS must be distinctive
Basic principles:
Contiguity: Closeness in time between pairing o CS and US
Acquisition: Phase when NS and US are presented together
Stimulus generalisation: Response to a stimulus to original CS
Stimulus discrimination: Capacity to distinguish between similar, but distinct, stimuli
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