Chapter 6: Learning

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You know, usually when we talk about a medical diagnosis, there's this expectation of absolute precision.

Right.

Like you break your arm, the x -ray shows that jagged white line, and the doctor just points and says, there it is, broken.

Yeah, it's very binary.

I mean, the physical world gives us these really visible categories.

But then you step into the world of psychology,

specifically how the brain actually acquires new behaviors, and suddenly that x -ray machine is, well, it's totally useless.

It really is.

You're looking at a landscape of the mind that is honestly a bit of a mystery until you know exactly what to look for.

Exactly.

So welcome to this custom deep dive.

You've got an exam coming up, so today we aren't just like memorizing terms.

We're going to look under the hood of the brain to see how you, me, and literally every living creature actually acquires new behaviors.

It's a fascinating topic.

It is.

And the last minute lecture team has curated this session to act as your one -on -one tutoring guide.

We're going to tackle chapter six on learning from your 2017 psychology textbook and we'll walk through it in its exact order.

Breaking down every foundational theory, the terminology, the classic experiments.

Yeah, so you'll be perfectly prepped for your exam.

Okay, let's unpack this.

Psychology can feel dense, but today we're just talking about acquiring new behaviors.

Right, and to truly understand what learning is, we actually first have to define what learning isn't.

Okay, what do you mean by that?

Well, before we can talk about how the brain wires entirely new behaviors, we have to establish the basic, the factory settings that organisms are born with.

The default mode.

Exactly.

Those unlearned behaviors fall into two distinct categories, which are reflexes and instincts.

The stuff you just do without thinking, right?

Like the pre -installed hardware.

Precisely.

So reflexes are simple, motor or neural reactions to a specific stimulus.

They happen almost instantaneously because they usually involve the more primitive centers of the central nervous system.

So they bypass the brain.

Yeah, they bypass the brain entirely and rely on the spinal cord or the medulla.

Think of a healthy human baby.

They're born with a sucking reflex.

Oh, right.

No one has to teach a newborn how to suck on a bottle.

Exactly.

It's an automatic, unlearned survival mechanism.

While instincts are more like full body programs.

Yes.

Instincts are much more complex.

They involve the whole organism and they're triggered by broader environmental events like changing seasons or aging.

And they do involve higher brain centers.

Like bird migration or something?

Yeah.

Or consider loggerhead sea turtle hatchlings.

The moment they're born, they instinctively know to scramble across the sand and head straight into the ocean.

Wow.

No swimming lessons required.

None.

No trial and error at all.

So if a reflex or an instinct is just pre -installed hardware,

learning is the process of downloading and installing new software.

That's a great analogy.

Because unlike that sea turtle, a human being has to learn how to swim or how to surf.

So learning is a relatively permanent change in behavior or knowledge that results from experience.

And this software installation at its most basic level relies on associative learning.

Associative learning.

Okay.

Yeah.

Our minds have this incredibly powerful natural tendency to automatically connect events that occur closely together in our environment.

They just link things up.

Right.

And this mechanism associative learning is the engine driving the three main types of learning we are going to explore today.

Classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational learning.

Which brings us to a name that definitely rings a bell for anyone studying psychology.

Ivan Pavlov.

Oh, absolutely.

And what's amazing is that Pavlov wasn't even a psychologist.

He was a Russian physiologist studying dog digestion.

Right.

It started as a completely different experiment.

He implanted tubes in dogs' cheeks to measure salivation in response to different foods.

Sounds messy.

Very.

But over time, the dogs started salivating before the food even arrived.

Like they drool at the sight of the empty bowl or even just hearing the laboratory assistants' footsteps.

Because the brain was anticipating the future.

Exactly.

Pavlov called these psychic secretions.

The dogs had learned to associate a completely neutral event, the footsteps, with the arrival of food.

And he realized he had stumbled onto a fundamental learning process.

He really did.

Let's map out the terminology equation Pavlov developed.

Because you absolutely must know this for your exam.

First, you have the unconditioned stimulus, or UCS.

This is the thing that naturally causes a reaction.

So in Pavlov's lab, the UCS was the meat powder.

And that meat powder automatically triggers an unconditioned response.

The UCR.

Exactly.

Which is the salivation.

Unconditioned just means unlearned.

It's the reflex.

Then we introduce a neutral stimulus.

The NS Pavlov used a tone, like a bell.

And before the experiment, the tone does absolutely nothing to the dog's saliva production.

Right.

Just a random sound.

But when that tone is presented immediately before giving the dog the meat powder, over and over again, the brain bridges the gap.

The neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus, the CS.

Exactly.

And that salivation.

It is now a conditioned response, or CR, because it's triggered by the learned tone alone.

Let's apply this so it sticks.

Think about a cat named Tiger.

You only ever use a loud electric can opener to open her food.

Okay.

Classic cat scenario.

The food is the unconditioned stimulus.

Her excitement is the unconditioned response.

But soon, the loud sound of the can opener, which is now the conditioned stimulus, makes Tiger run into the kitchen with excitement.

Which is the conditioned response.

And we can even stack these associations through what's called higher order, or second order, conditioning.

Oh, how does that work?

Well, let's say the cabinet where you keep Tiger's food gets a squeaky hinge.

Tiger hears the squeak, then the can opener, then gets food.

Soon, just the squeak of the cabinet makes her excited.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, you've used the conditioned stimulus of the can opener to condition a brand new stimulus.

You see this everywhere once you start looking.

Like, out at Stingray City in the Cayman Islands, wild southern stingrays hear the sound of a boat motor, a conditioned stimulus, and swarm the boats expecting food.

Yeah, perfect example.

Or a baby, let's call her Angelina, who gets visibly excited just seeing the blue canister her formula comes in.

But, you know, these associations aren't always permanent.

The initial period of linking the neutral stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus is called acquisition.

But what happens if you keep using the electric can opener, but you stop giving Tiger the food?

I mean, she'd eventually stop running into the kitchen, right?

Right, that's extinction.

The conditioned response weakens and disappears when the conditioned stimulus is repeatedly presented without the unconditioned stimulus.

But wait, if extinction happens when the food stops coming,

why does spontaneous recovery occur at a later date?

What do you mean?

Like say you don't use the can opener for months, then suddenly you fire it up and Tiger comes running again.

Does the brain never truly delete the file, just like hide it?

That is a brilliant way to frame it.

The neural pathway isn't erased, it's just suppressed.

The association lies dormant.

Is it still in there?

Yeah.

The textbook uses an ice cream truck example.

You hear the jingle, you get ice cream, your mouth waters.

If the truck drives by for a week straight, completely sold out of ice cream, you eventually stop salivating when you hear the music.

Extinction.

Makes sense.

But after a quiet weekend, Monday morning rolls around, you hear the jingle and your mouth waters again.

The learned association spontaneously recovers because the brain is holding on to that predictive model, just in case it becomes relevant again.

Our brains are so incredibly efficient.

I mean, look at evolutionary taste diversion.

That's a wild word.

You eat chicken curry, get a terrible stomach flu six hours later, and suddenly you can't even look at curry without feeling sick.

It completely breaks Pavlov's rule that the stimulus has to happen immediately before the response.

It does.

Taste diversion is a fascinating evolutionary mechanism.

If you eat a poisonous berry, you can't afford a slow learning curve of 10 trials to figure out it's bad.

You'd be dead.

Exactly.

It has to happen instantly in a single trial, even if the sickness takes hours to set in.

Organisms that developed this rapid association survived.

Wow.

And our brains manage all this data through stimulus discrimination and stimulus generalization.

Okay, let's break this down.

Stimulus discrimination is when Tiger the cat learns that the sound of your electric mixer is different from the electric can opener.

So she just stays on the couch.

She discriminates between the two sounds.

But stimulus generalization is when the brain casts a wider net.

Like if the mixer sounded almost exactly like the can opener, she might come running.

Right.

Or habituation, which is when you just learn to tune out a repeated stimulus like a noisy TV in the background.

Yeah.

But that generalization you mentioned, that is exactly what early psychologists, John B.

Watson relied on.

Ah, Watson,

the founder of behaviorism.

Yes.

He argued that psychology should only focus on observable behavior, not hidden internal thoughts.

And his work brings us to the infamous Little Albert experiment.

Which we should note is highly unethical by today's standards.

Oh, completely.

But it fundamentally changed our understanding of emotional conditioning.

Watson wanted to prove human emotions could be classically conditioned.

So he presented a baby, Little Albert, with a neutral stimulus,

a white rat.

And Albert wasn't afraid.

But then Watson started striking a metal bar with a hammer right behind Albert's head every time the baby reached for the rat.

That's horrible.

So the loud noise is the unconditioned stimulus.

The reflexive crying and fear is the unconditioned response.

Exactly.

And after repeated pairings, the white rat became a conditioned stimulus, eliciting the conditioned response of fear.

But he didn't stop there.

No.

He demonstrated stimulus generalization.

Little Albert's fear generalized to other furry things.

A rabbit, a fur coat, and even Watson wearing a Santa Claus mask.

Watson basically proved that emotions are completely malleable and can be conditioned.

He did.

Which is exactly what advertisers do today.

They pair an attractive model, the unconditioned stimulus with their car, the conditioned stimulus, so you automatically associate positive, desirable feelings with the vehicle.

It's classical conditioning at work.

But there is a limit to classical conditioning.

It perfectly explains involuntary reflexes.

Drooling, flinching, feeling sudden fear.

But classical conditioning cannot explain how we learn new voluntary behaviors.

Like, no one drools their way into learning how to play the piano.

Right.

To understand voluntary behavior, we have to look at consequences, which is the realm of operant conditioning.

Yes.

B .F.

Skinner proposed that our voluntary actions are driven by the consequences we receive after we perform them.

And he built his theory on psychologist Edward Thorndyke's law of effect.

He did.

The law of effect states a simple truth.

Behaviors followed by satisfying consequences are more likely to be repeated.

And behaviors followed by unpleasant consequences are less likely to be repeated.

Okay.

Let's clearly contract these two systems for the listener using table 6 .1 from the The bell rings, the dog salivates.

Right.

But in operant conditioning, the consequence comes after the response.

You press a button, you get a treat.

Exactly.

Skinner studied this using an operant conditioning chamber, famously known as the Skinner box, where animals like rats or pigeons would press levers or peck discs to receive a food reward.

Okay, now we enter the terminology matrix for operant conditioning.

And this is where it's crucial to rewire how you think about certain words.

Yes, students get tripped up on this all the time.

In psychology, positive and negative do not mean good and bad.

They are math symbols.

Yes.

Positive means you are adding something.

Negative means you are subtracting or taking something away.

And reinforcement always means you want to increase a behavior, while punishment always means you want to decrease a behavior.

So let's combine them.

Positive reinforcement means adding something desirable to increase a behavior.

Like second grade students in Dallas being paid $2 every time they read a book, the school added money and the reading increased.

Positive reinforcement.

Perfect.

Then you have negative reinforcement.

This is removing an undesirable stimulus to increase a behavior.

Oh, this is exactly like hitting the snooze button on a loud alarm.

You perform a behavior hitting snooze to remove the annoying sound.

The removal of that annoyance increases the likelihood you'll hit the snooze button again tomorrow.

Or your car's seat belt system.

It beeps relentlessly until you buckle up.

The annoying sound is removed once you exhibit the desired behavior.

Negative reinforcement.

Got it.

Now let's switch to decreasing a behavior using punishment.

Positive punishment means adding something undesirable.

Like a teacher scolding a student to get them to stop texting in class.

A reprimand is added to decrease the texting.

And negative punishment is removing something desirable to decrease behavior, like taking away a favorite toy when a child misbehaves or putting them in a timeout, which removes them from a fun activity.

Exactly.

But it's worth noting that physical punishment like spanking comes with massive drawbacks.

It can teach children to fear the person delivering the punishment.

And it often increases aggressive antisocial behavior.

Right.

They learn that physical force is how you solve problems.

Right.

Which is why psychologists heavily favor reinforcement.

Reinforcement is how we build complex skills through a process called shaping.

Shaping.

How does that work?

Well, if Skinner wanted a pigeon to play ping pong, he couldn't just wait for it to happen spontaneously.

He used shaping rewarding successive approximations of a target behavior.

So you break the task down.

Exactly.

First, reward the pigeon just for looking at the ball.

Then only reward it for walking toward the ball.

Then only for pecking it.

Parents do this constantly.

You want your kid to clean their room.

First, you reward them for picking up one single toy.

Then they have to pick up five toys to get the reward until eventually the whole room is clean.

The type of reward matters, too.

Primary reinforcers are innately satisfying.

Food, water, sleep, pleasure.

Your brain doesn't have to learn to want them.

Right.

Secondary reinforcers have no inherent biological value.

They only matter because they are linked to primary reinforcers.

Money, praise or stickers.

This is the foundation of token economies, which are amazing behavior management systems.

Like autistic children might be given quiet hands tokens for appropriate social behavior.

They can then exchange these secondary reinforcer tokens for minutes of playtime.

That's a great example, but it's not just about what the reward is.

It's about when it arrives.

The timing.

Yeah.

Reinforcement schedules dictate the timing of consequences.

Continuous reinforcement is rewarding the behavior every single time.

Which is the fastest way to teach a new behavior.

It is, but partial reinforcement is how behaviors are actually maintained in the complex real world.

Let's break down the four partial schedules from table six point three and figure six point one three.

They depend on whether the timing is fixed, meaning predictable or variable, meaning unpredictable.

Right.

And whether it's an interval based on time passing or a ratio based on the number of responses.

So a fixed interval schedule delivers reinforcement at predictable time intervals.

Imagine a hospital patient on a doctor timed pain medication drip that dispenses exactly every hour on a graph.

This creates a scallop shaped response curve.

The patient presses the button a lot right before the hour is up, gets the meds and then pauses.

Because the brain is optimizing energy.

Why press the button if you know the reward won't come for another 59 minutes?

Precisely.

Now, a variable interval schedule is based on unpredictable time.

Think of a fast food restaurant manager who checks in randomly.

The employees keep a moderate steady pace of good work because they never know exactly when the boss will walk through the door.

Exactly.

Then we shift to ratio schedules, which are based on quantity.

A fixed ratio schedule is a predictable quantity.

Like an eyeglass salesperson who gets a commission for every five pairs of glasses they sell.

This produces a very high response rate because their output directly equals their reward.

But the absolute most powerful schedule is the variable ratio.

This is an unpredictable quantity of responses.

A gambler at a slot machine.

Oh, right.

They put in a quarter.

Nothing.

Another quarter.

Nothing.

Then suddenly bells ring and they win 50 quarters.

They never know how many pulls it takes to win.

So they just keep pulling.

This yields the highest, steadiest response rate and it is the most resistant to extinction.

Wow.

From an evolutionary standpoint, unpredictability triggers massive dopamine and norepinephrine spikes in the brain.

The uncertainty makes the brain hyper -focused.

Your brain just won't give up, which is why gambling can mimic chemical addictions.

That's intense.

OK, so Skinner believed that these immediate consequences were the only way we learn.

But wait, if strict behaviorists like Watson and Skinner said you must have an immediate reward or punishment to learn,

what happens when someone just figures something out quietly in their head?

What do you mean?

Doesn't that completely disrupt pure behaviorism if you learn without a prize?

It does.

And that disruption came from another behaviorist named Edward C.

Tolman.

He put hungry rats in a maze with no food reward at the end.

So what did they do?

They just wandered around aimlessly.

But when he finally put food at the end, those exact same rats navigated the maze just as fast as a control group of rats who had been rewarded for every single correct turn.

So they were learning the whole time, even without a prize.

Exactly.

Tolman proved the rats had developed a cognitive map, a mental picture of the maze.

This demonstrated latent learning, which is learning that occurs but isn't observable in behavior until there is a reason to demonstrate it.

Oh, that's fascinating.

Psychologist Laura Carlson researches this today with how humans navigate complex buildings.

Like a kid named Ravi, who is driven to school by his dad every day.

He's in the passenger seat, never driving.

But one day his dad leaves early and Ravi successfully bikes the exact route to school.

Yes, he had a cognitive map.

He just didn't need to demonstrate that latent learning until that specific morning.

Tolman proved we can learn without immediate reward and Ravi proved we can learn simply by watching,

which leads perfectly into the final frontier of learning, observational learning or modeling.

This is a big one.

It completely bypasses the need for dangerous, time -consuming personal trial and error.

Right.

Psychologist Albert Bandura proposed social learning theory to explain this.

He realized pure behaviorism couldn't account for our ability to learn from the experiences of others.

And we now know this is tied to mirror neurons in our brains.

We do.

When you watch someone perform an action, certain neurons in your brain fire as if you were performing the action yourself.

It's an incredible evolutionary shortcut.

Tell me about the chimp study.

Oh, consider a study with captive chimpanzees given juice boxes.

One group, the dippers, dipped straws in the juice and licked them.

The second group, the suckers, drank directly through the straw and got way more juice.

Okay.

When the dippers simply watched the suckers, they immediately switched their method.

Monkey see, monkey do is neurologically accurate.

But Bandura pointed out that it's not just blind imitation.

There are four specific cognitive steps to the modeling process.

Right.

Let's list them.

First, attention.

You have to actually focus on the model.

Second, retention.

You have to remember what they did.

Third, reproduction.

You have to be physically capable of performing the behavior.

And finally,

motivation.

You have to want to copy it.

And that motivation is usually driven by vicarious reinforcement or vicarious punishment.

Meaning you don't have to experience the consequence yourself.

Exactly.

If four -year -old Allison watches her older sister, Kaylin, get a timeout for playing with their mother's makeup, that is vicarious punishment.

Allison observes the negative consequence and is motivated not to copy the behavior.

It sounds like observational learning is a massive evolutionary shortcut.

Get the benefit of the law of effect without having to actually suffer the punishments yourself.

Exactly.

But this power to model has a dark side, which Bandura famously proved with his bobo doll experiment.

Oh, the inflatable doll.

Bandura had children watch an adult act aggressively toward a five -foot inflatable bobo doll.

Hitting it, throwing it, punching it in the face.

When the adult was subsequently punished for the behavior, the children were less likely to copy it.

But when the adult was praised or simply ignored and not punished, the children placed in a room with the doll imitated the aggression perfectly.

They punched it and yelled at it, just like the adult model did.

The implications of that are staggering.

I mean, models can have pro -social positive effects.

Like if you want your kids to read, read in front of them.

Public figures like Martin Luther King Jr.

act as pro -social models for society.

They do.

But it also explains antisocial effects.

Abused children often grow up to become abusers themselves because they are directly modeling the behavior they witness.

It's deeply impactful.

It's also why psychologists continuously research how violent television and video games might teach aggressive behavior or desensitize developing brains to violence.

When you step back and look at the progression of this entire topic, you see a stunning evolution in how organisms adapt to their environment.

You really do.

We start with rigid unlearned reflexes.

We move to unconscious associations, hijacking those reflexes through classical conditioning.

Then we graduate to conscious voluntary behaviors shaped by the environment through operant conditioning.

And finally, we reach the highest cognitive level, observational learning, where our brains build complex cognitive maps and acquire new skills, really by watching the world unfold around us.

Think about the review questions you might face at the end of this chapter.

If the sound of your toaster popping causes your mouth to water,

what are the UCS, CS, and CR?

Well, you now have the exact tools to map that out.

The toast is the unconditioned stimulus.

Your mouth watering to the toast is the unconditioned response.

The pop sound starts as a neutral stimulus, becomes a conditioned stimulus, and your mouth watering to the pop is a conditioned response.

You've got this.

As you prepare for your exam, consider this final thought based on the text.

If our brains are constantly making subconscious associations, mapping out environments like Tolman's rats and modeling the behaviors we see in our homes and media, how much of your daily routine is actually a freely made conscious choice and how much is just a highly conditioned response to your environment?

Wow.

That X -ray machine of the mind is definitely a little murky, but hopefully the picture is a lot clearer now.

A massive thank you from the last minute lecture team for letting us guide you through this material.

Best of luck on your psychology exam.

Keep unpacking those ideas and we will see you on the next deep dive.