Hello again. Salut. So this is the fourth mini lecture for learning and it's the last lecture on classical conditioning and I just have two basic ideas that I wanted to share with you about classical conditioning. One is about discriminant learning or conditioning and one is like generalized. So discriminant or stimulus discrimination is one type of classical conditioning.
So the idea here is that you at some point learned that there was a connection between that was easy button and getting shot with an air gun or the sound of a bell and the presentation of dog food if you're a dog. You have stimulus discrimination though if the learning process is very specific. So, for example, if you heard that that was easy button, and it's sort of a robotic sounding voice, right?
But I guess a really specific example to push would be to say, instead of saying that was easy, that was hard. Like it's almost the same voice, a similar button, but you wouldn't respond to that. It would be very specific to. that was easy. That would be very specific.
In terms of the bell and the dog, what if you, instead of it being a bell, it was a chime and the dog wouldn't salivate to a chime, it would only salivate to a bell. It wouldn't salivate to music, it would only salivate to that specific bell. So that would be a very specific learning condition.
So that would be stimulus discrimination. So it's very focused. So here I have three pictures of dogs. So you might develop a fear to just one type of dog, not all dogs, for example. That's stimulus discrimination.
Now, pretty much the opposite of that is stimulus generalization. That means instead of being very focused and discriminant. and what you respond to to generalize. So in the that was easy scenario, maybe initially Brian responded to the robotic that was easy button sound and nothing else. But maybe he somehow generalized it to any computery voice that was heard.
Maybe sometimes there was computer voices coming out of... David's computer and he couldn't tell or he didn't really see the distinction between the that was easy button and other sort of robotic sounding voices. Or in the case of the dog, whether it was a chime or a bell or a music, no matter what, maybe the dog started salivating.
So that would be an example of a conditioned response to other stimuli. So it's not that those other stimuli were systematically associated with their unconditioned stimulus. So it wasn't the case that chimes were connected to the presentation of food.
It wasn't the case that the robotic voice was directly connected to Brian being shot. It was just similar enough in nature and its sound and its stimulus impact that... the person or the creature just responded, responded to it.
It's like, that's close enough. I want to be prepared. That's sort of the idea that it's, and the idea of, I guess, between these two things is you can imagine that discrimination is useful in that you don't want to waste energy and time responding to something, to a whole bunch of things when you can really respond to just one thing, right? Like just one specific or one specific person. On the other hand, you can also imagine how generalization could be important.
Because when I showed that picture of the three dogs, like maybe you want to be prepared for, you know, a variety of types of big dogs. Or maybe in this picture here, maybe you want to find all of these cute, like these furry things as cute and funny and make you feel positive. So sometimes there's value in... generalizing and sometimes value in discriminating. So that's the two key concepts there.
and that's pretty well it if you have any questions contact me on the general discussion forum take care