Behavioral Science: Learning and Memory

hello everybody my name is Iman welcome back to my YouTube channel today we&#39;re going to be covering chapter three for our Behavioral Science playlist chapter 3 is titled learning and memory and in this chapter we&#39;re going to cover the following objectives objective one is titled learning learning refers specifically to the way in which we acquire new behaviors and here we&#39;re going to learn about associative learning and observational learning now within associative learning we&#39;re going to talk about classical conditioning and oper conditioning then we&#39;re going to move into memory in memory we&#39;re going to talk about the three main processes of forming memories this is going to include encoding storage and retrieval and then after that we&#39;re also going to discuss forgetting and memory construction then we&#39;ll move into the third and final objective which is titled neurobiology of learning and memory here we&#39;re going to briefly discuss neuroplasticity with that being said let&#39;s go ahead and get started with objective one learning so to a psychologist again learning refers specifically to the way in which we acquire new behaviors and to understand learning we have to first start with the concept of a stimulus a stimulus can be defined as anything to which an organism can respond to this includes all of the sensory inputs that we discussed in Chapter 2 now the combination of a stimulus and response serves as the basis as the foundation for all behavioral learning responses to a stimuli those can change over time depending on the frequency and intensity of the stimulus so for instance repeated exposure to the same stimulus can cause a decrease in response this is called habituation the opposite process can also occur dis habituation is defined as the recovery of a response to a stimulus after habituation has occurred learning then is just the change in behavior that occurs in response to a stimulus and while there are many different types of learning for the MCAT we&#39;re only going to focus on two types we&#39;re going to discuss associative learning and we&#39;re going to discuss observational learning and here in the second page what you&#39;re going to see is a bit of the outline that we&#39;re going to cover when we discuss different types of learning first we&#39;ll start with discussing associative learning this is the creation of a pairing or association either between two stimuli or between a behavior and a response within associative learning we&#39;re going to cover classical conditioning this takes advantage of responses to create associations between two unrelated stimulus we&#39;re going to discuss conditioned stimulus versus unconditioned stimulus in addition we&#39;ll also cover Operate conditioning this links voluntary behaviors with consequences in an effort to alter the frequency of those behaviors and here we&#39;re going to discuss reinforcement versus punishment that&#39;s all under associative learning then we&#39;ll move into discussing a observational learning this is the process of learning a new Behavior or gaining information by watching others so that&#39;s the outline for the topics that we&#39;re going to cover now in objective one so let&#39;s go ahead and get started with associative learning let&#39;s start again with defining associative learning so associative learning is the creation of a pairing or association either between two stimuli or between a behavior and a response now on the MCAT you&#39;re going to be tested on two such kinds of learning classical conditioning and operant conditioning let&#39;s first start by talking about classical conditioning classical conditioning is a type of associative learning that is going to take advantage of biological instinctual response resp es to create associations between two unrelated stimuli classical conditioning works first and foremost because some stimuli cause an innate or reflexive physiological response for example we reflexively salivate when we smell fresh bread baking in an oven or we may jump or recoil when we hear a loud noise any stimulus that brings about such a reflexive response is called an unconditioned stimulus and then that innate or reflexive response that&#39;s called an unconditioned response now some stimuli they don&#39;t produce a reflexive response those are known as neutral stimuli now when you&#39;re thinking about classical conditioning usually the first name that comes to mind for researching classical conditioning is Ivan Pavlov and his experiments on dogs in Pavlov&#39;s experiment the unconditioned stimulus was meat all right this would cause the dogs to salivate reflexively if the dogs saw meat or food they would begin to salivate cool then what the neutral response here was is a bell okay if the dog was just hanging out and Pavlov rang a bell nothing would happen this is our neutral stimulus now through the course of the experiment Pavlov repeatedly rang the bell before placing in meat or food in front of the dog or in the dog&#39;s mouth initially the dog did not react much when they only heard the bell ring without receiving meat however after this procedure was repeated several times the dog began to salivate when they heard the bell ring in fact the dogs would salivate even if Pavlov only rang the bell and actually did not deliver any meat and so pavlof thereby turned that neutral stimulus the Bell into what&#39;s called a conditioned stimulus so a conditioned stimulus this is a normally neutral stimulus that through Association now causes a reflexive response called a conditioned response classical conditioning then is the process of taking advantage of a reflexive unconditioned stimulus to turn a neutral stimulus into a conditioned stimulus this process is also referred to as acquisition so again to repeat unconditioned stimulus was providing the dog with meat or food the dog would naturally and reflexively salivate okay if we just rang a bell and just the Bell this is a neutral stimulus the dog would do nothing slowly Pavlov begin to ring the bell and then provide food and so over the course of time even just ringing the bell even if food food was not provided the dog would would salivate in anticipation that it would bring meat and so that neutral stimulus turned into a conditioned stimulus wonderful now something to talk about in addition to this right building on top of this notice that the stimuli change in this experiment but the response is the same throughout because salivation in response to food is natural and it really requires no conditioning it is an unconditioned response in this context but on the other hand when paired with a conditioned stimulus salivation is considered a conditioned response just because though a conditioned response has been acquired here&#39;s an important thing it does not mean that it is permanent if the conditioned stimulus is presented without the unconditioned stimulus enough times then the organism can become habituated to the conditioned response and Extinction can occur so if the Bell Rings enough time and the dog notices that it&#39;s not getting any meat with the ringing of the Bell the dog may stop salivating when the bell sounds also interestingly enough this Extinction can be undone so this Extinction of a response is also not always permanent after some time if an extinct condition stimulus is presented again a weak conditioned response can sometimes be exhibited this is known as spontaneous recovery now in addition to all that there are a few processes that can modify the response to a conditioned stimulus after acquisition has occurred two of the two of those that we&#39;re going to cover is generalization and discrimination generalization is a broadening effect by which a stimulus that&#39;s similar enough to the condition stimulus can also produce the conditioned response so here in Pavlov&#39;s dog the conditioned stimulus is the bell ringing of the Bell something that&#39;s similar enough to the ringing of a bell is maybe a buzzer that&#39;ll you know create that sound all right that is a similar enough thing to the conditioned stimulus the Bell that might also produce the conditioned response so the dog upon hearing a buzzer that creates a similar sound might still associate that sound with food and may start to salivate then there&#39;s also discrimination so an organism could learn to distinguish between two similar stimuli so Pavlov could have also trained the dog between the ringing of Bell in two tones maybe ringing the bell in One Tone usually was a accompanied with food and the ringing of the bell in a different tone never brought food and so then there is this distinction between the tone of the bell and anticipation of food and thereby the dog may salivate when it hears one tone of the Bell because it knows that&#39;s associated with food but won&#39;t salivate with a different tone of the Bell because that&#39;s not associated with food and so again discrimination an organism learns to distinguish between two similar stimuli wonderful so that is Con that is conditioning all right that is classical conditioning let&#39;s go ahead and move into a discussion about operant conditioning now whereas classical conditioning is concerned with instincts and biological responses Operate conditioning links voluntary behaviors with consequences and in an effort to alter the frequency of those behaviors now operant conditioning is associated with BF Skinner who&#39;s considered the father of behaviorism the theory that all behaviors are conditioned now the four possible relationships between stimulus and behavior are summarized in this table and we&#39;re going to go over them together so let&#39;s start with saying that a stimulus is added and a behavior continues we call call this positive reinforcement on the other hand if a stimulus is removed and behavior continues this is called negative reinforcement so let&#39;s talk about this idea of reinforcement reinforcement is the process of increasing the likelihood that an individual will perform a behavior and reinforcers are also divided into two categories there&#39;s positive reinforcers these increase a behavior by adding a positive consequence or an incentive following the desired Behavior money is a great example of a common and strong positive reinforcer right of course employees are going to continue to work for you if they are being paid and especially if they are being paid well negative enforcers or reinforcers on the other hand they act similarly in that they increase the frequency of a behavior but they do so by remove removing something unpleasant for example taking an aspirin is going to reduce a headache so the next time you have a headache what are you going to do you&#39;re going to take in Aspirin negative reinforcement is sometimes confused with punishment that we&#39;re going to discuss punishment here in a little but remember that the frequency of the behavior is going to be the distinguishing Factor any reinforcement positive or negative is going to increase the likelihood that a behavior is going to be performed now within the realm of negative reinforcers we can subdivide this into two category all right two categories one is called Escape learning I&#39;m going to write that down here for us Escape learning and the other type is called avoidance learning all right we&#39;re going to cover these two right now so Escape learning and avoidance learning taking aspirin this is an example of Escape learning the role of the behavior is to reduce the unpleasantness unpleasantness of something that already exists like a headache avoidance learning on the other hand this is meant to prevent anything that&#39;s unpleasant that has yet to happen in fact you are practicing avoidance right now right you&#39;re watching this video in the hopes to study for the MCAT and you are studying to avoid the unpleasant consequences of a poor score on the mcap and when you&#39;re going to do well because you will future doctors you&#39;re going to realize even more the importance of studying and hopefully that will continue as a trend in medical school and you will study for all of your exams so that you will always do well now classical and operant conditioning they can actually be used hand inand for example let&#39;s take dolphin trainers this is going to be a good example they take advantage of reinforcers when they&#39;re training Dolphins to perform tricks sometimes the trainers will feed a dolphin a fish after it performs a trick the fish can then said to be a primary reinforcer because the fish is a treat that the dolphin responds to naturally now dolphin trainers also sometimes use a tiny handheld device that emits a clicking sound this clicker it would not normally be a reinforcer on its own but the trainers use classical conditioning to pair the clicker with the fish to elicit the same response and so the clicker is thus a conditioned reinforcer which is sometimes called a secondary reinforcer okay so that&#39;s reinforcement for us now let&#39;s move on to talking about punishment if a stimulus is added and a behavior stops that&#39;s called positive punishment if a stimulus is removed and the behavior stops this is called negative punishment so in contrast to reinforcement punishment uses conditioning to reduce the occurrence of a behavior positive punishment this adds an unpleasant consequence in response to a Behavior to hopefully reduce this Behavior so for example a thief may be arrested for stealing and put in jail in the hopes that he&#39;s stopped stealing the next time to avoid going to jail again negative punishment is the reduction of a behavior when a stimulus is removed so for example a parent May forbid their child from watching television as a consequence for bad behavior and the goal here is they hope that this prevents the behavior from happening again because you don&#39;t want your TV rights to be taken again awesome so that is operant conditioning we talked about reinforcement and Punishment now something else that&#39;s really interesting to talk about is reinforcement schedules the presence or absence of reinforcing or punishing stimuli is just part of the story the rate at which desired behaviors are acquired is also affected by the schedule that&#39;s being used to affect those behaviors reinforcement schedules they have two different factors whether the schedule is fixed or variable and whether the schedule is based on a ratio or an interval so there are four various types that we&#39;re going to cover and we&#39;re going to start off with fixed ratio schedules these reinforce a behavior after a specific number of performances of that behavior so for for example in a typical operant conditioning experiment researchers might reward a rat with a food pellet every third time it presses a bar in its cage and this continuous reinforcement is a fixed ratio schedule in which the behavior is rewarded every time it is performed now variable ratio schedules these reinforce a behavior after a varying number of performances of that behavior but such that the average number of performances to receive a reward is relatively constant so with this type of reinforcement schedule researchers might reward a rra first after two button presses then eight then four then finally six so you notice that the average number of performances to get that reward seems relatively constant here then we have fixed interval schedules these reinforce the first instance of a behavior after a specified time period has elapsed so for example once our rat gets a food pellet it has to wait 60 seconds before it gets another and so that first lever press after 60 seconds gets it a food pellet but any subsequent presses during those waiting 60-second period accomplishes nothing then last but not least we have variable interval schedules these reinforce a behavior the first time that behavior is performed after varying intervals of time so instead of waiting exactly 60 seconds for example our R our rat might have to wait 90 seconds then 30 seconds then 3 minutes and in each case once the interval elapses then the next press gets a rat a pellet now of all of these schedules variable ratio all right variable ratio works the best it&#39;s works for fastest all right for learning a new Behavior it is also the most resistant to Extinction now there are a few things to note when we&#39;re looking at this table for reinforcement schedules all right we have cumulative number of responses on the Y AIS versus time on the xaxis and the first thing is that variable rate variable ratio schedules they have the fastest response rate the rat will continue pressing the bar quickly with the hope that the next press will be the quote unquote right one also note that the fixed schedule so fixed ratio and fixed interval these are these two right here they often have a brief moment of no responses after the behavior is reinforced so the rat is just going to stop hitting the lover until it wants another pellet and once it has figured out what behavior is necessary to receive that pellet now the final idea that&#39;s associated with operant conditioning that we want to cover here before we move on to any further topics is this concept of shaping okay shaping is the process of rewarding increasingly specific behavior so for example let&#39;s say that you want to train a bird to spin around in place twice and then Peck a specific key on a keyboard board all right you&#39;re first going to start training at a slower rate and you might first give the bird a treat for just turning once all right but then you&#39;ll only start rewarding the behavior as it gets more complex so you might reward it for the first time it does one Spin and then you won&#39;t reward it again until it does two spins and then you won&#39;t reward it at all until it does those two spins and then it hits a specific key so shaping is the process of rewarding increasing specific behavior now it would be incorrect to say that classical and operant conditioning are the only factors that affect the behavior nor would it be correct to say that we are all just Mindless and robotic unable to resist rewards and punishments that occur in our lives now since Skinner&#39;s initial perspectives it&#39;s been found that many cognitive and biological factors are at work that can change the effects of associative learning or allow us to resist them all together for example many organisms undergo latent learning this is learning that occurs without a reward but that is spontaneously demonstrated once a reward is introduced so the classical experiment that&#39;s associated with latent learning involves rats running a maze so rats that were simply carried through the maze and then incentivized with a food reward for completing the maze on their own performed just as well and in some cases even better than those rats that had been trained to run them maze using more standard operant conditioning tech techniques by which they were like rewarded every few steps on the way to completing the maze now another thing to talk about is problem solving so problem solving is another method of learning that kind of steps outside the standard behaviorist approach so think of the way young children put together a jigsaw puzzle often they will take pieces one by one then they try to fit them together until they find a correct match many animals are also going to use this kind of trial and error approach um testing behavior until they actually yield a reward now not all behaviors can be taught using operant conditioning techniques many animals are actually predis uh predisposed to learn or not learn behaviors based on their own natural abilities and instincts so animals are most able to learn behaviors that are going to coincide with their natural behaviors for example birds naturally peck when they&#39;re searching for food so rewarding them with food in response to a pecking based Behavior is going to work well this predisposition is known as preparedness similarly it can be really difficult to teach animals behaviors that work against their Natural Instincts so for example researchers tried to use behavioral techniques to train raccoons uh raccoons to place coins in a piggy bank and lo and behold their efforts were unsuccessful because what the raccoons would do is they would pick up the coins rub them together then dip them into the bank before then deciding to pull them back out and researchers concluded that the reason they failed at this task is because they were trying to train the raccoons to perform something that was conflicting with their natural food Gathering instincts their natural food Gathering instincts is to pick up two seeds rub the seeds together wash them in the Stream to clean them before eating and so this difficulty in overcoming instinctual behaviors is called instinctive drift with that we&#39;ve covered everything that we wanted to with associative learning next up we want to talk about observational learning observational learning is the process of learning a new Behavior or gaining information by watching others the most famous and perhaps most controversial study into observational learning is the boo boo doll experiment in which children watched an adult in a room full of toys punching and kicking an inflatable clown toy and so then when the children were later allowed to play in the room many of them ignored every other toy in the room and inflicted the same kind of violence on that clown boo boo doll that they had seen the adults do now it&#39;s important to note that observational learning is not simply imitation because observational learning can also be used to teach individuals to avoid behaviors as well so in later iterations of this boo boo doll experiment children who watch the adult get scolded after attacking the boo boo clown doll were less likely to be aggressive towards the boo boo clown doll themselves now like associative learning there are a few neurological factors that affect observational learning the most important of these are mirror neurons these neurons are located in the frontal and parietal loes of the cerebral cortex and fire both when an individual performs an action and when that individual observes someone else performing that action mirror neurons are largely involved in motor processes but additionally are thought to be related to empathy and other kinds of emotions some Mir neurons fire both when we experience an emotion and also when we observe another experiencing that same emotion now researchers suggest that observation learning through modeling is an important factor in determining an individual&#39;s Behavior throughout his or her lifetime people learn about what behaviors are acceptable by watching others perform them now much attention is focused taking this idea on the reoccurrence of violent Media or domestic abuse as models for antisocial Behavior but something else that people are trying to push forward instead are pro-social modeling because that can be just as powerful of course observational learning is strongest when a model&#39;s words are consistent with their actions so many parents they try to adopt a do as I say not as I do approach when teaching their children but research suggests that children will disproportionately imitate what the model did rather than what the model said so this is a really interesting example of actions speak louder than words with that we finished objective one I&#39;m going to go ahead and end the video here and in the next part we&#39;re going to pick right up with objective two which is all about memory I really hope this was helpful let me know if you have any questions comments concerns down below other than that good luck happy studying and have a beautiful beautiful day future doctors

hello everybody my name is Iman welcome back to my YouTube channel today we&amp;#39;re going to be covering chapter three for our Behavioral Science playlist chapter 3 is titled learning and memory and in this chapter we&amp;#39;re going to cover the following objectives objective one is titled learning learning refers specifically to the way in which we acquire new behaviors and here we&amp;#39;re going to learn about associative learning and observational learning now within associative learning we&amp;#39;re going to talk about classical conditioning and oper conditioning then we&amp;#39;re going to move into memory in memory we&amp;#39;re going to talk about the three main processes of forming memories this is going to include encoding storage and retrieval and then after that we&amp;#39;re also going to discuss forgetting and memory construction then we&amp;#39;ll move into the third and final objective which is titled neurobiology of learning and memory here we&amp;#39;re going to briefly discuss neuroplasticity with that being said let&amp;#39;s go ahead and get started with objective one learning so to a psychologist again learning refers specifically to the way in which we acquire new behaviors and to understand learning we have to first start with the concept of a stimulus a stimulus can be defined as anything to which an organism can respond to this includes all of the sensory inputs that we discussed in Chapter 2 now the combination of a stimulus and response serves as the basis as the foundation for all behavioral learning responses to a stimuli those can change over time depending on the frequency and intensity of the stimulus so for instance repeated exposure to the same stimulus can cause a decrease in response this is called habituation the opposite process can also occur dis habituation is defined as the recovery of a response to a stimulus after habituation has occurred learning then is just the change in behavior that occurs in response to a stimulus and while there are many different types of learning for the MCAT we&amp;#39;re only going to focus on two types we&amp;#39;re going to discuss associative learning and we&amp;#39;re going to discuss observational learning and here in the second page what you&amp;#39;re going to see is a bit of the outline that we&amp;#39;re going to cover when we discuss different types of learning first we&amp;#39;ll start with discussing associative learning this is the creation of a pairing or association either between two stimuli or between a behavior and a response within associative learning we&amp;#39;re going to cover classical conditioning this takes advantage of responses to create associations between two unrelated stimulus we&amp;#39;re going to discuss conditioned stimulus versus unconditioned stimulus in addition we&amp;#39;ll also cover Operate conditioning this links voluntary behaviors with consequences in an effort to alter the frequency of those behaviors and here we&amp;#39;re going to discuss reinforcement versus punishment that&amp;#39;s all under associative learning then we&amp;#39;ll move into discussing a observational learning this is the process of learning a new Behavior or gaining information by watching others so that&amp;#39;s the outline for the topics that we&amp;#39;re going to cover now in objective one so let&amp;#39;s go ahead and get started with associative learning let&amp;#39;s start again with defining associative learning so associative learning is the creation of a pairing or association either between two stimuli or between a behavior and a response now on the MCAT you&amp;#39;re going to be tested on two such kinds of learning classical conditioning and operant conditioning let&amp;#39;s first start by talking about classical conditioning classical conditioning is a type of associative learning that is going to take advantage of biological instinctual response resp es to create associations between two unrelated stimuli classical conditioning works first and foremost because some stimuli cause an innate or reflexive physiological response for example we reflexively salivate when we smell fresh bread baking in an oven or we may jump or recoil when we hear a loud noise any stimulus that brings about such a reflexive response is called an unconditioned stimulus and then that innate or reflexive response that&amp;#39;s called an unconditioned response now some stimuli they don&amp;#39;t produce a reflexive response those are known as neutral stimuli now when you&amp;#39;re thinking about classical conditioning usually the first name that comes to mind for researching classical conditioning is Ivan Pavlov and his experiments on dogs in Pavlov&amp;#39;s experiment the unconditioned stimulus was meat all right this would cause the dogs to salivate reflexively if the dogs saw meat or food they would begin to salivate cool then what the neutral response here was is a bell okay if the dog was just hanging out and Pavlov rang a bell nothing would happen this is our neutral stimulus now through the course of the experiment Pavlov repeatedly rang the bell before placing in meat or food in front of the dog or in the dog&amp;#39;s mouth initially the dog did not react much when they only heard the bell ring without receiving meat however after this procedure was repeated several times the dog began to salivate when they heard the bell ring in fact the dogs would salivate even if Pavlov only rang the bell and actually did not deliver any meat and so pavlof thereby turned that neutral stimulus the Bell into what&amp;#39;s called a conditioned stimulus so a conditioned stimulus this is a normally neutral stimulus that through Association now causes a reflexive response called a conditioned response classical conditioning then is the process of taking advantage of a reflexive unconditioned stimulus to turn a neutral stimulus into a conditioned stimulus this process is also referred to as acquisition so again to repeat unconditioned stimulus was providing the dog with meat or food the dog would naturally and reflexively salivate okay if we just rang a bell and just the Bell this is a neutral stimulus the dog would do nothing slowly Pavlov begin to ring the bell and then provide food and so over the course of time even just ringing the bell even if food food was not provided the dog would would salivate in anticipation that it would bring meat and so that neutral stimulus turned into a conditioned stimulus wonderful now something to talk about in addition to this right building on top of this notice that the stimuli change in this experiment but the response is the same throughout because salivation in response to food is natural and it really requires no conditioning it is an unconditioned response in this context but on the other hand when paired with a conditioned stimulus salivation is considered a conditioned response just because though a conditioned response has been acquired here&amp;#39;s an important thing it does not mean that it is permanent if the conditioned stimulus is presented without the unconditioned stimulus enough times then the organism can become habituated to the conditioned response and Extinction can occur so if the Bell Rings enough time and the dog notices that it&amp;#39;s not getting any meat with the ringing of the Bell the dog may stop salivating when the bell sounds also interestingly enough this Extinction can be undone so this Extinction of a response is also not always permanent after some time if an extinct condition stimulus is presented again a weak conditioned response can sometimes be exhibited this is known as spontaneous recovery now in addition to all that there are a few processes that can modify the response to a conditioned stimulus after acquisition has occurred two of the two of those that we&amp;#39;re going to cover is generalization and discrimination generalization is a broadening effect by which a stimulus that&amp;#39;s similar enough to the condition stimulus can also produce the conditioned response so here in Pavlov&amp;#39;s dog the conditioned stimulus is the bell ringing of the Bell something that&amp;#39;s similar enough to the ringing of a bell is maybe a buzzer that&amp;#39;ll you know create that sound all right that is a similar enough thing to the conditioned stimulus the Bell that might also produce the conditioned response so the dog upon hearing a buzzer that creates a similar sound might still associate that sound with food and may start to salivate then there&amp;#39;s also discrimination so an organism could learn to distinguish between two similar stimuli so Pavlov could have also trained the dog between the ringing of Bell in two tones maybe ringing the bell in One Tone usually was a accompanied with food and the ringing of the bell in a different tone never brought food and so then there is this distinction between the tone of the bell and anticipation of food and thereby the dog may salivate when it hears one tone of the Bell because it knows that&amp;#39;s associated with food but won&amp;#39;t salivate with a different tone of the Bell because that&amp;#39;s not associated with food and so again discrimination an organism learns to distinguish between two similar stimuli wonderful so that is Con that is conditioning all right that is classical conditioning let&amp;#39;s go ahead and move into a discussion about operant conditioning now whereas classical conditioning is concerned with instincts and biological responses Operate conditioning links voluntary behaviors with consequences and in an effort to alter the frequency of those behaviors now operant conditioning is associated with BF Skinner who&amp;#39;s considered the father of behaviorism the theory that all behaviors are conditioned now the four possible relationships between stimulus and behavior are summarized in this table and we&amp;#39;re going to go over them together so let&amp;#39;s start with saying that a stimulus is added and a behavior continues we call call this positive reinforcement on the other hand if a stimulus is removed and behavior continues this is called negative reinforcement so let&amp;#39;s talk about this idea of reinforcement reinforcement is the process of increasing the likelihood that an individual will perform a behavior and reinforcers are also divided into two categories there&amp;#39;s positive reinforcers these increase a behavior by adding a positive consequence or an incentive following the desired Behavior money is a great example of a common and strong positive reinforcer right of course employees are going to continue to work for you if they are being paid and especially if they are being paid well negative enforcers or reinforcers on the other hand they act similarly in that they increase the frequency of a behavior but they do so by remove removing something unpleasant for example taking an aspirin is going to reduce a headache so the next time you have a headache what are you going to do you&amp;#39;re going to take in Aspirin negative reinforcement is sometimes confused with punishment that we&amp;#39;re going to discuss punishment here in a little but remember that the frequency of the behavior is going to be the distinguishing Factor any reinforcement positive or negative is going to increase the likelihood that a behavior is going to be performed now within the realm of negative reinforcers we can subdivide this into two category all right two categories one is called Escape learning I&amp;#39;m going to write that down here for us Escape learning and the other type is called avoidance learning all right we&amp;#39;re going to cover these two right now so Escape learning and avoidance learning taking aspirin this is an example of Escape learning the role of the behavior is to reduce the unpleasantness unpleasantness of something that already exists like a headache avoidance learning on the other hand this is meant to prevent anything that&amp;#39;s unpleasant that has yet to happen in fact you are practicing avoidance right now right you&amp;#39;re watching this video in the hopes to study for the MCAT and you are studying to avoid the unpleasant consequences of a poor score on the mcap and when you&amp;#39;re going to do well because you will future doctors you&amp;#39;re going to realize even more the importance of studying and hopefully that will continue as a trend in medical school and you will study for all of your exams so that you will always do well now classical and operant conditioning they can actually be used hand inand for example let&amp;#39;s take dolphin trainers this is going to be a good example they take advantage of reinforcers when they&amp;#39;re training Dolphins to perform tricks sometimes the trainers will feed a dolphin a fish after it performs a trick the fish can then said to be a primary reinforcer because the fish is a treat that the dolphin responds to naturally now dolphin trainers also sometimes use a tiny handheld device that emits a clicking sound this clicker it would not normally be a reinforcer on its own but the trainers use classical conditioning to pair the clicker with the fish to elicit the same response and so the clicker is thus a conditioned reinforcer which is sometimes called a secondary reinforcer okay so that&amp;#39;s reinforcement for us now let&amp;#39;s move on to talking about punishment if a stimulus is added and a behavior stops that&amp;#39;s called positive punishment if a stimulus is removed and the behavior stops this is called negative punishment so in contrast to reinforcement punishment uses conditioning to reduce the occurrence of a behavior positive punishment this adds an unpleasant consequence in response to a Behavior to hopefully reduce this Behavior so for example a thief may be arrested for stealing and put in jail in the hopes that he&amp;#39;s stopped stealing the next time to avoid going to jail again negative punishment is the reduction of a behavior when a stimulus is removed so for example a parent May forbid their child from watching television as a consequence for bad behavior and the goal here is they hope that this prevents the behavior from happening again because you don&amp;#39;t want your TV rights to be taken again awesome so that is operant conditioning we talked about reinforcement and Punishment now something else that&amp;#39;s really interesting to talk about is reinforcement schedules the presence or absence of reinforcing or punishing stimuli is just part of the story the rate at which desired behaviors are acquired is also affected by the schedule that&amp;#39;s being used to affect those behaviors reinforcement schedules they have two different factors whether the schedule is fixed or variable and whether the schedule is based on a ratio or an interval so there are four various types that we&amp;#39;re going to cover and we&amp;#39;re going to start off with fixed ratio schedules these reinforce a behavior after a specific number of performances of that behavior so for for example in a typical operant conditioning experiment researchers might reward a rat with a food pellet every third time it presses a bar in its cage and this continuous reinforcement is a fixed ratio schedule in which the behavior is rewarded every time it is performed now variable ratio schedules these reinforce a behavior after a varying number of performances of that behavior but such that the average number of performances to receive a reward is relatively constant so with this type of reinforcement schedule researchers might reward a rra first after two button presses then eight then four then finally six so you notice that the average number of performances to get that reward seems relatively constant here then we have fixed interval schedules these reinforce the first instance of a behavior after a specified time period has elapsed so for example once our rat gets a food pellet it has to wait 60 seconds before it gets another and so that first lever press after 60 seconds gets it a food pellet but any subsequent presses during those waiting 60-second period accomplishes nothing then last but not least we have variable interval schedules these reinforce a behavior the first time that behavior is performed after varying intervals of time so instead of waiting exactly 60 seconds for example our R our rat might have to wait 90 seconds then 30 seconds then 3 minutes and in each case once the interval elapses then the next press gets a rat a pellet now of all of these schedules variable ratio all right variable ratio works the best it&amp;#39;s works for fastest all right for learning a new Behavior it is also the most resistant to Extinction now there are a few things to note when we&amp;#39;re looking at this table for reinforcement schedules all right we have cumulative number of responses on the Y AIS versus time on the xaxis and the first thing is that variable rate variable ratio schedules they have the fastest response rate the rat will continue pressing the bar quickly with the hope that the next press will be the quote unquote right one also note that the fixed schedule so fixed ratio and fixed interval these are these two right here they often have a brief moment of no responses after the behavior is reinforced so the rat is just going to stop hitting the lover until it wants another pellet and once it has figured out what behavior is necessary to receive that pellet now the final idea that&amp;#39;s associated with operant conditioning that we want to cover here before we move on to any further topics is this concept of shaping okay shaping is the process of rewarding increasingly specific behavior so for example let&amp;#39;s say that you want to train a bird to spin around in place twice and then Peck a specific key on a keyboard board all right you&amp;#39;re first going to start training at a slower rate and you might first give the bird a treat for just turning once all right but then you&amp;#39;ll only start rewarding the behavior as it gets more complex so you might reward it for the first time it does one Spin and then you won&amp;#39;t reward it again until it does two spins and then you won&amp;#39;t reward it at all until it does those two spins and then it hits a specific key so shaping is the process of rewarding increasing specific behavior now it would be incorrect to say that classical and operant conditioning are the only factors that affect the behavior nor would it be correct to say that we are all just Mindless and robotic unable to resist rewards and punishments that occur in our lives now since Skinner&amp;#39;s initial perspectives it&amp;#39;s been found that many cognitive and biological factors are at work that can change the effects of associative learning or allow us to resist them all together for example many organisms undergo latent learning this is learning that occurs without a reward but that is spontaneously demonstrated once a reward is introduced so the classical experiment that&amp;#39;s associated with latent learning involves rats running a maze so rats that were simply carried through the maze and then incentivized with a food reward for completing the maze on their own performed just as well and in some cases even better than those rats that had been trained to run them maze using more standard operant conditioning tech techniques by which they were like rewarded every few steps on the way to completing the maze now another thing to talk about is problem solving so problem solving is another method of learning that kind of steps outside the standard behaviorist approach so think of the way young children put together a jigsaw puzzle often they will take pieces one by one then they try to fit them together until they find a correct match many animals are also going to use this kind of trial and error approach um testing behavior until they actually yield a reward now not all behaviors can be taught using operant conditioning techniques many animals are actually predis uh predisposed to learn or not learn behaviors based on their own natural abilities and instincts so animals are most able to learn behaviors that are going to coincide with their natural behaviors for example birds naturally peck when they&amp;#39;re searching for food so rewarding them with food in response to a pecking based Behavior is going to work well this predisposition is known as preparedness similarly it can be really difficult to teach animals behaviors that work against their Natural Instincts so for example researchers tried to use behavioral techniques to train raccoons uh raccoons to place coins in a piggy bank and lo and behold their efforts were unsuccessful because what the raccoons would do is they would pick up the coins rub them together then dip them into the bank before then deciding to pull them back out and researchers concluded that the reason they failed at this task is because they were trying to train the raccoons to perform something that was conflicting with their natural food Gathering instincts their natural food Gathering instincts is to pick up two seeds rub the seeds together wash them in the Stream to clean them before eating and so this difficulty in overcoming instinctual behaviors is called instinctive drift with that we&amp;#39;ve covered everything that we wanted to with associative learning next up we want to talk about observational learning observational learning is the process of learning a new Behavior or gaining information by watching others the most famous and perhaps most controversial study into observational learning is the boo boo doll experiment in which children watched an adult in a room full of toys punching and kicking an inflatable clown toy and so then when the children were later allowed to play in the room many of them ignored every other toy in the room and inflicted the same kind of violence on that clown boo boo doll that they had seen the adults do now it&amp;#39;s important to note that observational learning is not simply imitation because observational learning can also be used to teach individuals to avoid behaviors as well so in later iterations of this boo boo doll experiment children who watch the adult get scolded after attacking the boo boo clown doll were less likely to be aggressive towards the boo boo clown doll themselves now like associative learning there are a few neurological factors that affect observational learning the most important of these are mirror neurons these neurons are located in the frontal and parietal loes of the cerebral cortex and fire both when an individual performs an action and when that individual observes someone else performing that action mirror neurons are largely involved in motor processes but additionally are thought to be related to empathy and other kinds of emotions some Mir neurons fire both when we experience an emotion and also when we observe another experiencing that same emotion now researchers suggest that observation learning through modeling is an important factor in determining an individual&amp;#39;s Behavior throughout his or her lifetime people learn about what behaviors are acceptable by watching others perform them now much attention is focused taking this idea on the reoccurrence of violent Media or domestic abuse as models for antisocial Behavior but something else that people are trying to push forward instead are pro-social modeling because that can be just as powerful of course observational learning is strongest when a model&amp;#39;s words are consistent with their actions so many parents they try to adopt a do as I say not as I do approach when teaching their children but research suggests that children will disproportionately imitate what the model did rather than what the model said so this is a really interesting example of actions speak louder than words with that we finished objective one I&amp;#39;m going to go ahead and end the video here and in the next part we&amp;#39;re going to pick right up with objective two which is all about memory I really hope this was helpful let me know if you have any questions comments concerns down below other than that good luck happy studying and have a beautiful beautiful day future doctors

Transcript for:Behavioral Science: Learning and Memory

Transcript for:
Behavioral Science: Learning and Memory