greetings class hey in this chapter we're going to talk about learning okay so learning principles and theories have applications that have influenced like far beyond the field of psychology so people around the world use learning principles daily without even realizing they're doing so right without even knowing the specific principles that they're using uh for example everyone's seen a trained animal act you know many have noticed the animal receives a treat after it performs some desired behavior you know let's be an example of positive reinforcement something that we'll talk about parents use this style too silent reinforcement with their children quite often you probably learn to tie your shoes make your bed under the influence of positive reinforcement although i bet your parents didn't continue to reinforce you every time you tied your shoes or that you made your bed nonetheless the behavior didn't disappear so this example illustrates learning behavior under continuous reinforcement and its maintenance with partial reinforcement unfortunately the lack of understanding of learning principles leads to often their misapplication as well right so causing learning to be less effective than it could be so a good example of this is the use of punishment so punishment is often applied in a way that actually weakens its desired effects as a society you know we become more open to um i want to say accepting advice from psychologists learning principles have been applied in a wider variety of situations so i mean think about your own major if you're not a psych major i mean if well even regardless of your major you're part of an educational process and education majors though in particular you know they're they're not going to typically graduate without a course that deals in part or like exclusively with behavior management principles is a good thing for everyone to learn if you're going to be working with other organisms like people or non-human animals right so most of these courses consist primarily of principles of learning reinforcement punishment you know directly from a psychology lab um early work by the behaviorists found just like they were prolific really in their in their studies i mean like just cranking them out like study after study and they found considerable evidence to support the notion that environment affects learning right so there's a long history of research studying the effects of different variables such as you know number of learning trials reinforcement schedules types of stimuli the timing of stimuli on learning and this research has found many different environmental factors that affect how much or how well that we learn in more recent years research has shown that biological factors also have important influence on learning [Music] things like instinctive drift and taste aversions and preparedness as instances in which traditional behavioristic explanations of learning have given way to explanations you know incorporating these biological factors so maybe the old behavioristic notion that like any organism can learn any response under any conditions has been shown to be false or at least you know not as supported as by some of the earliest proponents of behaviorist perspectives so our biological predispositions can dictate what we learn under what conditions right so there's always that interaction of biology and the environment i would say like okay so this new kind of belief in diversity of psychological perspectives allows new ideas to surface and either replace or just amend behavioristic notions um behaviorism was a but we have we can't we gotta point out behaviorism was a powerful and dominant influence during the first half the 20th century but even so it was not strong enough to keep kind of cognitive explanations of learning processes and principles from arising right so it's the theoretical diversity that keeps psychology strong as a discipline and raises hope that will someday have more complete answers for a variety of phenomena so let's get started then let's look at what we want to focus on for our class right so the learning objectives for for this chapter uh or first of all kind of what is learning and that one's pretty quick to give you a definition and then we'll get into the different types of you know principles of learning we'll start with classical conditioning and it's probably where i will talk about that i'll probably stop the video make a new one for operant conditioning and then make a new one for latent learning and observational learning all right so first off some some basic definitions right okay what do we mean by learning right if i don't mean that to be like a loaded term um we're gonna look at like the foundations of learning like the simplest building blocks like if we were gonna break this down you know and kind of our put on our structuralist hat try to break down learning to its core concepts you know what does it mean well learning is no matter how you do it learning is a relatively permanent change in your behavior and you could say in your thoughts and you're even in your emotion regulation right due to experience right so it's empiricism essentially right so a relatively permanent change in behavior due to experience so there's two important parts there right relatively permanent change lasting right some kind of lasting modification to your behavior your thoughts that comes from not your biology but from your experience okay now behaviorism is the study of observable behavior in the role of the environment as a determinant of that behavior so if there's like a nature nurture debate going on you know the the early behaviorists you know they would be on the side of nurture right they're not focused on biology they're focused on the environment and how you can control or react to your environment in ways that um what can be beneficial for the learning process right or you think about it in nefarious terms could be manipulative right but either way it's the environment you know shaping your behavior according to this perspective and i wanted to point out like just kind of maybe don't worry about trying to write this down if you're taking notes from the slideshow don't write this quote down this is more here for me because i can't remember this whole quote but john watson right it's kind of like you know extreme environmentalism not uncommon for a lot of the early behaviorist but it was there was never like a consensus there's always debate here but like who does history remember right they tend to remember the most extreme those that had controversial points of view and psychology has got plenty of those types of theorists and researchers and watson is one of those right so watson has an extreme behaviorist environmentalist point of view where he says things like this like give me a dozen healthy infants well formed in my own special world to bring them up in i'll guarantee to take anyone at random and train him to be any type of specialist i might select a doctor lawyer artist merchant chief yes beggar man and thief regardless of his talents pensions tendencies abilities vocations and race of his ancestors right so he's essentially saying you give me someone who is you know physically healthy and i can if i can control their entire environment i could shape them into anything i want right is what he's saying pretty radical right for the um to say the biology doesn't necessarily matter now modern behaviorists of course they're not going to agree with all of this you know they might say yeah we could place emphasis on you know the environment and nurturing right but nature still matters too right biological predispositions exist um but this was a you know a radical idea and we'll come back to talk about john watson a bit later so john watson you know loves works done like in the 1920s but we're going to go back further than that okay so let's talk about uh classical conditioning and here's someone you should know right so this is a russian physiologist he won a nobel prize for work regarding saliva in the digestive system and not a psychologist in fact he had some writings where he was you know very very offended by being called a psychologist actually you know he was a physiologist he was you know studying uh biology and this guy you've probably heard of his work if you've forgotten his name or haven't learned anything about him specifically so like i said he was a russian physiologist so he would say his name ivan pavlov or if you're american right you say ivan pavlov but this is this is pavlov here and we're gonna talk a little bit about him in classical conditioning right so there's a name associated with the founding of classical conditioning it's pavlov right so what he did and you can see in this picture here was he had a surgically implanted tubes into the salivary ducts of dogs in his lab right and he wanted to collect their saliva after he's studying saliva and the world that saliva plays in digestion right so he needs saliva so he's collecting it from these dogs now to get them to salivate so we can collect their saliva he would present them with meat powders or basically meat powders and like the leftover kind of drippings uh and liquids from meat that you would find on a meat wrapper like imagine you went to the butcher right and you bought meat and then you unwrapped it what's left on the paper well he would collect that and he would use that to stimulate the salivation response in his dogs right so that's what he's doing and he started to notice something strange in his dogs i started presenting what he first called psychic reflexes and what he meant by that was it seemed like the dogs were anticipating you know being presented with this this is called meat powder this meat powder and they started salivating you know before it was even presented to them so we thought how can they do that how can they anticipate you know right away in his own writings you can see he's actually going to a you know a cognitive place he's wondering like what's going on in these dogs brains where they're salivating before they're presented with the meat powder right hmm and and but to be sure first let's make sure that's actually what's happening right so it observes the dogs and for sure it seems like a certain time of day they start salivating and then then he starts to pick up on and start to kind of focus on from like the dog's perspective what's going on in the environment and starts listening so it's hearing these different sounds in the environment and there was a particular sound that the dogs would associate with the meat powder that's not related necessarily directly to the meat powder so it's not like the unwrapping of it or the sound of it being placed in their bowl they're salivating before that even happens right so it's like well what is it and so he watches his workers and they come to to get these you know meat powder to put in the poles and what they heard was the sound of keys jangling right so here the sound of these keys as they go into this kind of cupboard area you know to get the material that makes the dog salivate so they could hear the keys and right away they start salivating so pavlov's observing this and other workers in this lab and they're thinking the dogs are making this connection you know between the sound of keys which like objectively you know don't have anything to do with meat but these dogs have learned that now the sound of these keys means i'm about to receive this meat powder and so they start drooling so i wonder all right you know can we control this in in some way you know are these dogs learning more than we thought they were capable of and also you know is this something similar to the building blocks of learning for all organisms right so without you know setting out to you know pavlov and his lab did one of the most in studies in psychology right okay so after realizing these dogs were having this kind of instinctive response like an involuntary response of salivation you know people in the lab how can we control this in some way and so we get this i will say this now for this entire chapter we get these ideas that are fairly simple like in their basic form like what is classical conditioning and then later on we'll talk about operant conditioning and then like observational learning like real simple ideas complicated terminology uh at first right like you get used to it the more you read about behaviorism but at first it could be a little confusing so keep that in mind okay these ideas super simple ideas about the building blocks of learning however you know the terminology used to explain them can be a little daunting at first for for a student in intro site class right but the idea is easy and you can see what i mean by this definition right someone said give me a definition of classical conditioning you know and you're having a conversation and you said something like this sounds very robotic learning to make a reflex response to a stimulus other than the original natural stimulus that normally produces the reflex it's like okay can you can you explain that in human terms right it's basically this it's associative learning right so you're learning to make associations between two different stimuli and think about them as objects two different objects where one of those objects produces this instinctive response that you don't have to learn like a dog with meat powder right they smell meat powder you salivate just like you right maybe you sit down in front of your favorite meal and maybe you start to salivate more you really have to learn to do that something your body does automatically right but now what if you pair that your pick your favorite food like imagine it in your head you know for me i'm thinking of like a steak like a big steak put right in front of me and i might start salivating but now what's something that doesn't make you salivate at all right how about this how about the smell of this you know whiteboard cleaner or though that's not going to do it for me right that's not going to make me salivate at least i hope not that'd be weird right here let's test it nothing right so okay so i'll take these two objects this whiteboard cleaner and the steak and now what i'll do is is when the steak is first set down the table in front of me for me to eat i'm going to give a spritz of this whiteboard cleaner in the air so that i smell it right and so now i'm making an association between the white board cleaner and the steak in front of me i'm salivating because it's an instinctive response to the steak but i'm making an association i'm learning something i'm learning that there's kind of this coupling effect you know this association between the whiteboard cleaner and the steak where's over enough trials maybe you present the whiteboard cleaner and the steak to me maybe that happens like 10 times in a row and then soon enough then just the smell of the whiteboard cleaner alone will make me salivate as if i'm responding to a steak so i've learned the association between you know these two different stimuli so that's not a terribly complex idea right we make associations like that all the time it's just the language that becomes a little tricky right so we'll walk through this and we'll practice with the language and i'm not going to promise it won't be tricky it takes practice it takes practice to get this language down all right so let's look at more about classical conditioning and just diving right into the terminology here and i'm going to use pavlov's example of with his dogs right as we first are learning about this so here's the terminology if we go back to the meat powder example right and the sound of the keys pavlov was very creative using all different types of sounds you know to make sure that they were novel and that they could create this type of associative learning or classical conditioning with a brand new stimuli but let's start here with an unconditioned stimulus or us right unconditioned stimulus like it says here it's a natural occurring stimulus that leads to an involuntary response so that's the meat powder right the dogs salivate when they present it with meat powder they don't have to learn to do this it's something that their body does instinctively you could also sometimes throw in here you know things that you've previously learned that become an automatic response but this one's a good example because they don't have to learn at all like the first time you present a dog with meat powder they salivate right okay so there's really no learning going on in this phase it's just instinctive and automatic right so that's the unconditioned stimulus and that gives you an unconditioned response right or you are so the unconditioned response is the salivation itself so this part here you know it says unconditioned think of the word conditioned as as really synonymous with learned so it means like unlearned there's an unlearned stimulus you have an unlearned response to it it's all reflexive it's instinctive you didn't have to learn this or you learned it so long ago and it's been what reinforced so many times that it's become an instinctive automatic response okay so not a whole lot of learning here but you want to make sure that this actually works if you're going to go through these trials of classical conditioning so you found an unconditioned stimulus and unconditioned response the dogs drool when they smell meat powder great right now next steps these are the old reflexes now let's look at the before conditioning so some you know the process of classical conditioning itself all right now you've found your unconditioned stimulus unconditioned response meat powder salivation now let's find a stimulus stimulus that is neutral that means that it just doesn't create the unconditioned response in our in our last step of the process right so we're going to find something that does not create a salivation response so a pavlovic's experiment with lots of different tones um i think the first one after they there he wrote about keys was a metronome right so you know the old metronomes you might see like on your piano that goes just to keep time right so that was one of the first things they tried okay well let's take this this metronome and put it in front of the dogs they have this little device kind of clicking at them right and they go okay that produced no salivation response perfect so that's a neutral stimulus doesn't create this reflexive response like the meat powder does does nothing for the salivation right okay good so now the trick is how can we pair that neutral stimulus the tone together whoops together with the unconditioned stimulus the meat powder and if you do that okay we're all set up right we know these two things exist oh sorry i'm jumping ahead of myself before conditioning we know the tone does nothing for salivation the meat powder elicits a salivation response that's unconditioned automatic okay cool so we got these two you know parts of the process in place the next step then is conditioning so now we're going to make the association between the tone of the metronome and being presented with meat powder right so you do this with the dogs and it doesn't take very many trials to actually form this association with these dogs and in their responses right so you're still getting an unconditioned response when the dogs are in the learning process so they may still be responding you know just because the meat powder is still being presented to them but in this case it's like okay you know metronome meat powder get them in sink turn the metronome on put the meat powder down right and so the dog starts salivating because the meat powder is there at the same time they are hearing the sound of the metronome so these two things are in the process of becoming associated right so the dog is being conditioned to respond to first the association of these two stimuli and then we'll see what happens next all right so far simple idea right it's just the terminology that gets kind of confusing so neutral stimulus combined with the unconditioned stimulus unconditional stimulus is there so of course we're going to get the unconditioned response okay now we have some new terminology and we're learning these new uh reflexes right or we're thinking of as the building blocks of learning now the conditioned stimulus this was the initially neutral stimulus so that's the metronome sound right okay so that initially neutral stimulus comes to elicit a conditioned response after being paired with the unconditioned stimulus feels like a tongue twister right so what it's basically saying is that the neutral stimulus which was the sound of the metronome has been paired with the unconditioned stimulus the meat powder until now and after all those pairings and trials the neutral stimulus has become a conditioned stimulus a learned stimulus so it's not something that happened reflexively at the beginning it started out as neutral now it's a stimulus that's been conditioned as a stimulus that elicits a conditioned response right so the conditioned response or learned response occurs after the conditioned stimulus has been associated with the unconditioned stimulus right um so a lot of jargon in there to explain something which is relatively simple right you know it's associative learning it's conditioned learning or sorry that's a redundant um it's classical conditioning which means learning right so simple building blocks and typically this goes on in our lives without our awareness you know these associations of course i'm going to give you some more examples of these right but the important thing here is that now the neutral stimulus has become a conditioned stimulus so it's a learned stimulus which pre which creates or elicits a learned response which is salivation right and so pavlov played around with this they used the metronomes they used um different tones different clicking sounds um all different types of stimuli and they found that they could in fact you know condition uh this response in their dogs their dogs were learning things it was interesting at the time too you can read about what people thought about animals of course people who worked with animals already knew these things to be true maybe they didn't have a language for it um and they use something else more often which is called operant conditioning um but but but it's it wasn't really like consensus in the scientific field and certainly not in the general public uh the animals could learn and that their building blocks of learning would be the same as humans right like today we're more comfortable with that idea but you know back in pavlov's day that wasn't necessarily the case right i mean we're going back to like i mean when was this like 1904 somewhere around there in the turn of the century the 20th century right early 1900s okay so but anyway anyway we've got our conditioned stimulus and response now dogs are drooling when they hear the metronome there's a couple things that pavlov also recommended and behaviors have expanded upon greatly you know since pavlos time and that's something called acquisition so we're going to look at some characteristics and principles of of classical conditioning so the the acquisition stage really refers to you know when is the like optimal time to create the pairing in this case the meat powder and the sound of the metronome so it says the conditioned stimulus right so they have to learn this that's the metronome sound to come a half second before the uncons unconditioned stimulus for this acquisition to occur right so that means for the best results here to create the association you would turn on the metronome click click click right and then as fast as you can even you know a half you know second goes by and then you present the meat powder that was even better than doing them exactly at the same time which is kind of interesting right so it's like you want to get the attention of uh and start processing the sound in this case before the meat powder but there's lots of examples of this that have been done in the lab i teach a human sexuality class and one of the things we go over in that class which is kind of fun is examples of conditioning in our own sexual responses so you know here's one it's not super risque but i think you'll find it interesting or maybe amusing so let's say all right you have a an unconditioned stimulus which is a passionate kiss and that creates sexual arousal in people um in this study i'm thinking about was done in the 80s they did this in the lab and they're checking things like penile circumference and and blood flow basically to the to the genital areas for men and for women and they found that when they kissed someone that they were in a romantic relationship with they had this sexual arousal response but they also had it when they kissed strangers in the lab right so okay but you know that's not that shocking like even if psychologically you're like i don't really want to do this sometimes you do get some response in your body after all right okay so passionate kiss unconditioned stimulus leads to the unconditioned response which is sexual arousal okay so we've got that connection that reflexive connection right but what happens if we try to make the association and and condition you know the smell of something like onion breath right so first you know they want to make sure that's neutral so they have people smell onion breath and just ensure that there was no sexual response just to onion breath on its own right and that's what they found in the study all right so you smell someone's breath that's bad it doesn't create an arousal response but what if you take that neutral stimulus the onion breath pair it with the unconditioned stimulus you know and remember the acquisition would have to be smell the onion breath and then the kiss right which is probably how that would work right so the person kisses you and they have onion breath now you're going to get that sexual arousal response because it's unconditioned response right regardless of the onion breath it might not be as strong because of the bad breath but it's still there so you get that unconditioned response until eventually after enough trials you know you can just present the conditioned stimulus now the onion breath itself and get sexual arousal even without the kiss involved huh interesting so maybe you know some one theory in human sexuality that this is a part of where fetishes come from is this association and there are some unethical studies done in the past where uh researchers studying human sexuality and behaviorism wanted to see if they could create sexual fetishes in the lab and they did just that right by incorporating objects into um sex with couples where they'd say okay you guys you know have sex but incorporate this beach ball for example right and until eventually especially in men they would get this sexual arousal response which is presented with the beach ball right with no sex attached to it at all and then it would become in some cases because sex is a strong motivator you know a very strong stimulus that it was tough to get like an arousal response without the beach ball there whoa okay so now we're getting into like fetish territory interesting huh so i mentioned that was an unethical study because then they didn't unlearn those fetish responses for those participants in that study um interesting stuff huh okay so let's look at some other examples of classical conditioning oh this one i like because this one i found this it was in a textbook but this actually happened in to a friend of mine my group of friends when i was in high school i had a story that that matched on to this textbook example so i had a friend in high school who uh her dad got a job here in bakersfield but they they moved from the east coast and you know she grew up over on the east coast all of her family's still there and like every winter break and summer break her and her family would do they wouldn't fly they would do this road trip across the country and they'd drive all the way to forget where they were from now i want to say connecticut so they would drive all the way to connecticut right like and back twice a year they loved it but there's one thing they would do like they had these like traditions in their car when they were driving and maybe you guys do something like this to you like my daughter and i when we drive underneath like underpasses that are particularly long you know like the lit ones that you're in there for a few seconds we just like we just kind of scream and laugh the whole time right so her family was doing the same kind of thing but they did it for bridges anytime they go over a bridge you know they'd try to like scream the whole way you know as soon as the car hit the bridge and went off the other side and for most of the family they would just laugh it was like something they did you know for fun but my buddy my friend she was really really young she was the youngest of her siblings and in particular she remembered that her it would scare her because her father was like so dramatic i guess he must have been a good actor so convincing uh that when they go over scared and he'd go over the bridges he'd like let go of the wheel and he'd say things like we're gonna die oh my god that's right and it really scared her uh every time she was scared everybody else was laughing and she just thought how can they be laughing right so let's say you know before these incidents happened and she was to look at pictures of bridges or maybe even walk across a bridge you know she wouldn't have been scared um the unconditioned stimulus those are you know this father scare tactics when her father was scared you know you would respond to that thinking i should be too especially if you're a child right so now you combine those two together you compare combine the father scare tactics as an unconditioned stimulus to the bridge itself which is going to is neutral but will become the conditioned stimulus and you're going to get this conditioned response to bridges now which is fear right so remember condition means learned so essentially creating a phobia you know um theoretically a lot of phobias are created this way you know they're they're taught to us by other people or you learn from an association between an object and a fear response and then and then we get to operant conditioning where they're reinforced right but not everybody's aware of like when this happened this association happened but my friend totally was and part of it being a phobia means that she's aware that it's irrational she has an idea of where it came from right unless it persists right so she's got to do something to unlearn this like break this association and practice it over and over until she no longer gets this automatic or no longer has this conditioned fear response so we learned about this but story time when you know when you're uh you know if you're like me but in my circle of friends when i was a teenager you know one of us got a car first right so my buddy had a car and we would all pile in the car and we're like oh hell reason now going around town and we thought for whatever reason i remember now we were gonna drive to la and we're driving to la and i'm in the back seat with like three or four other people we're all crammed in there right and then um we're going over a bridge none of us think anything we're just talking and laughing and having fun and then my friend starts to what looks like kind of sees like she's having a seizure she's gasping for breath she can't catch her breath like she's gonna pass out and we didn't know at the time but she was essentially having like a panic attack right and so you know we get up off the bridge and we pull over on the side of the road and you know she calms down and she's embarrassed you know and that's when the story comes out she tells us i know it's dumb and you guys are going to make fun of me but you know i'm i've always been this way i'm afraid of bridges you know i didn't realize that we were on one because i was so caught up in the moment with everybody until we were in the middle of the bridge and i realized there was like no way off of it quickly because you know we're in traffic right and so she had this panic attack and we didn't make fun of her we were scared to death you know this is like pre-cell phones so we're like what do we do do we get her to a hospital and then she just kind of calmed down like okay and then she told us about this like ah so at the time i didn't know like oh that's a phobia and you're having a panic attack and you learn this through classical conditioning right but she told us the story about her dad and driving across country where there are lots of bridges um you know this was the typical type of conditioning you know that she was experiencing in the car made sense made sense to us right poor thing she's good now by the way if you're curious um you know that phobia has been extinguished let's look at some more terminology speaking of extinguishing right so these associations don't necessarily last forever right and that's a good thing that's a good thing because you know we want our our learning to be flexible in fact it's crucial that our learning is flexible and so you could what you can expect is that if there's no kind of um contain what do you say continuation of the association between you know between stimuli and response excuse me then you're going to get a disappearance of or you know of a response until it becomes extinct itself so like a disappearing or a weakening of a learned response fall it's like oh it's right on the screen following the removal or absence of the unconditioned stimulus and classical conditioning right so you remove that reinforcer if it's operant conditioning which we haven't gotten to yet but we'll get there soon so this graph is showing you here like these the uh you know the strength of the conditioned response over time so over over you know multiple trials of pairing the condition stimulus and unconscious stimulus together so it gets strong right and then if you just stop you know stop presenting the um unconditioned stimulus so you only have the conditioned stimulus alone so this would be like here the trials of the meat powder and the clicking sounds getting stronger and stronger and stronger and then you just stop with the meat powder all together well it's going to last a while right the association will be there but then it will slowly decline right until you're getting less and less salivation until it's extinguished right and the extinguish means that now you're presenting the clicking sound no increased salivation right so you check that multiple times there's no increased salivation so you would think okay so not only can we create this association but we can eliminate it or extinguish it as well right so now it's extinct fantastic but another thing they noticed even in pavlov's lab you know back in like 1904 somewhere around there was that there would be this strange like reappearance of salivation even after a time where it seemed like okay this salivation response has been extinguished as you know it's extinct now that it would pop back up almost spontaneously so now we call that spontaneous recovery and that's an important one to think about when it comes to like well to adjust your expectations first of all like once you think a response is extinguished um but in the practical application if you think about something like a relapse in drug use so let's say you have made an association between something in your environment and the use of a drug and and that's what a lot of people use drugs do right it becomes like ritualistic so they have this kind of ritualistic behavior which gives kind of importance almost like a ceremonial aspect to their drug use so let's take that example right maybe you have a certain like ceremony you do whenever you use this drug and so that ceremony becomes a part of like a part of the drug use itself right becomes a part of the um anticipation of that dopamine you know um and and really ramping that up right so let's say after a period of time though you go through the ritual or you put yourself in the environment where you used to use this drug but you no longer use the drug right you've gone through maybe some type of treatment program and you feel like okay i no longer feel the urge i don't want to use this drug anymore i've i've tried it out i've put myself back in the environment multiple times and i have not used this drug and so you feel like all right that urge has totally been extinguished it's gone right well you can expect now because we haven't gotten into this part of the class yet but when going from you know something that you explicitly condition in yourself becomes an automatic response those are not so easy for your brain to let go of right so you've still got that happening and so once in a while you can expect a big poop a big kind of surge a spontaneous recovery you know of that conditioned response if it was the dogs then they just start salivating again which seems like out of nowhere when they hear clicks we thought it was extinguished it comes back usually not as strong right usually not as strong as before um but it comes back nonetheless the same thing for something like drug use right you feel like you extinguish that urge and then just kind of out of where seemingly it comes back and you really want to use that drug again right and then maybe it's easier to fight off because you have practice not using it but nonetheless that urge comes back and you can expect it to come back like it's typical it's typical for that urge to come back or or to experience this spontaneous recovery and of course that's very dangerous for people that have serious addictions because you know if so seriously went through a treatment program where you know it was their health was at risk right and then they extinguish the urge to want to use that drug and they feel like i'm good i'm sober now i'm done right so um you know that urge might pop back and then they'll feel like guilt and shame about that urge like it should have been you know it should have been extinguished and what's wrong with them and they start to blame themselves right and that leads them to want to use the drug even more right all those types of feelings to kind of escape those feelings um the other thing that's dangerous about it is now that their body has had a chance to kind of get back to something close to you know homeostasis or close to being healthy without this drug if the person had a very very serious drug addiction and they used a lot of the drugs when they had a tolerance for it well now they may not have the same tolerance and so they might use that drug in a high amount and now it's even more dangerous because you know their body can't tolerate it so if they use it the same amount they did you know with their like the height of their addiction then it can be lethal right so it'd be very dangerous there if your smoke if you smoke cigarettes for example it usually takes on average um depending on the study you read the three to five very serious attempts at stopping smoking before people are actually successful at it it's highly addictive right and so even if you've quit like you think okay i'm done i'm done smoking cigarettes i'm sober i don't feel the urge to have one anymore at all you can expect that urge to pop back up once in a while right that's spontaneous recovery it's that was something you did so regularly it became automatic right that response became automatic so you could expect spontaneous recovery to come back i mean pretty pretty brilliant i think that you know even in like pavlov writing about this even in the early 1900s right uh so you can see why the behaviors were so prolific like right away very simple types of trials um and and just amazing results honestly for understanding how it is we learn and how to modify our behavior okay speaking of let's go over a couple more terms that have to do with the principles of classical conditioning so let's look at stimulus generalization so with stimulus generalization these are conditioned responses to new stimuli that are similar to the original so like pavlov is using like a metronome that clicks right in his trials other things that make a similar clicking sound might elicit the same type of unconditioned or conditioned rather same type of conditioned response because they're similar clicks right or my example of my friend with bridges it wasn't that you know she was just had the sphere response for one bridge she generalized to all bridges and things that even were like bridge-like structures which created the same response so she generalized across stimuli uh that were similar so one study that's famous for this uh stimulus generalization is by john watson remember him the quote at the beginning in his now infamous little albert studies so what they did in this study first was little albert by the way is the name of the baby here in this picture right so you see little albert there if you look between his legs he's reaching down to touch something he's reaching down to touch a rat see the white rat so he's reaching down to touch that and what's important to know first okay that this is a a neutral stimulus the rat is a neutral stimulus little albert's not afraid of the rat babies aren't afraid of rats typically right they want to reach out and touch them they look interesting they look soft they're moving around right they have to learn to be afraid of those things right but babies on their own not like innately afraid of rats so that's important to know for the study all right so watson observes this cool albert's not afraid of this rap now does little albert have an unconditioned response to loud scary noises so watson gets a hammer and a frying pan and just bangs it out of nowhere behind little albert right it's a little albert can't even see it coming it just gets this big crash noise and what do you know he responds like a baby when they're scared and he cries right it's like okay so they didn't have to learn to be afraid of that noise they just kind of respond you know instinctively and then they're not scared of the rat so let's see if we can make an association between this loud noise and the rat so now they you know they bring in the rat little hour goes to touch it they hit the frying pan with the hammer little albert cries and through just a few trials now when they present the rat's little albert he cries right he has this fear response to the rat all right so that was basically replicating what pavlov did right just in this situation with a human instead of a dog which is important um but yeah maybe not very ethical huh so what watson does next is he wants this to find out okay does this little albert here does he make a generalization between stimuli that have some of the same characteristics as this rat so they get other types of small animals with white fur and they present into the little albert what do you know he cries right so they show him like a bunny he cries they show him a kitten the puppy right cries he cries um they even went so far to show him uh fur coat and he cried and then the story goes i don't know if this is true or not but the story goes watson sees one of his colleagues you know in the hallway outside of his lab who's got a big white beard you know so he brings him down for an hour to see his big white beard and little albert cries at that too so watson is like look at that right this fear response is something that is conditioned in us because well not well i should start that over a fear response can be something that is conditioned there are certain things that we think are innate that people are afraid of but really it's just the process of learning so they learn to be afraid of these through classical conditioning interesting if you want to do your own deep dive sometime go look up the stories about little albert there's been you know interesting journalists to try to track down who little albert actually was we definitely know little albert wasn't there are people that came out claiming to be little albert and they wanted to sue the universities things like that and i think the watson estate at one point um but they were not old enough to be little albert so it was obvious um you know manipulation on their part but yeah do a deep dive if you want to it's kind of interesting how many people have claimed to be little albert from these studies and then just too little albert actually was i'm not going to go into those details you guys can do your own deep dive on that but it's pretty interesting okay so we got stimulus generalization you know think little albert think uh phobias right like my friend with the bridge all right now if if it's possible for these principles of conditioning and for this stimulus response relationship to be generalized you can also look at the other way there's also discrimination now it might take take a lot more work a lot more trials you know of um association to create this discrimination but it's possible so in some classic studies done with dogs and tuning forks they you know scientists did just that so if you know a tuning fork it's a picture here on the left the thing that looks like a u with a stick on it right it's basically where you you strike that against you know a surface and then you get a certain tone that's produced from the tuning fork and you can use those to tune instruments right that's what they're originally uh used for if enough of them you could even create music yourself but the idea here was like we just pick a note right can we train train a dog let's say to to salivate only when they hear like a c sharp note right no other note and they can kind of map this out almost linearly what they can you know teach this dog where they're going to try to narrow it down to the c sharp right so they kind of shape their behavior in a way so that they are presented meat powder only at the c sharp and no other notes if they get pretty close you know you can start to see generalization happen uh they'll definitely make sure there's no meat powder being presented then sorry starting to get mixed up with operant conditioning it's so hard not to mix up the two sometimes because i want to talk about that too um so what they'll do is they'll just present like the c sharps sharp alone only time this dog gets meat powder no other notes and they found out was that yeah these dogs could could discriminate over like multiple octave ranges so you could even do like a c sharp only in this range not a higher note c sharp only this c sharp would work that it took a lot more time um but it was possible it was possible to create that conditioned response right and that was mind-blowing it's like okay animals can do that they can do that much discrimination you know that's pretty amazing i've tested this out once one thanksgiving at my mother's house it was a long time ago uh she had this cat and the cat would when my mom came home like run around on the back of the couch and the couch was like right against the front window it would run around the back of the couch you know my mom would come in and the cat would run to the table when my mom came in it was because my mom would give her a treat right so there's some operant conditioning going on there um they always say things like people my family would say oh yeah the cat knows when mom is home and me being maybe no fun but you know i'm trying to be my best skeptical you know scientific thinking i thought is it my mom are you sure it's my mom that the cat is partial to you know let's do a test let's control the environment a little bit here and let's do a test to find out just like where this association is with the cat so we tried different things put cardboard up over the window so the cat couldn't see so that was interesting we had we had my mom drive different cars and pull into the driveway and we found out right away okay when my mom drives my car pulls into the driveway the cat doesn't respond right it responds when it sees her at the door so we're like okay we'll block out the window right and so now my mom drives my car around the block pulls into the driveway walks the door the cat doesn't go crazy on the couch it does run to the table after it sees her if she's opened the door so we thought okay well what if it's not my mom but it's the car is my cat or my mom's cat able to like discriminate between the different sounds of car engines we found out that yes they could so the way to figure that out was we had my mom drive different cars that were not hers no response from the cat and then we had um other people in the family drive my mom's car on the block and park it in the driveway then we get that response from the cats we're like oh my gosh this cat has learned the sound because we covered up the windows they couldn't see the sound of the engine and you can tell the difference between like my mom's mazda and my whatever it was the time toyota or something right so i mean that was pretty amazing it made my mom feel a little bad so you know i feel kind of guilty about that i heard my mom's feelings she like i thought it was me it's like sorry it's the motor but um but there you go yeah i've always been a weirdo okay all right look we're gonna stop there but well let me think of some other examples first before we stop let's think of some other examples of um classical conditioning so because you guys can relate to these have you ever had a oh here's one you hear a lot like if you've ever watched the movie jaws right and it scared you and you hear the jaws theme music like that alone is is enough to make you want to like avoid water for example um or the sound of a dentist drill right that one you can hear that you know you can hear that uh outside of a dentist office and get the same kind of reaction makes me don't really like that sound or or the sound of your alarm oh that too right i have this like very visceral physical reaction when i hear the sound of my own alarm that wakes me up which is a bummer because it actually was a song that i liked a lot and now when i hear that song i just have this like irritated reaction because i don't want to wake up right there's always different ways you can relate to the effects of learning in classical conditioning and you can use it to your advantage too and we'll talk more about that as we go through the next sections of this chapter all right gang so that's it for the first video for class we'll be right back with part two in just a moment