PSY 01- Introduction to Psychology

MODULE 4: LEARNING AND MEMORY

“IF KNOWLEDGE IS POWER, LEARNING IS YOUR SUPERPOWER”

JIM KWIK

MODULE OVERVIEW
Module 4 explore the role of learning and memory in understanding behavior.
Learning is the process that allows us to adapt to the changing conditions of the world
around us.
Learning Outcomes:

 Explain learning and the process of classical conditioning.

 Explain operant conditioning, reinforcement, and punishment.
 Describe latent learning and observational learning.

 Explain the process of memory.

 Explain and give examples of forgetting and memory failure.

 Recognize and apply memory-enhancing strategies.

Part 1 LEARNING

I. Learning

• Learning: any relatively permanent change in behavior brought about by

experience or practice.
– When people learn anything, some part of their brain is physically
changed to record what they have learned.
– Any kind of change in the way an organism behaves is learning.
–
II. Classical Conditioning
A. Pavlov and Classical Conditioning

• Ivan Pavlov: Russian physiologist (person who studies the workings of the body)
who discovered classical conditioning through his work on digestion in dogs.

• Classical conditioning: learning to make a reflex response to a stimulus other

than the original, natural stimulus that normally produces the reflex.
B. Classical Conditioning Concepts

• Unconditioned stimulus (UCS): a naturally occurring stimulus that leads to an

involuntary response.
– unconditioned means “unlearned” or “naturally occurring.”
• Unconditioned response (UCR): an involuntary response to a naturally
occurring or unconditioned stimulus.
• Conditioned stimulus (CS): stimulus that becomes able to produce a learned
reflex response by being paired with the original unconditioned stimulus.
• conditioned means “learned”.
• neutral stimulus (NS) can become a conditioned stimulus when paired with an
unconditioned stimulus.
• Conditioned response (CR): learned reflex response to a conditioned stimulus.
• sometimes called a conditioned reflex.
• CS: ice cream truck
• CR: salivation when one hears ice cream truck bell
• Acquisition: repeated pairing of the NS and the UCS; the organism is in the
process of acquiring learning
– although classical conditioning happens quite easily, there are a few basic
principles that researchers have discovered:
 CS must come before UCS.
 CS and UCS must come very close together in time—ideally, only
several seconds apart.
 neutral stimulus must be paired with the UCS several times, often
many times, before conditioning can take place.
• CS is usually some stimulus that is distinctive or stands out from other competing
stimuli.
• Stimulus generalization: tendency to respond to a stimulus that is only similar
to the original conditioned stimulus with the conditioned response.
• Stimulus discrimination: tendency to stop making a generalized response to a
stimulus that is similar to the original conditioned stimulus because the similar
stimulus is never paired with the unconditioned stimulus.
 • Extinction: disappearance or weakening of a learned response following the
removal or absence of the unconditioned stimulus (in classical conditioning) or
the removal of a reinforcer (in operant conditioning)
C. Conditioned Emotional Response
• Conditioned emotional response (CER): emotional response that has
become classically conditioned to occur to learned stimuli.
– examples: fear of dogs; the emotional reaction that occurs when seeing an
attractive person.
– CERs may lead to phobias—irrational fear responses.

• Vicarious conditioning: classical conditioning of a reflex response or emotion

by watching the reaction of another person.
• Conditioned taste aversion: development of a nausea or aversive response to
a particular taste because that taste was followed by a nausea reaction.
– occurs after only one association.
D. Why Classical Conditioning Works
• Stimulus substitution: original theory in which Pavlov stated that classical
conditioning occurred because the conditioned stimulus became a substitute for
the unconditioned stimulus by being paired closely together.
III. Operant Conditioning: Thorndike and Skinner

A. Operant Conditioning
• Operant conditioning: the learning of voluntary behavior through the effects
of pleasant and unpleasant consequences to responses.
• Thorndike’s law of effect:
• if a response is followed by a pleasurable consequence, it will tend to be
repeated.
• if a response is followed by an unpleasant consequence, it will tend not to be
repeated.
B. Skinner’s Contribution
• Skinner was a behaviorist; he wanted to study only observable, measurable
behavior.
• Gave “operant conditioning” its name.
– operant: any behavior that is voluntary.
• Learning depends on what happens after the response: the consequence.
• Heart of operant conditioning: effect of consequences
• In operant conditioning: learning depends on what happens after the response-
the consequence.
C. Important Concepts in Operant Conditioning
• Reinforcement: any event or stimulus, that when following a response,
increases the probability that the response will occur again
– primary reinforcer: any reinforcer that is naturally reinforcing by meeting
a basic biological need, such as hunger, thirst, or touch.
– secondary reinforcer: any reinforcer that becomes reinforcing after being
paired with a primary reinforcer, such as praise, tokens, or gold stars.
• Positive reinforcement: the reinforcement of a response by the addition or
experience of a pleasurable stimulus
• Negative reinforcement: the reinforcement of a response by the removal,
escape from, or avoidance of an unpleasant stimulus.
– example: taking aspirin for a headache is negatively reinforced: removal
of headache!
D. Schedules of Reinforcement
• Partial reinforcement effect: a response that is reinforced after some—but not
all—correct responses tends to be very resistant to extinction
• Continuous reinforcement: reinforcement of each and every correct response
• Fixed interval schedule of reinforcement: interval of time that must pass
before reinforcement becomes possible is always the same.
• Variable interval schedule of reinforcement: the interval of time that must
pass before reinforcement becomes possible is different for each trial or event.
• Fixed ratio schedule of reinforcement: number of responses required for
reinforcement is always the same.
• Variable ratio schedule of reinforcement: schedule of reinforcement in which
the number of responses required for reinforcement is different for each trial or
event.
E. Punishment
• Punishment: any event or object that, when following a response, makes that
response less likely to happen again
• Negative reinforcement strengthens a response, while punishment weakens a
response.
• Two Kinds of Punishment:
• Punishment by application: the punishment of a response by the addition or
experiencing of an unpleasant stimulus. (ex. Spanking, scolding) Specialists
strongly recommend parents to avoid using with their children
• Punishment by removal: the punishment of a response by the removal of a
pleasurable stimulus. Most often confused with negative reinforcement. (Ex.
“Grounding” a teenager is removing the freedom to do what she wants.).
• Difference between negative reinforcement and punishment by removal:

- Negative reinforcement occurs when a response is followed by the

removal of an unpleasant stimulus.
- Positive reinforcement: reinforcement of a response by the addition or
experience of a pleasurable consequence.
 F. Problems with Punishment
• Severe punishment
– may cause avoidance of the punisher instead of the behavior being
punished.
– may encourage lying to avoid punishment.
– creates fear and anxiety.
G. How to Make Punishment More Effective
1. Punishment should immediately follow the behavior it is meant to punish.
2. Punishment should be consistent.
3. Punishment of the wrong behavior should be paired, whenever possible, with
reinforcement of the right behavior.

IV. How Operant Stimuli Control Behavior

A. Operant Stimuli and Stimulus Control
• Discriminative stimulus: any stimulus, such as a stop sign or a doorknob, that
provides the organism with a cue for making a certain response in order to obtain
reinforcement.
• Shaping: reinforcement of simple steps, leading to a desired complex behavior
 • Successive approximation: small steps, one after another, that lead to a
particular goal behavior.
• Extinction occurs if the behavior (response) is not reinforced.
• One way to deal with a child’s temper tantrum is to ignore it; lack of
reinforcement for the tantrum behavior will eventually result in extinction.
• Operantly conditioned responses also can be generalized to stimuli that are only
similar—not identical—to the original stimulus.
• Spontaneous recovery (reoccurrence of a once-extinguished response) also
happens in operant conditioning.
B. Behavior Resistant to Conditioning
• Instinctive drift: tendency for an animal’s behavior to revert to genetically
controlled patterns.
– Each animal comes into the world (and the laboratory) with certain
genetically determined instinctive patterns of behavior already in place.
– These instincts differ from species to species.
– There are some responses that simply cannot be trained into an animal
regardless of conditioning.

V. Behavior Modification
A. Behavior Modification
• Behavior modification: use of operant conditioning techniques to bring about
desired changes in behavior.
• Token economy: type of behavior modification in which desired behavior is
rewarded with tokens.
• Time-out: form of mild punishment by removal in which a misbehaving animal,
child, or adult is placed in a special area away from the attention of others
• essentially, the organism is being “removed” from any possibility of
positive reinforcement in the form of attention.
When used with children, a time-out should be limited to 1 minute for
each year of age, with a maximum time-out of 10 minutes.

• Applied behavior analysis (ABA): modern term for a form of behavior

modification that uses shaping techniques to mold a desired behavior or
response.
B. Biofeedback and Neurofeedback
• Biofeedback: use of feedback about biological conditions to bring involuntary
responses such as blood pressure and relaxation under voluntary control
• Neurofeedback: form of biofeedback using devices (EEG, fMRI) to provide
feedback about brain activity in an effort to modify behavior.
VI. Cognitive Learning Theory
A. Latent Learning
• Edward Tolman: early cognitive scientist
– best-known experiments in learning involved teaching three groups of rats
the same maze, one at a time (Tolman & Honzik, 1930b)
• Edward Tolman’s Maze Experiment
– Group 1
• rewarded each time at end of maze.
• learned maze quickly.
– Group 2
• in maze every day; only rewarded on 10th day
• demonstrated learning of maze almost immediately after receiving
reward.
– Group 3
• never rewarded.
 did not learn maze well.
 Latent learning: learning that remains hidden until its application becomes
useful.
B. Insight – Kohler
• Insight: the sudden perception of relationships among various parts of a
problem, allowing the solution to the problem to come quickly
– cannot be gained through trial-and-error learning alone.
– “Aha” moment
C. Learned Helplessness: Seligman
• Learned helplessness: tendency to fail to act to escape from a situation
because of a history of repeated failures in the past.
• Positive psychology: new way of looking at the entire concept of mental health
and therapy that focuses on the adaptive, creative, and psychologically more
fulfilling aspects of human experience rather than on mental disorders.

VII. Observational Learning

A. Observational Learning: Bandura
• Observational learning: learning new behavior by watching a model perform
that behavior.
• Learning/performance distinction: learning can take place without actual
performance of the learned behavior.
B. Four Elements of Observational Learning
1. Attention
– To learn anything through observation, the learner must first pay attention
to the model.
 2. Memory
– The learner must also be able to retain the memory of what was done,
such as remembering the steps in preparing a dish that were first seen on
a cooking show.
3. Imitation
– The learner must be capable of reproducing, or imitating, the actions of
the model.
4. Motivation
– The learner must have the desire to perform the action.

Part II – MEMORY
A. What is memory?
- an active system that receives information from the senses, puts that information
into a usable form, organizes it as it stores it away, and then retrieves the information
from storage.
B. Three Processes of Memory
1. Encoding – putting it in, get sensory information (from our senses).
2. Storage – keeping it in; holding of information for some period of time.
3. Retrieval – getting it out; getting the information.

C. The Information-Processing Model: Three Memory Systems

1. Sensory memory- first stage of memory, point at which information enters the
nervous system through the sensory systems
- Initial process that receives and holds environmental information in its raw form
for a brief period of time, from an instant to several seconds.
- Two kinds of sensory Memory:
a. Iconic (Visual) Sensory memory- lasts only for a fraction of a second
- Icon is a Greek word for image.
b. Echoic (Auditory) Sensory Memory – brief memory of something a
person has heard. Lasts longer- about 2 to 4 seconds.
 2. Short Term Memory (STM) - next stage of memory
- held for up to 30 seconds or more.
- Selective Attention: ability to focus on only one stimulus from among all
sensory input.
- It is through selective attention that information enters our STM system
- short-term memory as working memory- relating to storage and
manipulation of information
- While Working Memory: as an active system that processes the information
present in short-term memory.
- Short-term memory lasts from about 12 to 30 seconds without rehearsal
Maintenance rehearsal: a person is simply continuing to pay attention to the
information to be held in memory.

3. Long Term Memory (LTM)- third stage of memory

-System into which all the information is placed to be kept more or less
permanently.
- Capacity: Unlimited for all practical purposes
- Memories may be available but not accessible
- Elaborative rehearsal: best way to encode information into LTM. Way of
transferring information from STM into LTM by making that information meaningful.
Connect new information with something that is already well known.

D. Types of longTerm Information

- Include general facts and knowledge, personal facts, and even skills that can be
performed.
 1. Nondeclarative Memory or Implicit Memory (LTM): memories for things
that people know how to do (memory for skills). Ex. Riding a bicycle.
2. Declarative Memory or Explicit Memory: about all the things that people
can know – facts and information that make up knowledge.
a. Semantic memory – general knowledge that anyone has the ability to know,
it is relatively permanent.
- what is learned in school or by reading.
b. Episodic Memory – personal knowledge that each person has, personal
history- a kind of autobiographical memory.

E. Retrieval of Long Term Memories

- Encoding Specificity: tendency for memory of any kind of information to be
improved if retrieval conditions are similar to the conditions under which the information
was encoded. It can be external or internal:
1. Context-dependent learning – refer to the physical surroundings a
person is when they are learning specific information.
2. State-dependent learning- memories formed during a particular
physiological or psychological state will be easier to remember while in a similar state.
- Two Kinds of retrieval Memories:
1. Recall – memories are retrieved with few or no external cues. Ex.
Filling in the blanks on an application form
- Serial Position Effect: a feature of recall, information at the beginning
and at the end of a list, like a poem or a song, tends to be remembered more easily and
accurately.
a. Primacy Effect – words at the beginning of the list tend to be
remembered better than those in the middle of the list.
b. Recency Effect – last word or two was just heard and is still in
short term memory for easy retrieval.
2. Recognition- involves looking at or hearing information and matching it
to what is already in memory. Ex. Word-search puzzle, multiple choice, matching & true-
false tests.

- Tip of the tongue (TOT) phenomenon- answer seems so very close to

the surface of conscious thought.
- This particular memory problem gets more common as we get older,
although it should not be taken as a sign of oncoming dementia unless the
increase is sudden.
- How can a person overcome TOT? Forget about it.

F. Automatic Encoding
- Flashbulb memories – special kind of automatic encoding takes place when
an unexpected event or episode in a person’s life has strong emotional associations,
such as fear, horror, or joy.
 G. Forgetting
1. Ebbinghaus and the Forgetting Curve:
- Hermann Ebbinghaus (1913)-one of the first researchers to study
forgetting.
- He created several lists of “nonsense syllables”, pronounceable but
meaningless (like GEX and WOL). He memorized a list, waited a specific amount of
time, and then tried to retrieve the list-the result is: curve of forgetting.
- The graph shows that forgetting happens quickly within the first hour
after learning the lists. In short, forgetting is greatest just after learning.
- He also found out that it is important not to try to “cram” information you
want to remember into your brain.
- Research has found that spacing out one’s study sessions, or
distributed practice, will produce far better retrieval of information studied.

H. Reasons Why People Forget Things

1. Encoding failure – failure to process information into memory.
2. Memory Trace decay theory-
- Memory trace – some physical change in the brain, perhaps in a neuron
or in the activity between neurons, which occurs when a memory is formed. Over time, if
these traces are not used, they may decay, fading into nothing.
3. Interference Theory – other information interferes.
a. Proactive interference – tendency for older or previously learned material
to interfere with the learning.
b. Retroactive interference – newer information interferes with the retrieval of
older information.

I. How Does Amnesia Occur?

1. Retrograde amnesia – loss of memory from the point of injury backwards.
2. Anterograde amnesia – loss of memories from the point of injury or illness
forward.
- difficulty remembering anything new.
- most often seen in people with senile dementia
3. Alzheimer’s disease - most common type of dementia found in adults and the
elderly. Primary memory problem, at least in the beginning, is anterograde amnesia.
4. Infantile amnesia – involves the type of memory that exists in the first few
years of life, when a child is considered an infant. Early memories tend to be implicit.
Implicit memories are difficult to bring to consciousness.

J. Three Important Factors in Improving and Maintaining your memory’s health:

1. Getting enough sleep
2. Moderate exercise
3. Diet high in DHA: Fish is brain food.
 - Fish like salmon, bluefin, tuna & swordfish have high levels of omega-3
fatty acid called DHA (docosahexaenoic acid).

References:

Ciccarelli, Saundra K. and J. Noland White. Psychology. Fourth Edition

Coon, Dennis and Mitterer, John O. (2016), Introduction to Psychology Getways to mind
and Behavior 4th Edition, Cenage learning Inc., ISBN : 978 -1-305-09187-0.

Hoeksema, Susan Nolen, Fredrickson,Barbara L., Loftus, Geoff R., WAgeenar, Willem
A., Atkinson’s and Hilgard’s Introduction to Psychology, ISBN: 13:978-1844807284.

A. Check your Knowledge

1. By pairing the ringing of a bell with the presentation of meat, Pavlov trained dogs to
salivate to the sound of a bell even when no meat was presented. In this experiment,
the presentation of the meat was the:
a. unconditioned stimulus.
b. unconditioned response.
c. conditioned stimulus.
d. conditioned response.
2. Some of the simplest and most basic learning, that involves the acquisition of fairly
specific patterns of behaviors in the presence of well-defined stimuli is:
a. motivation.
b. cognitive dissonance.
c. integration.
d. conditioning.
3. Ivan Pavlov is most closely associated with __________.
a. vicarious learning
b. the Law of Effect
c. operant conditioning
d. classical conditioning
4. The person most directly associated with operant conditioning is ______.
a. Pavlov
b. Watson
c. Thorndike
d. Skinner
5. The apparatus that has come to symbolize the theory of operant conditioning is the:
a. Rubik's cube.
b. Skinner box.
c. Pavlov bell.
d. Thorndike puzzle.
6. When Ivan Pavlov presented meat powder, the dog salivated. The meat powder was
the ________ and salivation was the ________.
a. UCR, UCS
b. UCS, UCR
c. CS, CR
d. CR, CS
7. A grandmother gives her grandchild a cookie because the child cleaned up her room.
What is the cookie in this example?
a. conditioned response
b. punisher
c. positive reinforcer
d. negative reinforcer
8. Nagging someone to do something until they do it is an example of __________.
a. negative reinforcement
b. aversive conditioning
c. punishment
d. positive reinforcement
9. An infant who is fed every four hours is on a schedule that is SIMILAR to which of the
following?
a. fixed ratio
b. variable ratio
c. fixed interval
d. variable interval
10. If Billy was praised every 4th time he collected rocks without throwing them, his
behavior would be on which schedule of reinforcement?
a. variable ratio
b. fixed interval
c. fixed ratio
d. variable interval
11. Learning that depends on mental processes that are not able to be observed directly
is called _________ learning.
a. autonomic
b. primary
c. secondary
d. cognitive
12. The type of learning that involves a sudden coming together of the elements of a
situation so that the solution to a problem is instantly clear is _____.
a. insight
b. latent learning
c. cognitive mapping
d. contingency blocking
13. What are the components of the information processing model in order?
a. retrieval, encoding, storage
b. encoding, capturing, retrieval
c. capturing, encoding, retrieval
d. encoding, storage, retrieval
14. The process we use to notice important stimuli and ignore irrelevant ones is ______.
a. encoding
b. attention
c. masking
d. chunking
15. The sensory memory associated with the visual sense is called the:
a. iconic memory system.
b. echoic memory system.
c. optical memory system.
d. occipital memory system.

B. Analysis/Application
1. Compare and contrast classical conditioning to operant conditioning.

2. After receiving a painful treatment from a physician, little Addie began showing fear
whenever she saw anyone in white uniform. Indicate the UCS, UCR, CS and CR in this
situation. Describe Addie’s behavior if this fear were to generalize further.

3. Your grandmother said that she used to be a “whiz” (very good) in solving
mathematical problems, but is having trouble helping you with your math subject.
Explain this difficulty in terms of decay, interference, and retrieval failure.