LEARNING

CHAP 6
Classical conditioning
Forging connections between
formerly unrelated events
 definitions
▪ Classical conditioning (CC) – process
by which an organism learns a new
association between two paired stimuli;
one of which was initially neutral the other
producing an unconditional reflex

▪ Unconditioned stimuli (UCS) – an event

that constantly and automatically elicits an
unconditioned response (UCR)
 More definitions
▪ Unconditioned response (UCR) –
an action that an UCS elicits

▪ Conditioned response (CR) – action

that Conditioned Stimulus elicits; it
does not have to be identical to the
UCR
 Other aspects
▪ The process that establishes or
strengthens a CR is called
acquisition

▪ A CR can even be a thought

 Unraveling the connection
▪ Extinction – the decrease or
extinguishment of the conditioned
response

▪ In CC, extinction takes place when we

repeatedly present the CS without the
UCS following it
 The return of the
cs>CR connection
▪ Extinction doesn’t erase the CS>CR
connection, it inhibits it

▪ Spontaneous recovery – the

temporary return of the extinguished
response after a delay
 All together now
▪ First we build the CS>CR connection
through acquisition,
▪ Then we unravel it through
extinction,
▪ If we then stop presenting the CS for
a while, once we resume its use,
▪ The CR will return, but not for long,
unless it is again paired with the UCS
 Extending the connection
▪ The CR can occur even without
presentation of the exact CS which formed
it, if the new CS is similar enough
▪ Stimulus generalization – the extension
or broadening of a CR from the original CS
to another, similar stimulus
▪ The more similar the entire setting is, the
more likely the new connection will form
 Narrowing connections

▪ If differing stimuli, although quite

similar to the CS, are never, or rarely,
followed by the UCS, then the CR will
not emerge

▪ Stimulus generalization – differing

responses to differing stimuli that
have been followed by differing
events
 The big picture
▪ CC involves visceral reactions involving
the sympathetic nervous system – you feel
it in your gut.
▪ It prepares us for important challenges
and threats.
▪ But it does not tell us what to do.
▪ For how we learn voluntary, planned
behaviors we turn to operant conditioning.
 OPERANT/INSTRUMENTAL
CONDITIONING
▪ This type of conditioning was first investigated by B.F.
Skinner.
▪ Skinner studied occurrence of voluntary responses when
an organism operates on the environment. He called them
operants.
▪ Operants are those behaviours or responses, which are
emitted by animals and human beings voluntarily and are
under their control.
▪ The term operant is used because the organism operates
on the environment.
▪ Conditioning of operant behaviour is called operant
conditioning.
 Determinants of Operant
Conditioning
▪ Operant or instrumental conditioning is a
form of learning in which behaviour is
learned, maintained or changed through its
consequences.

▪ A reinforcer is defined as any stimulus or

event, which increases the probability of
the occurrence of a (desired) response.
 Types of Reinforcement
▪ Positive Reinforcement involves stimuli
that have pleasant consequences.
▪ The strengthen and maintain the responses
that have caused them to occur.
▪ Positive reinforcers satisfy needs, which
include food, water, medals, praise, money,
status, information, etc.
 Types of Reinforcement
▪ Negative Reinforcement leads to
learning of avoidance and escape
responses.
▪ For instance, one learns to put on woolen
clothes, burn firewood or use electric
heaters to avoid the unpleasant cold
weather.
▪ One learns to move away from dangerous
stimuli because they provide negative
reinforcement.
 Punishment and Negative
Reinforcer

▪ Use of punishment reduces or suppresses

the response while a negative reinforcer
increases the probability of avoidance or
escape response.
 PUNISHMENT
▪ No punishment suppresses a response
permanently.
▪ Mild and delayed punishment has no effect. The
stronger the punishment, the more lasting is the
suppression effect but it is not permanent.
▪ Sometimes punishment has no effect irrespective
of its intensity.
▪ On the contrary, the punished person may
develop dislike and hatred for the punishing
agent or the person who administers the
punishment.
 Number of Reinforcement and
other Features
▪ Number of trials on which an organism has
been reinforced or rewarded.
▪ Amount of reinforcement means how much
of reinforcing stimulus (food or water or
intensity of pain causing agent) one
receives on each trial.
▪ Quality of reinforcement refers to the kind
of reinforcer. Eg: Chocolate and cake.
 Schedules of Reinforcement
▪ A reinforcement schedule is the arrangement of
the delivery of reinforcement during conditioning
trials.
▪ When a desired response is reinforced every time
it occurs we call it continuous reinforcement.
▪ In contrast, in intermittent schedules responses
are sometimes reinforced, sometimes not.
▪ It is known as partial reinforcement and has
been found to produce greater resistance to
extinction – than is found with continuous
reinforcement.
 Delayed Reinforcement
▪ The effectiveness of reinforcement is
dramatically altered by delay in the
occurrence of reinforcement.
▪ It is found that delay in the delivery of
reinforcement leads to poorer level of
performance.
 Key Learning Processes
▪ Reinforcement is the operation of administering
a reinforcer by the experimenter.
▪ Extinction means disappearance of a learned
response due to removal of reinforcement from
the situation in which the response used to occur.
▪ Responding similarly to similar stimuli is known
as generalisation.
▪ Discriminative response depends on the
discrimination capacity or discrimination learning
of the organism.
 OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING
▪ Human beings learn social behaviours,
therefore, it is sometimes called social
learning.
▪ They observe others and emulate their
behaviour. This form of learning is called
modeling.
▪ In observational learning observers acquire
knowledge by observing the model’s
behaviour, but performance is influenced by
model’s behaviour being rewarded or
punished.
 COGNITIVE LEARNING
▪ In cognitive learning, there is a change in
what the learner knows rather than what s/he
does.
▪ This form of learning shows up in insight
learning and latent learning.
 Insight Learning
▪ The process by which the solution to a
problem suddenly becomes clear.
▪ Kohler- Chimpanzees….
▪ Once the solution has appeared, it can be
repeated immediately the next time the
problem is confronted.
▪ Thus, it is clear that what is learned is not a
specific set of conditioned associations
between stimuli and responses but a cognitive
relationship between a means and an end.
 Latent Learning
▪ In latent learning, a new behaviour is learned
but not demonstrated until reinforcement is
provided for displaying it.
▪ Tolman- Rats and maze…..

▪ Cognitive Map- a mental representation of

the spatial locations and directions, which
they needed to reach their goal.
 VERBAL LEARNING
1. Paired-Associates Learning : This method is similar
to S-S conditioning and S-R learning. It is used in learning
some foreign language equivalents of mother tongue
words.
2. Serial Learning : This method of verbal learning is
used to find out how participants learn the lists of verbal
items, and what processes are involved in it. Serial
anticipation method.
3. Free Recall : In this method, participants are presented
a list of words, which the read and speak out. Each word
is shown at a fixed rate of exposure duration. Immediately
after the presentation of the list, the participants are
required to recall the words in any order they can.
Determinants of Verbal Learning
▪ Length of the list to be learned
▪ Meaningfulness of the material.

▪ Categorization and Clustering- Bousfield

first demonstrated this experimentally. He
made a list of 60 words that consisted of 15
words drawn from each of the four semantic
categories, i.e. names, animals, professions,
and vegetables. These words were presented
to participants one by one in random order.
 CONCEPT LEARNING
▪ A concept is a category that is used to refer
to a number of objects and events.
▪ Defined as ‘a set of features or attributes
connected by some rule’.
▪ A feature is any characteristic or aspect of an
object or event or living organism that is
observed in them, and can be considered
equivalent to some features observed or
discriminated in other objects.
▪ A rule is an instruction to do something.
 TYPES OF CONCEPTS
1. ARTIFICIAL CONCEPTS
Are those that are well-defined and rules connecting
the features are precise and rigid. In a well-defined
concept the features that represent the concept are
both singly necessary and jointly sufficient.
2. NATURAL CONCEPTS
Are usually ill-defined. Numerous features are found
in the instances of a natural category.
Such concepts include biological objects, real world
products, and human artefacts such as tools, clothes,
houses, etc.
 SKILL LEARNING
▪ A skill consists of a chain of perceptual motor
responses or as a sequence of S-R
associations.
Skill learning passes through three phases:
▪ Cognitive (understand and memorise the instructions)
▪ Associative (different sensory inputs or stimuli are linked
with appropriate responses)
▪ Autonomous (attentional demands of the associative
phase decrease, and interference created by external factors
reduces).
 TRANSFER OF LEARNING
▪ The term transfer of learning is often called
transfer of training or transfer effect.
▪ It refers to the effects of prior learning on new
learning.
▪ Transfer is considered to be positive if the
earlier learning facilitates current learning.
▪ It is considered to be negative transfer if new
learning is retarded.
▪ Absence of facilitative or retarding effect
means zero transfer.
 FACTORS FACILITATING
LEARNING
▪ Continuous vs Partial Reinforcement
In continuous reinforcement the participant is
given reinforcement after each target response.
This kind of schedule of reinforcement produces
a high rate of responding.
The fact that the responses acquired under
partial reinforcement are highly resistant to
extinction is called partial reinforcement effect.
 FACTORS FACILITATING
LEARNING
▪ Motivation
The more motivated you are, the more hard
work you do for learning. Your motivation for
learning something arises from two sources.
You learn many things because you enjoy
them (intrinsic motivation) or they provide
you the means for attaining some other goal
(extrinsic motivation).
 FACTORS FACILITATING
LEARNING
▪ Preparedness for Learning
It implies that one can learn only those
associations for which one is genetically
prepared.
A particular kind of associative learning is easy
for apes or human beings but may be
extremely difficult and sometimes impossible
for cats and rats.
 THE LEARNER : LEARNING
STYLES
‘A learner’s consistent way of responding to and
using stimuli in the context of learning’.

In other words, it is ‘the way in which each

learner begins to concentrate, processes, and
retains new and complex information’.
 LEARNING STYLES
▪ Perceptual Modality are biologically-based
reactions to the physical environment, such
as auditory, visual, smell, kinesthetic, and
tactile.

▪ Information Processing distinguishes

between the way we are structured to think,
solve problems, and remember information,
active/reflective, sensing/intuitive,
sequential/global, serial/simultaneous, etc.
 LEARNING STYLES
▪ Personality Patterns are the way we
interact with our surroundings. Each one of
us has a preferred, consistent, and distinct
way of perceiving, organising, and retaining
information. This approach focuses on
understanding how personality affects the
way people interact with the environment,
and how this affects the way individuals
respond to each other within the learning
environment.
 LEARNING STYLES
▪ Anderson differentiated between analytic and
relational styles of learning.

▪ People with a Relational Style learn material best

through exposure to a full unit or phenomenon. They
comprehend parts of the unit only by understanding
their relationship to the whole.

▪ People with an Analytical Learning Style learn

more easily when information is presented step by
step in a cumulative sequential pattern that builds
towards a conceptual understanding.
 LEARNING DISABILITIES

▪ Learning disability is a general term. It

refers to a heterogeneous group of disorders
manifested in terms of difficulty in the
acquisition of learning, reading, writing,
speaking, reasoning, and mathematical
activities.
 Symptoms of Learning
Disabilities
▪ 1. Difficulties in writing letters, words and
phrases, reading out text, and speaking
appear quite frequently. Quite often they have
listening problems, although they may not
have auditory defects. Such children are very
different from others in developing learning
strategies and plans.
 Symptoms of Learning
Disabilities

▪ 2. Learning-disabled children have

disorders of attention. They get easily
distracted and cannot sustain attention on
one point for long. More often than not,
attentional deficiency leads to
hyperactivity, i.e. they are always moving,
doing different things, trying to manipulate
things incessantly.
 Symptoms of Learning
Disabilities

▪ 3. Poor space orientation and inadequate

sense of time are common symptoms. Such
children do not get easily oriented to new
surroundings and get lost. They lack a sense
of time and are late or sometimes too early in
their routine work. They also show confusion
in direction and misjudge right, left, up and
down.
 Symptoms of Learning
Disabilities
▪ 4. Learning-disabled children have poor
motor coordination and poor manual
dexterity. This is evident in their lack of
balance, inability to sharpen pencil, handle
doorknobs, difficulty in learning to ride a
bicycle, etc.
 Symptoms of Learning
Disabilities
▪ 5. These children fail to understand and
follow oral directions for doing things.

▪ 6. They misjudge relationships as to which

classmates are friendly and which ones are
indifferent. They fail to learn and understand
body language.
 Symptoms of Learning
Disabilities

▪ 7. Learning-disabled children usually show

perceptual disorders. These may include
visual, auditory, tactual, and kinesthetic
misperception. They fail to differentiate a call-
bell from the ring of the telephone. It is not
that they do not have sensory acuity, but they
fail to use it for performance…….why???
 Symptoms of Learning
Disabilities
▪ 8. Fairly large number of learning-disabled children have
dyslexia. They quite often fail to copy letters and words;
for example, they fail to distinguish between b and d, p
and q, P and 9, was and saw, unclear and nuclear, etc.
They fail to organise verbal materials.
 APPLICATIONS OF
LEARNING PRINCIPLES

Applications of learning principles in four areas:

▪ Organisations
▪ In treatment of maladjustive behaviours
▪ In rearing children
▪ School learning
 Organizations
PROBLEMS FACED: Absenteeism, Frequent
medical leave, Indiscipline, and Lack of proper
skills

LEARNING TECHNIQUES USED: Partial

Rewards for attendance, Negative
Reinforcement and Modeling
 Maladaptive Behaviors
PROBLEMS FACED: Fears, Anxieties,
Phobias, Undesirable habits, Addictions,
Excessive shyness, Personality development

LEARNING TECHNIQUES/PRINCIPLES:
Extinction, Implosive Therapy, Flooding,
Systematic Desensitization, Aversion Therapy,
Biofeedback, Assertive Learning, Modeling,
Reinforcement
 Child Rearing and School
Learning

▪ PROBLEMS FACED: Misbehavior, Verbal

Learning, Skill Learning

▪ LEARNING TECHNIQUES/PRINCIPLES:
Reinforcement, Shaping, Modeling,
Mentoring, Appropriate Practice Conditions