Help Me Study for Psychology!

So I'm attempting to study for my psychology test, but for the life of me I can't get it. I read it over and over and it goes out one ear and out the other. They say that sometimes teaching someone else something is the best way for you to learn it.  So I'm going to teach you a little bit about what I'm currently learning and who knows, maybe we'll both learn something!

Well today class, we're learning about learning. (What? haha.) No but seriously, we are learning about how we learn things as human beings.  First we will define learning as: a relative permanent change in behavior due to experience.

Is there a food that you hate to eat? But not because you hate how it tastes, but because one time in the past, you ate the food and it made you sick, so now you Never want to eat that food again? That is a type of associative learning.   Associative learning is the process by which an association between two stimuli or behaviors, and a stimulus is learned.  There are two different forms of associative learning: classical and operant conditioning.

Classical conditioning is where we humans learn by association.  Our minds work in a way where they naturally connect events that occur in sequence.  So associative learning is learning that two events occur together; this can either be two stimuli or a response and its consequences.

Before we get too technical, I'll bring it back to an example that helps me remember how classical conditioning works.  Have you ever heard of a man named Ivan Pavlov? Well, he was a psychologist back in the day (early 1900s.)  He did a study with a dog.  First he showed a dogs reaction to two things before conditioning. The first thing he did was sit a bowl of food in front of the dog, and the dog began to drool. (This is an example of an unconditioned stimulus producing an unconditioned response.)  Next, he rang bell in front of the dog, and the dog did not drool. (This is an example of a neutral stimulus producing no salivation as a response.)  Next he conditioned the dog.  He began to ring the bell, every single time, right before he was about to feed the dog.  After this conditioning, Pavlov concluded that the dog would drool just from hearing the tone! Even though he didn't before conditioning!  This is considered, a conditioned response.

So does this mean the dog will drool at every bell it hears for the rest of its life? Not exactly! Pavlov decided to see what would happen if he rang the bell, but stopped putting food in front of the dog.  The reactions were mixed but for the most part, the dogs stopped drooling at the sound of the bell.  This is known as extinction.  However, something odd happened when he paused for several hours before ringing the bell again; after the pause, the dogs would start to drool again at the sound of the bell, but the response would be weaker.  This regained interest is called spontaneous recovery.

Pavlov also tested the dog by ringing a bell that had a different tone to see how the dog would respond.  The dog did respond to this new tone, but not nearly as much as with the originally tone.  When someone has the tendency to respond to a stimuli that is somewhat similar to the one they are used to, this is called generalization.   Even though the dogs somewhat generalized, they still learned the ability to distinguish between the tones.  This adaptive ability to distinguish between stimuli is called discrimination.

Next we will move onto operant conditioning.  Operant conditioning is based around two things: reinforcement and punishment.  There are different ways to schedule reinforcement; there is continuous reinforcement, where you reinforce the desired response every time it occurs, and there is partial (intermittent) reinforcement, which only reinforces a response part of the time. Partial reinforcement has a slower acquisition, or initial learning time, but it has a greater resistance to extinction.

The name in psychology usually associated with operant conditioning is B.F. Skinner (1904-1990.) He created the operant chamber, also known the Skinner Box.  The box has a little lever in it that an animal can press, that releases a reward of water or food.  This allowed skinner to use an operant conditioning procedure called shaping which is where you can use reinforcements to guide behavior towards your desired outcome.  So let's say Skinner places a rat in the box, the first thing he is going to do is watch the rat's existing behavior and reward it accordingly.  If the rat walks to the side of the box that has the lever, he will dispense food.  If the rat gets closer to the lever, he will release food again.  Eventually he will not release food until the rat hits the lever.  Shaping helps us understand how nonverbal animals perceive things.  It is how most of us have trained and communicated with domestic pets we have had, we just didn't know what it was called!

There are two different types of reinforcements: positive reinforcements and negative reinforcements.

When going into this, take away everything you think you know about positive and negative reinforcements; just toss it out the window.

A positive reinforcement tries to reinforce behavior by adding a desirable stimulus.  For example, you call your dog to you, and you pet it.  You are rewarding the dog for good behavior and encouraging him or her to do it again.

A negative reinforcement is where you remove an aversive stimulus to try to reinforce the behavior.  For example, you take painkillers to end pain, so that reinforces taking the painkillers because the pain is taken away.

In class we used plus (+) and minus (-) signs to talk about positive and negative reinforcements, and I liked that.  I got confused because I used to think a negative reinforcement was something like a coach yelling at you to make you run faster (when in fact that is a positive punishment, but we'll get to that later!) I didn't realize that a negative (-) reinforcement was just removing, or subtracting something.

There are different ways to schedule reinforcements.

Variable-ratio schedules provide reinforcements after a seemingly random number of responses.  This applies to a slot machine at a casino.  Each next time could be it! But can the person know? NO! But is their behavior reinforced just because they could win? YES!

A fixed-interval schedule on the other hand is predictable.  My Freshman year I had a serious problem with Sweet CeCe's, I ate it--all the time. So when I went, I made sure to always get my card punched, because I KNEW that on the 10th punch, I would get a free frozen yogurt!  That is an example of a fixed-interval schedule.

A variable-interval schedule is where a reinforcement is given at an unpredictable time interval.  This isn't like the casino where it is after so many coins paid or levers pulled, this is about the amount of time that has passed.  Do you check your email, Facebook, or twitter often during the day? I know you do!  When you check for messages you check in varied time intervals.  But eventually, when you check, there will be a message, and your persistence will have paid off.  This positively reinforces you to check your messages often.

Earlier when I briefly mentioned that coach that we all hated, I was referring to punishment, which just so happens to be our next topic.  We just learned how reinforcement increases a behavior, now let's see how punishment does the opposite of that.

Just like there are positive and negative types of reinforcement there are also positive (+) and negative (-) forms of punishment.

Positive (+) punishment is where you add an aversive stimulus.  For example, you are speeding so a cop gives you a ticket for speeding.  He gave you something that makes you less likely to repeat your behavior.

Negative (-) punishment is where you remove a rewarding stimulus.  For example, a teenager breaks a rule so his parents take away his driving privileges.  This removal of an activity the teenager enjoys doing will make him less likely to break the rules next time, thus giving the parents their desired behavior.

So in conclusion, we have looked at classical and operant conditioning.  We know that they are both forms of associative learning.  We can contrast them by realizing that in classical conditioning we respond automatically to different stimuli that we do not control, like the dog drooling at the sound of the bell after he was conditioned to think there was food coming next.  While in contrast we know operant conditioning is where we associate our own behaviors with reinforcements and punishing stimuli that our environment provides us.

Thank you so much for helping me study--I hope I haven't bored you! I do have to say, writing this out and sharing it with you was much more fun than just reading the chapter over and over.  I apologize for any typos or other mistakes, but it is 1:30am here in Nashville and 8am will be here before I know it, so no proof reading for me tonight, it's time to go to sleep.  I enjoyed this form of studying, so expect another similar post tomorrow night.  My test isn't until Friday, and believe it or not, all of the above isn't even half of what is on the test! Wish me luck! :)

(All information was gathered from: Modules 20 and 21 of David G. Myers' Psychology Tenth Edition in Modules)