Psychology 3 Marks Question

Classical conditioning:

1. In classical conditioning, the responses are under the control of some stimulus.
2. In classical conditioning US elicits responses, which is often called respondent conditioning
3. In classical conditioning the CS and US are well defined.
4. In classical conditioning, the experimenter controls the occurrence of US. Thus, for US in classical conditioning the organism remains passive.

e.g. In classical conditioning the reinforcement occurs (U.S) in every trial.

5. Classical conditioning is relatively simple and passive type of learning.

Operant Conditioning:

1. In operant conditioning, responses are under the control of the organism and are voluntary responses or “operants”.
2. In operant conditioning reinforcement is contingent upon a response, it depends upon a response. This response is emitted by the learner rather than elicited by the US.
3. In operant conditioning CS is not defined. It can be inferred but is not directly known.
4. In operant conditioning the subject has to be active in order to be reinforced.

e.g. In operant conditioning the reinforce occurs only when the 'organism' makes the current responses.

5. Operant conditioning is a more complex type of learning.

Motivation is a prerequisite for learning because it energises the organism to act vigorously in order to attain some goal. It provides a purpose to actions that continue till the goal is attained and the need is satisfied. It also provides impetus to the need for survival and growth that is essential for learning. Thus, an organism works harder when the motivation is high. For example, a student studies in order to achieve a good result. This is because the student is motivated towards a good result for which she/ he learns to achieve a specific goal.

Extinction:

1. Extinction occurs when the CS presented alone without the US for a number of trials, when this is done, the strength or magnitude of the CR gradually decreases.
2. If the paring of CS (bell) and CR (saliva) is not followed by the US (food) in classical conditioning or lever pressing is not followed by food pellets in the skinner's box, the learned behaviour will gradually become week and disappear.
3. The key point in experimental extinction is that if motivation is not periodically provided the established responses seems to be extinguished.

Spontaneous Recovery:

1. Pavlov was of opinion that complete or permanent extinction of a C.R is not possible, when the experimentally extinguished responses reappears again after a period, it is called spontaneous recovery.

e.g. Even without the presentation of food, bell produces a few drop of saliva.

2. The amount of spontaneous recovery depends on the duration of the time lapsed after the extinction session.
3. The longer the duration of time lapsed, the greater is the recovery of learned response. Such recovery occurs spontaneously.

Skinners major contribution to psychology was his exploration into the subject of operant conditioning through his famous experiments in which he used the skinners box.
In his experiment he placed a hungry rat in the skinners box. The box was specially designed with lever that dispersed pallets of food when pushed. Once the rats exploration process began, it pushed the lever to discover a pallet. As the number of trials increased, the time taken by the rat to push the lever decreased.
Responses in operant conditioning are acquired through reinforcers, that are stimuli that increase the probability of a response to occur.
e.g., In skinners experiments, the reinforcer is the dispersing of pallets after pressing the lever.

Reinforcement is a process of the application or removal of a stimulus to increase the strength of a specific behaviour.
Positive reinforcers are stimulus or event which strengthen responses that precede them.

1. Positive Reinforcer involves stimuli that have pleasant consequences.
2. Pleasant consequences strengthen and maintain the responses that have caused them to occur.
3. Positive reinforcers satisfy needs. e.g. food, water, medals, praise, money, status, etc.

Negative Reinforcers: Stimuli that strengthen responses that permit the organism to avoid or escape from their presence.

1. Negative reinforcers involve unpleasant and painful stimuli.
2. Negative reinforcement leads to learning of avoidance and escape responses. e.g one learns to put on woolen clothes, burn firewood or use electric heaters to avoid the unpleasant cold weather.
3. One learns to move away from dangerous stimuli because they provide negative reinforcement.

Punishment: A procedure by which the application or removal of a stimulus decreases the strength of a behaviour.

1. Punishment decreases the likelihood that the response will occur again.
2. Mild and delayed punishment has no effect. The stronger the punishment the more lasting is the suppression effect but it is not permanent.

e.g. Timeout, scolding, spankings, and the like can act as punishers.

• Verbal learning refers to the process to respond verbally to verbal stimuli, which may include symbols, nonsense syllables and list of words.
• Verbal learning is limited to human learning.
• Verbal learning usually intentional but it may be incidental e.g. rhythemic words, words starting from identical letters are learnt incidentally.
• Organisation of verbal material is mostly subjective.
• Category clustering facilitate recall of verbal learning.

The important factors/ determiners that influence the course of verbal learning are:

1. Length of the list: Learning time increases with increase in length of the list, occurrence of the word with low association value or lack of relation among the items.
2. Amount of time: The more time taken to learn the content, stronger will be the learning. It means a fixed amount of time is necessary to learn a fixed amount of material, regardless of the number of trials (total time principal) into which that time is divided. In other words the more time it takes to learn, the stronger becomes the learning.
3. Meaningfulness of words: Meaningfulness of material facilitates verbal learning.

That can be measured in several ways in a fixed time:

• Numbers of associations.
• Familiarity of the material
• Relations among the words in the list
• Frequency of usage
• Sequential dependence of each word.

Extinction refers to disappearance of a learned response due to removal of reinforcement from the situation in which the response used to occur.Factors influencing extinction:

• Resistance to extinction increases with increasing number of reinforcements during acquisition (learning) trials. Beyond that point any increase in number of reinforcement reduces the resistance to extinction.
• Amount of reinforcement (number of food pellets) increases during learning trials, resistance to extinction decreases.
• Reinforcement in every learning trial makes the learned response to be less resistance to extinction. In contrast, partial reinforcement during learning trials makes a learned response more resistance to extinction.

Skinner is also known for his schedules of reinforcement which is classified into:

1. Intermittent/ partial reinforcement: When reinforcement is not given continuously, but only at intervals, it is called intermittent reinforcement.

• Intermittent schedule responses are some times reinforced, some times not. So it is also called partial reinforcement.
• It has been found that it produces greater resistence to extinction i.e. it is more effective.

2. Continuous Reinforcement: It refers to that reinforcement which is given to the organism every time he/ she. makes the appropriate response. It is less effective because it produces less effective resistence to extinction.
3. Delayed Reinforcement: Delay in the delivery of reinforcement leads to poor level of performance.
4. These forms of reinforcement act as a determiner to facilitate learning.

Classical conditioning demonstrates learning by association as one stimulus signifies the possibility of the occurrence of another stimulus. Unconditioned stimulus and response are gradually conditioned. For example, in the experiment conducted by Ivan P. Pavlov on the dog, a bell was rung after which food was served to the dog. After some days, no food was served after the ringing of bell, but the dog still salivated to the sound of it and thus, associated the bell with the food. The association resulted in the acquisition of the new response by the dog, i.e. salivation to the sound of bell. In this case, the bell was a conditioned stimulus and saliva secretion was a conditioned response.
Therefore, in classical conditioning, one stimulus signifies the possible occurrence of another stimulus.

A good role model is very important for a growing up child as children learn social behaviour and acquire personality characteristics by observing and emulating adults. It is a form of learning that takes place by observing others. Hence it is called modeling which is a form of observational learning. The observers acquire knowledge by observing the model. Similarly, children learn various personality characteristics through observational learning. For instance, traits like aggressiveness, pro-social behaviour, courtesy, politeness, diligence and indolence are acquired through observational learning.
A negative role model would lead to the development of negative personality while a positive role model would lead to the development of good personality of the child.

Transfer of learning refers to the way in which we might transfer skills learned in one situation to a second, related situation. Thus, learning to play tennis may introduce a range of coordination and racket skills that would then transfer to similar games such as squash.

• It refers to the effects of prior learning on new learning.
• Transfer is consider to be positive if the earlier learning facilitates current learning. If new learning is a related then it is consider to be negative transfer.
• Absence of facilitative of retarding effect means zero transfer i.e. earlier learning has no effect on later learning.

Preparedness for Learning: The members of different species are very different from one another in their sensory capacities and response abilities. The mechanisms necessary for establishing associations, such as S-S or S-R, also vary from species to species. It can be said that species have biological constraints on their learning capacities. The kinds of S-S or S-R learning an organism can easily acquire depends on the associative mechanism it is genetically endowed with or prepared for. 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. It implies that one can learn only those associations for which one is genetically prepared.

Learning can be defined as any relatively permanent change in behaviour or behavioural potential produced by experience. Changes that occur due to practice and experience, and are relatively permanent, are a component of learning.Its distinguishing features are:

1. Learning always involves some kind of experience. For instance, a child gets lost at a place on leaving the hands of the parents, would learn not to leave the hand of elders the next time.
2. Behavioural changes that occur due to learning are relatively permanent and are different from temporary behavioural changes caused by habituation, drugs or fatigue. For example, feeling tired after studying is a temporary change and does not involve learning.
3. Learning is an inferred process that involves a series of psychological events. It is also different from a performance.