Psychology 5 Marks Question

The principles of learning are applied in:

1. Organizations: In organizations, a number. of problems such as absenteeism, frequently medical leave, indiscipline and lack of proper skills pose serious problems. Applying the principles of learning may solve these problems e.g.

• Attractive rewards increase attendance and reduce absenteeism.
• With a view to improving discipline, managers start functioning as models for employees, or employees are placed under such model managers.

2. Treatment of maladaptive children:

1. A number of therapeutic procedures have been developed to modify maladaptive and socially incapacitating habits and behaviours.
2. The principle of extinction is employed, in the case of those children and adults who exhibit irrational fears with accompanying avoidance behaviour.
3. Implosive therapy and flooding are used. Implosive refers to a situation where the person imagine his most scary form of contact with feared object. It accompanies by vivid verbal description by the therapist. Flooding is exposer that takes place in an actual fearful situation. It is considered to be the most effective of all treatments of fear.
4. The technique of systematic desensitization is used. Systematic desensitization is form of behaviour therapy used to reduce phobic patients anxiety responses through counter conditioning.
5. This technique was developed by Wolpe. Four stages are being used in this therapy i.e. interview, relexation training, formation of hierarchy and desensitisation.
6. In order to eliminate habits that are undesirable and injurious for health and happiness, aversion therapy is used. Aversion therapy is a form of behaviour therapy where undesirable behaviour is being associated with aversive consequences. e.g. vomiting after consuming alcohol.
7. Modeling and systematic use of reinforcement for shaping and developing competence are extensively used.
8. Persons suffering from shyness and having difficulties in interpersonal interactions are subjected to assertive learning.
9. Psychotherapists use biofeed-back treatment. Biofeed-back technique is based on the interaction between classical and instrumental conditioning. It is focusing on ones own physiological processes. e.g. heart rate and B.P. which their normally unaware of, to learn to control them.

3. School Learning:

1. Educational objectives are decided after analyzing the instruction at tasks and fitting them into various types of learning such as S-S or S-R verbal, observational and skill learning.
2. Students are told what they have to learn and appropriate practice conditions are provided.
3. Teachers act as models and mentors for students to promote appropriate social behaviours.

4. Child rearing:

1. By using the classical conditioning procedure, children are made to learn necessary signs of danger and safety.
2. The behaviour of children can easily be modified and shaped through the use of operant conditioning procedure.
3. As models and mentors, parents make children socially skillful, duty oriented and resourceful.

This type of conditioning was first investigated by B.F.Skinner:

• Operants are those behaviours or responses, which are emitted by animals and human beings voluntrarily and are under their control.
• The term operant is used because the organism operates on the environment. Operant behaviour is called operant conditioning.

e.g. Skinner's Experiments. Rats and pigeons in an Operant chamber.

• Skinner conducted his studies on rats and pigeons in specially made boxes, called the Skinner Box.
• A hungry rat (one at a time) is placed in the chamber which was so built that the rat could move inside but could not come out. In the chamber there was a lever, which was connected to a food container kept on the top of the chamber.
• When the lever is pressed, a food pellet drops on the plate placed close to the lever.
• While moving around and pawing the walls (exploratory behaviour), the hungry rat accidentally presses the lever and a food pellet drops on the plate. The hungry rat eats it.
• In the next trial, after a while the exploratory behaviour again starts. As the number of trials increases, the rat takes lesser and lesser time to press the lever for the food.
• Conditioning is complete when the rat presses the lever immediately after it is placed in the chamber. It is obvious that lever pressing is an operant behaviour.

Salient factors which are found very important are as follows:

1. Continuous vs Partial Reinforcement:

• Two kinds of schedules namely continuous and partial have been found very important.
• In continuous reinforcement: the participant is given reinforcement after each target response.
• This kind of schedule of reinforcement produces a high rate of responding.
• Once the reinforcement is withheld, response rates decrease very quickly.
• Where reinforcement is not continuous, some responses are not reinforced. called partial or intermittent reinforcement.
• It has been found that partial reinforcement schedules often produce very high rates of responding, particularly when responses are reinforced according to ratio.
• Extinction of a response is more difficult following partial reinforcement than following continuous reinforcement.

2. Motivation:

• Motivation is a mental as well as a physiological state, which arouses an organism to act for fulfilling the current need.
• Motivation energises an organism to act vigorously for attaining some goal.
• Motivation is a prerequisite for learning.

3. Preparedness for Learning:

• The mechanisms necessary for establishing association, such as S-S or S-R, also vary from species to species.
• It implies that one can learn only those associations for which one is genetically prepared.
• They can learn such tasks, but only with great difficulty and persistence. (iv) Learning Styles.
• Learning style may be defined as a learner's consistent way of responding to and using stimuli in the context of learning'.
• It is 'they way in which each learner begins to concentrate, processes, and retains new and complex information'.
• Learning styles are mainly derived from Perceptual Modality, Information Processing, and Personality Patterns.

1. Perceptual Modality: It refers to the preferences of persons through which they take in information such as auditory, visual, smell, kinesthetic, and tactile.
2. Information Processing distinguishes: This may be thought of as the way we process information. For example, active/reflective, serial/simultaneous, etc.
3. Personality Patterns: 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.

Classical conditioning:

• Classical conditioning is a type of learning in which an organism learns to associate stimuli.
• The concept was developed by Ivan Pavlov.
• The main feature is that the originally neutral conditioned stimulus (CS), through repeated pairing with the unconditioned stimulus (US) acquires the response originally given to the US.

Classical conditioning gets its name from the fact that it is the kind of learning situation that existed in the early "classical" experiment of Ivan P. Pavlov. This famous Russian physiologist began to establish many of the basic principles of this form of conditioning, that is why classical conditioning is also known as respondent conditioning or Pavlovian Conditioning.

e.g. Pavlov designed an experiment to understand this process in detail. He experimented on dogs.

e.g. Pavlov designed an apparatus that, could measure how much a dog's mouth salivated or water in response to food or other things in its environment. At the beginning of his experiment, Pavlov noted that no saliva flowed when he rang a bell.

• He trained the dog by sounding the bell and shortly afterward, presenting food. After the sound of the bell had been paired with food a few times, he tested the effects of the training by measuring the amount of saliva that flowed when he rang the bell and did not present the food.
• He found that some saliva was produced in response to the bell alone. He than resumed the pairing.
• Paired presentation of bell and food took place few more times and then tested again with the bell alone.
• As pairing continued the amount of saliva on tests with the bell alone increased (up to a point).
• Thus after training, the dog's mouth watered/salivated whenever the bell was sounded.
• This is what was learned is the conditioned response.

The students with learning disability have some common symptoms through which they can be identified.
These are as follows:

1. They have difficulty in reading and writing letters, words, phrases and speaking. They suffer from hearing problems without any auditory defect.
2. They have disorders of attention and get distracted easily leading to hyperactivity.
3. They have poor space orientation and inadequate sense of time. They also have difficulty in getting oriented to new surroundings and feel lost. They get confused in following directions and misjudge right, left, up and down.
4. These children have poor motor coordination and manual dexterity.
5. They are unable to understand and follow oral directions.
6. They misjudge relationships as to the classmates who are friendly and the ones who are not and are unable to comprehend various body languages.
7. They show perceptual disorders which includes visual, auditory, tactual and kinesthetic misperception.
8. Many learning disabled children suffer from dyslexia and fail to copy letters and words and do not learn to organize verbal materials.

A skill is defined as the ability to perform some complex task smoothly and efficiently, e.g. car driving, writing etc.
Skill consists of a chain of perceptual motor responses or as a sequence of S-R associations, e.g.: Movements of legs, feet and toes etc.
According to Fits skill learning develops through three stages.

1. Cognitive Phase: In cognitive phase of skill learning, the learner has to understand and memories the instructions.

• The learner has to understand how the task has to be performed.
• In this phase every outside cue instructional demand and one’s response outcome have to be kept alive in consciousness.

2. Associative Phase:

• Different sensory inputs or stimuli are to be linked with appropriate responses.
• As the practice increases, errors decrease, performance improves and time taken is also reduced.

3. Autonomous Phase: Two important changes take place in performance.

• The Attentional demands of the associative phase decreases.
• Inference created by external factors reduces. Finally, skilled performance attains Automaticity with minimal demands of–conscious effort.

Generalization: When a learned response occurs or is elicited by a new stimulus it is called generalization.
Example: Suppose an organism is conditioned to elicit a CR (Saliva secretion or any other reflexive response) on presentation of a CS (light or sound of bell). After conditioning is established, and another stimulus similar to the CS (e.g., ringing to telephone) is presented, the organisms make the conditioned response to it. This phenomenon of responding similarly to similar stimuli is known as generalization.
Dscrimination: Discrimination is a response due to difference.
Example: Suppose a child is conditioned to be afraid of a person with a long moustache and wearing black clothes, in subsequent situation, when she/ he meets another person dressed in black clothes with a beard, the child shows signs of fear. The child’s fear is generalized. She/ he meets another stranger who is wearing grey clothes and is clean-shaven. The child shows no fear. This is an example of discrimination. Occurrence of generalization means failure of discrimination. Discriminative response depends on the discrimination capacity or discrimination learning of the organism.

Operant or instrumental conditioning is a form of learning in which behaviour is learned, maintained or changed through its consequences. Determinants of operant conditioning:
Reinforces:

• A reinforce is defined as any stimulus or event which increases the probability of the occurrence of a desired response.
• The type - positive or negative, frequency, quality and schedule or reinforcer are determinants of operant conditioning.

Type of reinforcement:

• Positive reinforcement involves stimuli that have pleasant consequences. They strengthen and maintain the responses that have caused them to occur.
• Negative reinforcer involves unpleasant and painful stimuli. Responses that lead organisms to get rid of painful stimuli or avoid and escape from them provide negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement leads to learning of avoidance and escape responses.

Frequency/ number of reinforcement and other feature:

• Frequency of trial on which an organism has been reinforced or rewarded.
• Amount of reinforcement i.e. how much of reinforcing stimulus (food or water) one receives on each trial.
• Quality of reinforcement i.e. to the kind of reinforcer. Bread of inferior. Quality as compared with pieces of cake have different reinforcing value.

Schedule of reinforcement:

• This refers to the arrangement of the delivery of reinforcement during trials.
• When a desired response is reinforcement every time it occurs we call it continuous reinforcement.
• When according to schedule responses are sometimes reinforced, sometimes not it is known as partial reinforcement and has been found to produce greater resistance to extinction.

Delayed reinforcement:

• It is found that delay in the delivery of reinforcement leads to poorer level of performance.

Insight learning is a form of cognitive learning.

• Insight is defined as sudden perception of relationship between the learner, the goal and intervening obstacles.
• Insight occurs when the learner suddenly sees the relations between two valuables. Many experiments have been performed on insight learning. One of the simplest of these experiments requires the chimpanzee to reach food with a stick when it cannot be reached by hand and when nothing else other than a stick is a available in the room. Latent learning is another form of cognitive learning.

The word latent means ‘hidden’ and thus latent learning is learning that occurs but is not evident in behaviour until later, when conditions for its appearance are favourable.

• Latent learning is said to occur without reinforcement of particular responses and seems to involve changes in the ways information is processed.
• Thus latent learning is an example of cognitive learning.

Experimental evidence:

• Rats in an experimental group the latent learning group were first given plenty of experience in a maze. After they thoroughly experienced the maze, reinforced maze learning under instrumental conditioning began ie. They were rewarded for their successful effort.
• The rats in a control group are not being given experience with the maze. The control group animals were put in a box that is unlike the maze.
• When reinforcement for maze learning starts, the experimental group did better than the rats in the control group.
• The latent learning group rats learned the maze faster and with fewer errors than did the control animals.
• It proves that the latent learning showed up in their performance.

In the study of verbal learning, psychologists use a variety of materials including non-sense syllables, familiar words, unfamiliar words, sentence, and paragraphs.
Procedures for studying 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. First a list of paired associates is prepared. The first word of the pair is used as the stimulus, and the second word as the response. Members of each pair may be from the same language or two different languages. A list of such word is given in Table given below:

Table: Examples of Stimulus - Response

Pairs used in Paired - Associates

Stimulus	- Response	Stimulus - Response
GEN -	LOOT	LUR - ROOF
GEN -	TIME	RUL - GOLD
GEN -	LAMP	YAK - HILL

WUF	DEER	KER - NAME
JIT	LION	HOZ - GOAL
DAX	COAL	MUW - BULL

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. First, lists of verbal items, i.e., non-sense syllables, most familiar or least familiar words, interrelated words, etc. are prepared. The participant is presented the entire list and it required to produce the items in the same serial order as in the list. In the first trial, the first item of the list is shown and the participant has to produce the second item. If s/he fails to do so within the prescribed time, the experimenter presents the second items. Now this item becomes the stimulus and the participant has to produce the third item that is the response word. If s/he fails, the experimenter gives the correct item, which becomes the stimulus item for the fourth words. This procedure is called serial anticipation method. Learning trials continue until the participant correctly anticipates all the items in the given order.
3. Free Recall: In this method, participants are presented a list of words, which they 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. Words in the list may be interrelated or unrelated. More than ten words are included in the list. The present order or words varies from trial to trial. This method is used to study how participants organise words for storage in memory. It has been observed that the items placed in the beginning or end of the lists are easier to recall than those placed in the middle, which are more difficult to recall.