Learning And Behavior Analysis

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learning

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A process based on experience that results in a relatively permanent change in behavior or behavioral processes

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learning-performance distinction

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• The difference between what has been learned and what is expressed in overt behavior (ex. an appreciation of modern art that may influence the kind of books you read or how you spend your leisure time)

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habituation

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• A decrease in a behavioral response when a stimulus is presented repeatedly
• Helps keep your focus on novel events in the environment -- you don't expend heavioral effort to respond repeatedly to old stimuli

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sensitization

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• An increase in a behavioral response when a stimulus is presented repeatedly
• More likely to occur when stimuli are intense or irritating

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John Watson (1878 - 1958)

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• Founded the school of psychology known as behaviorism
• Wrote the 1919 book, Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist, in which he argued that introspection (people's verbal reports of sensations, images, and feelings) was not an acceptable means of studying behavior because it was too subjective
• Defined the chief goal of psychology as "the prediction and control of behavior"

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B.F. Skinner (1904 - 1990)

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• Adopted Watson's cause and expanded his agenda
• After reading Watson's 1924 book, Behaviorism, began his graduate study in psychology at Harvard
• Formulated a position known as radical behaviorism
• Focused not so much on their legitimacy as data as on their legitimacy as causes of behavior
• In his view, mental events such as thinking and imagining, do not cause behavior -- they are examples of behavior that are caused by environmental stimuli

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behavior analysis

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• The area of psychology that focuses on the environmental determinants of learning and behavior
• Behavior analysts attempt to discover regularities in learning that are universal, occurring in all types of animal species, including humans, under comparable situations
• Complex forms of learning represent combinations and elaborations of simpler processes and not qualitatively different phenomena

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classical conditioning

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A type of learning in which a behavior (conditioned response) comes to be elicited by a stimulus (conditioned stimulus) that has acquired its power through an association with a biologically significant stimulus (unconditioned stimulus)

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Ivan Pavlov (1849 - 1936)

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• Set out to conduct research on digestion, for which he won a Nobel Prize in 1904
• Devised a technique to study digestive processes in dogs by implanting tubes in their glands and digestive organs to divert bodily secretions to containers outside of their bodies so that the secretions could be measured and analyzed
• Put meat powder into the dogs' mouths to produce secretions
• Observed that they salivated before the powder was given to them
• They would start salivating at the mere sight of food and, later, at the sight of the assistant who brought the food or even the sound of their footsteps
• Accidentally observed that learning may result from two stimuli becoming associated with each other

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classical conditioning in Pavlov's dogs

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• Sir Charles Sherrington suggestion suggested Pavlov give up his foolish investigation of "psychic" secretions
• Pavlov abandoned his work on digestion
• Dogs in Pavlov's experiments were first placed in restraining harnesses
• At regular intervals, a stimulus tone was presented, and a dog was given some food
• Tone had no prior meaning for the dog with respect to food or salivation, and so the dog's first reaction to the tone was only an orienting response
• With repeated trials in which the tone preceded food, the orienting response stopped and salivation began
• Demonstrated the generality of this effect by using a variety of stimuli ordinarily neutral with respect to salivation, such as lights and ticking metronomes

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reflex

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An unlearned response elicited by specific stimuli that have biological relevance for an organism

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unconditioned stimulus (UCS)

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In classical conditioning, the stimulus that elicits an unconditioned response

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unconditioned response (UCR)

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In classical conditioning, the response elicited by an unconditioned stimulus without prior training or learning

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conditioned stimulus (CS)

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In classical conditioning, a previously neutral stimulus that comes to elicit a conditioned response

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conditioned response (CR)

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In classical conditioning, a response elicited by some previously neutral stimulus that occurs as a result of pairing the neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus

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acquisition

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The stage in a classical conditioning experiment during which the conditioned response is first elicited by the conditioned stimulus

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delay conditioning

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• The most effective form of conditioning, usually, with a short interval between the onsets of the CS and UCS
• The onset of the CS precedes the onset of the UCS and stays on at least until the UCS is presented

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trace conditioning

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• The CS is discontinued or turned off before the UCS is presented
• Trace refers to the memory that the organism is assumed to have of the CS

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simultaneous conditioning

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• A generally poorly effective form of conditioning because the CS does not actually predict the onset of the UCS
• Both the CS and UCS are presented at the same time

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backward conditioning

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• The most poorly effective form of conditioning because the CS does not actually predict the onset of the UCS
• Evidence of this conditioning may appear after a few pairings of the CS and UCS but disappear with extended training as the animal learns that the CS is follow by a period free of the UCS
• The onset of the UCS precedes the onset of the CS

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extinction

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• In conditioning, the weakening of a conditioned association in the absence of a reinforcer or unconditioned stimulus
• Occurs when the CR no longer appears in the presence of the CS (and the absense of the UCS)

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spontaneous recovery

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• The reappearance of an extinguished conditioned response after a rest period
• The CR will reappear in a weak form when the CS is presented alone again after extinction

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stimulus generalization

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• The automatic extension of conditioned responding to similar stimuli that have never been paired with the unconditioned stimulus
• The more similar the new stimulus is to the original CS, the stronger the response will be
• Builds in a similarity safety factor by extending the range of learning beyond the original specific experience (ex. even when a predator makes a slightly different sound or is seem from a different angle, its prey can still recognize and respond to it quickly)

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generalization gradient

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Found when a response strength is measured for each of a series of increasingly dissimilar stimuli along a given dimension

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stimulus discrimination

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• A conditioning process in which an organism learns to respond differently to stimuli that differ from the conditioned stimulus on some dimension
• The organism gradually learns which event-signal predicts the onset of the UCS and which signals do not
• Prevents over-responsiveness in an organism (ex. an animal fearful of every shadow as its predator wastes time and energy to dispel its worry)

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contiguous

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Side by side; adjoining

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contingent

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Dependent; possible

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Robert Rescorla

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• Designed an experiment in the mid-1960s using a tone (the CS) and a shock (the UCS)
• For one group of animals, the CS and UCS were merely contiguous
• For the other group of animals, the CS reliably predicted the UCS
• Trained dogs to jump a barrier from one side of a shuttlebox to the other to avoid an electric shock delivered through the grid floor
• If the dogs did not jump, they received a shock; if they jumped, the shock was postponed
• Used the frequency with which dogs jumped the barrier as a measure of fear conditioning
• When dogs were jumping across the barrier regularly, Rescorla divided his subjects into two groups and subjected them to another training procedure
• To the random group, the UCS (the shock) was delivered randomly and independent of the CS (the tone), so the CS had no predictive value
• For the contingency group, the UCS always followed the CS, and the sounding of the tone was a reliable predictor of the delivery of the shock
• Dogs exposed to the contingent CS-UCS relation jumped more frequently in the presence of the tone than did dogs exposed only to the contiguous CS-UCS relation
• Concluded that in addition to the CS being contiguous with the UCS, the CS must also reliably predict the occurrence of the UCS in order for classical conditioning to occur

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informative stimuli

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• For a stimulus to serve as a basis for classical conditioning, it must be informative in the environment
• A stimulus is more readily notice the more intense it is and the more it contrasts with other stimuli
• A neutral stimulus will become an effective CS only if it is both appropriately contingent and informative

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John Watson's & Rosali Rayner's experiments with Little Albert

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• In 1920, trained an infant, Albert, to fear a white rat he had initially liked, by pairing its appearance with an aversive UCS -- a loud noise just behind him created by striking a large steel bar with a hammer
• Unconditioned startle response and the emotional distress to the noxious noise formed the basis of Albert's learning to react with fear to the appearance of the white rat
• Fear developed in just seven conditioning trials
• Emotional conditioning turned to behavioral conditioning when Albert learned to escape from the feared stimulus
• Fear then generalized to other furry objects
• It was later suggested that Albert's real name was Douglas Meritte and that he died in 1925

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classical conditioning in advertising

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• In the advertising industry, advertisers strive to create positive associations in your mind between their products and passion
• They expect the elements of their advertisements --- attractive individuals -- will serve as the UCS to bring about the UCR -- feelings of sexual arousal
• The hope is that the product itself will be the CS, so that the feeling of arousal will come to be associated with it

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Shepard Siegel

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• Suggested that the setting in which drug use occurs acts as a conditioned stimulus for a situation in which the body learns to protect itself by preventing the drug from having its usual effect
• The drug (UCS) brings about certain physiological responses to which the body responds with countermeasures to protect itself by preventing the drug from having its usual effect
• The body's countermeasures to the drug are the unconditioned response (UCR)
• Over time, the compensatory response also becomes the conditioned response
• In settings ordinarily associated with drug use (the CS), the body physiologically prepares itself (the CR) for the drug's expected effects
• Tolerance arises because, in that setting, the individual must consume an amount of the drug that overcomes the compensatory response before starting to get any "positive" effects

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Siegel's heroine injection in rats study

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• Classically conditioned rats to expect heroin injections (UCS) in one setting (CS1) and dextrose solution injections in a different setting (CS2)
• All rats developed heroin tolerance in the first phase of training
• On the test day, all animals received a larger-than-usual dose of heroin -- nearly twice that before
• Half of them received it in the setting where heroin had previously been administered; the other half received it in the setting where dextrose solutions had been given during conditioning
• Twice as many rats died in the dextrose-solution setting as in the usual heroin setting: 64% versus 32%
• Those receiving heroin the usual setting were more prepared for this potentially dangerous situation because the context (CS1) brought about a physiological response (CR) that countered the drug's typical effects

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Siegel's heroine addict interview study

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• Interviewed heroin addicts who had come close to death from supposed overdoses
• In 7 out of 10 cases, the addicts had been shooting up in a new and unfamiliar setting
• Suggested that a dose for which an addict has developed tolerance in one setting may become an overdose in an unfamiliar setting

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biological preparedness

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• Some instances of conditioning depend not only the relationship between stimuli and behavior but also on the way an organism is genetically predisposed toward stimuli in its environment
• A particular species has evolved so that the members require less learning experience than normal to acquire a conditioned response

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taste-aversion learning

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A biological constraint on learning in which an organism leans in one trail to avoid a food whose ingestion is followed by illness

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John Garcia's & Robert Koelling's taste-aversion experiment on rats

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• In phase 1, thirsty rates were familiarized with the situation in which licking a tube produced three CSs: saccharin-flavored water, noise, and bright light
• In phase 2, when rats licked the tube, half received only the sweet water and half received only the noise, light, and plain water
• Each of the two groups were divided again: Half of each group was given electric shocks that produced pain, and half was given X-ray radiation that produced nausea and illness
• Big reductions in drinking occurred when flavor was associated with illness (taste aversion) and when noise and light were associated with pain
• There was little change in behavior under the two other conditions -- when flavor predicted pain or when the "bright-noisy water" predicted illness

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conditioned aversions with temperature

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• In a preliminary experiment, 20 rats had the opportunity to drink from two bottles containing water at either 50 degrees F or 104 degrees F
• Rats preferred the cold water over the warm water
• In the next experiment, 16 rats where split into two groups
• After drinking the cold water, one group was injected with a substance that made the rats ill; the other group received a saline injection that had no negative effect
• The rats that became ill now showed a conditioned aversion to the cold water
• Despite their initial dislike for the warm water, they now mostly drank water at that temperature
• In later experiments, rats that got sick after drinking water that was both cold and sweet acquired an aversion to both components of the novel stimulus: they subsequently avoid both cold water and warm saccharin

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classical conditioning in cancer treatment

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• People who undergo chemotherapy often experience negative consequences such as fatigue and nausea
• Research suggests that processes of classical conditioning contribute greatly to the persistence of those side effects over time
• Over the course of cancer treatment, patients' nausea and vomiting began even before they received the chemotherapy drugs, known as anticipatory nausea
• Chemotherapy drugs served as the UCS, producing posttreatment nausea as an UCR
• Distinctive features of the clinic environment serve as the CS
• Across visits to the clinic, the CS becomes paired with the UCS
• Result is that patients experience anticipatory nausea as a CR as soon as they arrived at the clinic
• One study of 214 patients found that about 10% developed anticipatory nausea
• Surveyed a group of 273 Hodgkin's disease survivors who ranged from 1 to 20 years beyond treatment
• Were asked to reflect over the past six months to indicate whether they experienced anything that mad them feel good or bar; 55% reported lingering bad responses that were triggered by stimuli associated with the chemotherapy
• Persistent responses were the result of classically conditioned associations between various aspects of the chemotherapy experience (the CS) and the drug infusions (the UCS)

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Edward L. Thorndike (1874 - 1949)

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• Tested cats ability to escape from puzzle boxes
• Cats at first only struggled against their confinement, but once some "impulsive" action allowed them to open the door, "all the other unsuccessful impulses [were] stamped out and the particular impulse leading to the successful act [was] stamped in by the resulting pleasure"
• Analysis suggests that learning was an association between stimuli in the situation and a response than an animal learned to make: a stimulus-response (S-R) connection
• S-R connections occurred gradually and automatically in a mechanistic way as the animal experienced the consequences of its actions through blind trial and error

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law of effect

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A basic law of learning that states that the power of a stimulus to evoke a response is strengthened when the response is followed by a reward and weakened when it is not followed by a reward

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Skinner's analysis of Thorndike's view

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• Embraced Thorndike's view that environmental consequences exert a power effect on behavior
• Outlined a program of research whose purpose was to discover, by systematic variation of stimulus conditions, the ways that various environmental conditions affect the likelihood that a given response will occur
• Empiricists such as Skinner advocate a bottom-up approach; they start with the collection and evaluation of data within the context of an experiment and are not theory-driven

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operant conditioning

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Learning in which the probability of a response is changed by a change in its consequences

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operant

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• Behavior emitted by an organism that can be characterized in terms of observable effects it has on the environment
• Not elicited by specific stimuli as classically conditioned behaviors are

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Skinner's operant chamber

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• Invented an apparatus that allowed him to manipulate the consequences of behavior
• After having produced an appropriate behavior defined by the experimenter, a rat presses a level, and the mechanism delivers a food pellet
• Allows experimenters to study the variables that allow rats to learn, or not to learn, the behaviors they define

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operant experiments

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• In many, the measure of interest is how much of a particular behavior an animal carries out in a period of time
• Researchers record the pattern and total amount of behavior emitted in the course of an experiment
• Methodology allowed Skinner to study the effect of reinforcement contingencies on animals' behavior

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reinforcement contingency

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A consistent relationship between a response and the changes in the environment that it produces

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reinforcer

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• Any stimulus that, when made contingent on a response, increases the probability of that response
• Are always defined empirically, in terms of their effects on changing the probability of a response

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positive reinforcement

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A behavior is followed by the presentation of an appetitive stimulus, increasing the probability of that behavior (ex. a rat will turn in circles if a consequence of circle turning is the delivery of desirable food)

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negative reinforcement

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A behavior is followed by the removal of an aversive stimulus, increasing the probability of that behavior (ex. someone who hates strawberries would be more likely to perform a behavior it if it would allow them to cease eating strawberries)

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escape conditioning

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A form of learning in which animals acquire a response that will allow them to escape from an aversive stimulus (ex. raising an umbrella during a downpour)

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avoidance conditioning

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A form of learning in which animals acquire a response that will allow them to avoid aversive stimuli before they begin (ex. in a car with a buzzer that sounds when you fail to buckle your seatbelt, you will learn to buckle up to avoid the aversive noise)

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operant extinction

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When a behavior no longer produces predictable consequences, its return to the level of occurrence it had before operant conditioning (ex. no longer kicking a soda machine when you do not get your soda because kicking it produced no soda in previous times)

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punisher

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Any stimulus that, when made contingent on a response, decreases the probability of that response

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positive punishment

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A behavior is followed by the presentation of an aversive stimulus, decreasing the probability of that behavior (ex. touching a hot stove produces pain that punishes the preceding response so that you are less likely to touch the stove next time)

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negative punishment

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A behavior is followed by the removal of an appetitive stimulus, decreasing the probability of that behavior (ex. when a parent withdraws a child's allowance after she hits her baby brother, so the child learns not to hit her brother in the future)

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discriminative stimulus

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• Stimulus that acts as a predictor of reinforcement, signaling when particular behaviors will result in positive reinforcement
• Organisms learn that, in the presence of some stimuli but not of others, their behavior is likely to have a particular effect on the environment

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three-term contingency

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• The means by which organisms learn that, in the presence of some stimuli but not others, their behavior is likely to have a particular effect on the environment
• Three terms are discriminative stimulus, behavior, and consequence

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defining the behavior to be reinforced or eliminated

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• Reinforcement should be contingent on exactly that behavior
• When reinforcers are presented so that they are not contingent, their presence has little effect on behavior (ex. if a parent praises poor work as well as good efforts, a child will not learn to work harder in school)

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defining the contexts in which a behavior is appropriate or inappropriate

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• Define the discriminative stimuli and investigate how broadly the desired response will be generalized to similar stimuli (ex. if a child learned to sit quietly in class, would that behavior generalize to other "serious" settings)

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unknowingly reinforcing some behaviors

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• To eliminate a behavior, determine whether you can identify reinforces for that behavior
• Extinguish the behavior by eliminating those reinforcers (ex. reinforcing tantrums in a child by giving him extra attention when he screams which would count as a secondary gain from the bad behavior i.e. he may learn that when he screams, he'll gain extra attention)
• Parenting research has identified this as one cause of serious behavioral problems in children

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Gerald Patterson's coercion model

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• Children are put at risk when parents issue threats in response to small misbehaviors
• At some moments, parents would issue harsh or explosive discipline toward the same behaviors
• Children learn the lesson that relatively large acts of aggressive and coercive behavior are appropriate and necessary for achieving goals -- leading to cycle of increase in the severity of the children's antisocial behavior
• Suggests that parents' attempts to use punishment to affect children's behavior are often ineffective

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physical punishment and negative child outcomes

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• One study involving over 1,000 children examined the relationship between the amount of physical punishment the children received as 15-month-olds and the behavior problems they displayed as 36-month-olds and as first graders
• Demonstrated that for both "easy" and "difficult" children (as reported by parents), the more the children had been spanked early in life the more likely they were to show increases in aggressive behaviors at both 36 months and in first grade
• Explains why experts advise that parent first try positive reinforcement rather than punishment
• Reinforcing children for behaving well is often a better long-term strategy than punishing them for behaving poorly

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primary reinforcer

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Biologically determined reinforced, such as food and water

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conditioned reinforcers

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In classical conditioning, a formerly neutral stimulus that has become a reinforcer

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chimp and raisin study

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• With raisins as primary reinforcers, chimps were trained to solve problems
• Then tokens were delivered along with the raisins
• When only tokens were presented, chimps continued working for their "money" because they could later deposit the hard-earned tokens in a "chimp-o-mat" designed to exchange tokens for the raisins

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conditioned reinforcers in teaching

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• Found to be more effective and easier to use than primary reinforcers because:
(1) few primary reinforcers are available in the classroom, whereas almost any stimulus event that is under control of a teacher can be used as a conditioned reinforcer;
(2) they can be dispensed rapidly;
(3) they are portable;
and (4) their reinforcing effect may be more immediate because it depends only on the perception of receiving them and not on biological processing, as in the case of primary reinforcers
• Token economies such as those found in psychiatric hospitals are also set up based on these principles

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time outs and children's behavior

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• A time out is "the contingent withholding of the opportunity to earn reinforcement...from rewarding stimuli including attention from the parent, as a consequence of some form of misbehavior"
• The contrast between time out and time in is very important: if a child does not find interactions with his parents rewarding, then a time out that suspends those interactions will not reduce his misbehavior
• Time outs are probably most effective for children ages 3 to 7, for a duration of one to five minutes
• Children should be told why they are receiving the time out
• It is important that the child does not learn that the time outs allow him to escape from tasks he'd rather not perform: parents must ensure that they reaffirm their request once the time out period has passed

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response deprivation theory

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Behaviors become preferred and, therefore, reinforcing when an animal is prevented from engaging in them (ex. water-deprived rats learned to increase their running in an exercise wheel when their running was followed by an opportunity to drink)

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Skinner's partial reinforcement of rats

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• At some point, did not have enough of a food-reward supply for his hardworking rats
• He economized by giving the rats pellets only after a certain interval of time -- no matter how many times they pressed in between, they could not get any more pellets
• Rats responded as much with this partial reinforcement schedule as they had with continuous reinforcement
• When animals underwent extinction training and their responses were followed by no pellets at all, the rats whose level pressing had been partially reinforced continued to respond longer and more vigorously than did the rats who had gotten payoffs after every response

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schedule of reinforcement

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In operant conditioning, a pattern of delivering and withholding reinforcement (ex. when you raise your hand in class, sometimes the teacher calls on you)

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partial reinforcement effect

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The behavioral principle that states that responses acquired under intermittent reinforcement are more difficult to extinguish than those acquired with continuous reinforcement

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fixed-ratio (FR) schedule

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• A schedule of reinforcement in which a reinforcer is delivered for the first response made after a fixed number of responses
• The higher the ratio, the longer the pause after each reinforcement
• Stretching the ratio too thin by requiring a great many responses for reinforcement without first training the animal to emit that many responses may lead to extinction
• Many salespeople are on FR schedules: they must sell a certain number of units before they can get paid

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variable-ratio (VR) schedule

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• A schedule of reinforcement in which a reinforcer is delivered for the first response made after a variable number of responses whose average is predetermined
• Generate the highest rate of responding and the greatest resistance to extinction, especially when VR value is large
• Gambling would seem to be under the control of VR schedules
• VR schedules have you guessing when the reward will come -- you gamble that it will be after the next response, not many responses later

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fixed-interval (FI) schedule

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• A schedule of reinforcement in which as reinforcer is delivered for the first response made after a fixed period of time
• Response rates under FI schedules show a scalloped pattern
• You experience an FI schedule when you reheat a slice of pizza; you set the oven time for 2 minutes and you probably won't check very much for the first 90 seconds, but in the last 30 seconds, you'll peek more often

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variable-interval (VI) schedule

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• A schedule of reinforcement in which a reinforcer is delivered for the first response made after a variable period of time whose average is predetermined
• Generates a moderate but very stable response rate
• Extinction under VI schedules is gradual and much slow than under fixed-interval schedules
• You've experienced a VI schedule if you've taken a course with a professor who gave occasional, irregularly scheduled pop quizzes for which you had to study your notes each day before class

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shaping by successive approximations

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• A behavioral method that reinforces responses that successively approximate and ultimately match the desired response
• For shaping to work, you must define what constitutes progress toward the target behavior and use differential reinforcement to refine each step along the way

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Canadian pole vaulting university student experiment and shaping by successive approximations

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• 21-year-old pole vaulting university student sought help to correct a technical problem with his vaulting technique
• He didn't sufficiently extend his arms (holding the pole) above his head before he planted the pole to life himself off
• Vaulter's average hand-height takeoff was calculated at 2.25 meters at the beginning of the intervention
• Photoelectric beam was set up so that when the vaulter achieved a desired extension, the beam was broken and equipment produced a beep (the beam serving as a conditioned positive reinforcer)
• At first, beam was set at 2.30 meters, then once the student was able to reach the height with 90% success, was moved to 2.35 meters, and then 2.40, 2.45, 2.50, and 2.52 meters -- finally at 2.54 meters
• Vaulter's behavior was successfully shaped toward the desired goal

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Keller Breland & Marion Breland

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• Used operant conditioning techniques to train thousands of animals to perform a remarkable array of behaviors
• Believed that general principles derived from laboratory research using virtually any type of response could be directly applied to the control of animal behavior outside the laboratory
• At some point after training, though, some of the animals began to "misbehave"
• Devised the idea of instinctual drift as they saw that "learned behavior drifts toward instinctual behavior"

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instinctual drift

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• The tendency for learned behavior to drift toward instinctual behavior over time
• Not explained by operant principles, but biologically, species-specific tendencies imposed by an inherited genotype override changes in behavior brought about by operant conditioning (ex. in the Brelands's experiments, raccoons trained to put coins in toy banks and collect edible reinforcers later rubbed coins together, dipped them into the bank, and pulled them back out, a common behavior as they remove the outer shells of a favorite food, crayfish; pigs given the same task instead would drop the coins onto the floor, root (poke at) them with their snouts, and toss them into the air, a natural part of their inherited food-gathering repertory)

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comparative cognition

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The study of the development of cognitive abilities across species and the continuity of abilities from nonhuman to human animals

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Edward C. Tolman (1886 - 1959)

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• Pioneered the study of cognitive processes in learning by inventing experimental circumstances in which mechanical one-to-one associations between specific stimuli and responses could not explain animals' observed behavior
• Along with his students, demonstrated that when an original goal path is blocked in a maze, a rat with prior experience in the maze will take the shortest detour around the barrier, even though that particular response was never previously reinforced
• Results showed that conditioning involves more than the simple formation of associations between sets of stimuli or between responses and reinforcers; it includes learning and representing other facets of the total behavioral context

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cognitive maps and their efficiency

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• A mental representation of physical space
• Animals use spatial memory to recognize and identify features of their environments
• Animals use spatial memory to find important goal objects in their environment
• Animals use spatial memory to plan their route through an environment

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functions of cognitive maps at work

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• Pinyon jaws bury thousands of pine seeds each fall and retrieve them four to seven months later to survive through the winter into the early spring; by the time they are 8 months old, they have they have the spatial memory required to make their way back to their seeds
• Coal birds use their memories for the positions of their old seed caches to make decisions about proper locations for new caches

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pigeons' judgments of same versus different

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• Pigeons viewed arrays that contained two colored circles
• Arrays remained on view for five seconds
• After brief memory delay, a second array appeared in which one of the colors had changed
• To get a reward, the pigeons needed to peck on the circle with the changed color
• Were able to learn this response with trials using a set of colors on which they'd specifically been trained
• Behavior transferred to a new set of colors for which they had not received explicit training
• Results suggest that the pigeons had acquired the concept of same versus different colors

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observational learning

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• The process of learning new responses by watching the behavior of another
• Enables organisms to acquire large integrated patters of behavior without going through the tedious trial-and-error process of gradually eliminating wrong responses and acquiring the right ones -- the organism can profit immediately from the mistakes and successes of others

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vicarious reinforcement

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Reinforcement that occurs when you imitate the behavior of someone who has been reinforced for that behavior

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vicarious punishment

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Refers to the tendency not to repeat behaviors that we observe others punished for performing, as when avoiding hot water having seen another person burned by it

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Albert Bandura

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• After having them watch adult models punching, hitting, and kicking a large plastic BoBo doll, children in his experiment later showed a greater frequency of the same behaviors than did children in control conditions who had not observed the aggressive models
• Subsequent studies showed that children imitated such behaviors just from watching filmed sequences of models, even when the models were cartoon characters

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processes that determine the influence of a model's observed behavior

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• Attention: The observer must pay attention to the model's behavior and its consequences -- this is more likely when there are perceived similarities between features and traits of the model and the observer
• Retention: The observer must store a representation of the model's behavior in memory
• Reproduction: The observer must have the physical or mental ability to reproduce the model's behavior
• Motivation: The observer must have a reason to reproduce the model's behavior (ex. the model's behavior could be seen as having reinforcing consequences)

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TV violence and aggression study

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• Began in 1977 when researchers measured two years of television viewing for 557 children starting in either first or third grade
• Particularly, researchers measured the viewing of violent content
• Fifteen years later, the researchers were able to interview 329 of the children who were now 20 to 22 years old
• Adult level of aggression was measure both through self-reports and that of others, such as spouses
• Men and women who had watched the most violent TV as children also displayed the highest adult levels of aggression
• Data suggest that early TV viewing of violence causes later aggression
• Found only a small relationship between childhood aggression and the individuals' viewing of TV violence as adults, reducing the possibility that the children destined to be aggressive were already more interested in violent content as children

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TV violence and its negative impact on viewers

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• Though the mechanisms of observational learning, it increases aggressive behavior, which has particularly important implications for children whose aggressive habits borne of viewing of TV violence may serve as the basis for antisocial behavior later in life
• Leads viewers to overestimate the occurrences of violence in the everyday world, so viewers may be unduly afraid of becoming victims of real-world violence
• May bring about desensitization, a reduction in both emotional arousal and distress at viewing violent behavior
• Research has also shown that children can learn prosocial, helping behaviors when they watch programs that provide prosocial behavioral models