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Psychology: Learning and Memory There are many different kinds of ways that people and animals learn. People can adjust the way they learn to the different situations in which they are learning and what they have to learn. One form of learning is known as conditioning. Conditioning emphasizes the relationship between stimuli and responses. The two types of conditioning found are Classical conditioning and Operant conditioning. Learning may occur in different ways.
Psychologists have distinguished between different types of learning, these being Observational Learning and Insight Learning. Classical conditioning refers to a simple form of learning, which occurs through the repeated association of two or more different stimuli. Learning is only said to have occurred once a particular stimulus always produces a response, which it did not previously produce. Classical conditioning involves an unconditioned stimulus and an unconditioned response, as well as a conditioned stimulus and a conditioned response. The unconditioned stimulus is any stimulus, which consistently produces a naturally occurring, automatic response. The unconditioned response is a reflexive and involuntary response, which occurs because of the unconditioned stimulus.
The conditioned stimulus is the stimulus that is neutral at the beginning of the conditioning process and does not produce the unconditioned response. However, through repeated association with the conditioned stimulus, triggers the same response as the unconditioned stimulus. The conditioned response is the learned response that is brought forth by the conditioned stimulus. The conditioned response occurs after the conditioned stimulus has been associated with the unconditioned stimulus. An example of classical conditioning is a person who walks past a certain house each day and every time is attacked by a large dog. They then associate that house with the dog and avoid walking past there again.
In this example, the unconditioned stimulus is the dog, the unconditioned response is fear, the conditioned stimulus is the house, and the conditioned response is avoidance of the house. Insight learning is a kind of learning involving a period of mental manipulation of the information associated with a problem prior to the realization of a solution to the problem. The learning is said to have occurred when the relationships relevant to the solution are grasped. The learning appears to occur in a flash and what has been leaned is usually performed smoothly and without error. Insight learning involves four stages: preparation, incubation, insightful experience and verification. Preparation is a getting ready period in which the person gathers as much information as possible about what needs to be done.
Incubation is a period of mental time out in which the information gained is put aside. However, the information continues to be reflected upon on a sub-conscious level. Insightful experience is often referred to as the ah ha experience because of its suddenness. This experience seems to occur because of some mental event that unexpectedly bridges the gap between the problem and its solution. Verification represents the final stage of insight learning, when the visual image that flashed into the mind during the insightful experience is acted upon and is tested. If the solution proves to be ineffective the learner with then return back to the stage of incubation.
Operant conditioning is the learning process in which the likelihood of a particular behavior occurring is determined by the consequences of that behavior. It is based on the assumption that a person or animal will tend to repeat behavior that brings forth a positive consequence such a praise, and tend not to repeat behavior that brings forth negative consequences such as punishment. In operant conditioning also referred to as instrumental conditioning an organism learns to engage in certain behavior because of the effects of that behavior. Operant conditioning is a type of conditioning those results from ones actions and the consequences they cause. Most learning is done through operant conditioning because it is learning done by experiences. The brain learns more with operant conditioning than classical conditioning because the brain tends to remember unusual things better than common things.
In operant conditioning, you must have reinforcement, primary, secondary, positive, and negative reinforcement. Reinforcement is something that follows a response and makes you want to repeat that response. Primary reinforcement is the reinforcement that is first and of greatest importance. Secondary reinforcement is anything that comes as a primary reinforcement. Positive reinforcement is reinforcement that makes you want to repeat a response because the response was good.
A positive reinforcement for kids in school is, if they get good grades, than they will get money and clothes for a job well done. Negative reinforcement is a reinforcement that does not make you want to repeat a response because the response was negative. A negative response for kids in school is if they get bad grades, they will get all their privileges taken away. Therefore, if operant conditioning works than you will learn from the mistakes, you made when you tried to do something and failed or if you did something for the first time and get a negative response.
Punishment is a type of negative reinforcement used to weaken a response. In addition, example of operant conditioning is the training of rats to press a lever in order to obtain a food reward. The pressing of the lever (conditioned response) is associated with the food reward (unconditioned stimulus). After a training period, the rat will show the conditioned response of pressing the lever even without the presence of the unconditioned stimulus of the food. Generalization is also apart of operant conditioning. It is when behavior that spreads from one situation to similar one.
If you walk past a person and they wave to say hi, you make a generalization that the next person will wave when you walk past too. Discrimination Learning is learning to tell the difference between one object than another. If you can discriminate in learning than, you will be able to learn more because you can decipher things better. Pavlov noted that responding to different stimuli as thought they are functionally equivalent is adaptive form animals. Rustling sounds in the undergrowth differ, but rabbits and deer do well to flee when they perceive any of many varieties of rustling. Sirens differ, but people do well to become vigilant or to pull their cars to the side of the road when any siren is heard.
In a demonstration of generalization, Pavlov first conditioned a dog to salivate when a circle was presented. During each acquisition trial, the dog was shown a circle, and then given meat powder. After several trials, the dog exhibited the CR of salivating when presented with the circle alone. Pavlov demonstrated that the dog also exhibited the CR in response to closed geometric figures such as ellipses, pentagons, and even squares.
The more closely the figure resembled a circle, the greater the strength of the response (the more drops of saliva that flowed). In operant conditioning, as in classical conditioning, extinction is a process in which stimuli lose the ability to evoke learned responses because the events that had followed the stimuli no longer occur. In classical conditioning, however, the events that normally follow and confirm the appropriateness of the learned response are the unconditioned stimuli. In Pavlov's experiment, the meat powder was the event that followed and confirmed the appropriateness of salivation. In operant conditioning, the ensuing events are reinforcers. Thus, in operant conditioning, the extinction of learned responses results from repeated performance of operant behavior without reinforcement.
After a number of trials, the operant behavior is no longer shown. When some time is allowed to pass after the extinction process, an organism will usually perform the operant again when placed in a situation in which the operant had been reinforced previously. Spontaneous recovery of learned responses occurs in operant conditioning as well as in classical conditioning. If the operant is reinforced at this time, it quickly regains its former strength. Spontaneous recovery of extinguished operant's suggests that they are inhibited or suppressed by the extinction process and not lost permanently. Observational learning occurs when a person or an animal uses observation of another's actions and their consequences to guide their own future actions.
The person being observed is referred to as a model. For this reason, observational learning is also referred to as modeling. Observational learning involves four stages, attention, retention, reproduction and motivation-reinforcement. Attention is when the learner observers the actions of the model (The higher the status of the model the more attention the learner will pay and the closer their imitations will be to the models actions).
Retention occurs when the learner retains in their memory what they have just observed. Reproduction is when the learner will reproduce or imitate the actions of the model that they have just observed. Reproduction is when the learner reproduces or imitates what they have just observed. Motivation-reinforcement can come in various ways. External reinforcement, through praise for doing something well, self-reinforcement, through the learner setting themselves a goal in which they must achieve, and vicarious self-reinforcement, in which the learner can see others joy in their achieving this goal. An example of observational learning is when a person begins to learn a dance.
The person will observe their dancing instructor (attention) when they are shown the dance moves. They then retain the information that they have just observed. The person will then reproduce / imitate the dance moves that they have just been shown (reproduction). The motivation reinforcement can come from praise from the instructor or fellow dancers, or seeing others dance well and wanting to be able to do the same. An emotion is a state of felling that can have physiological, situational, and cognitive components.
Although no two people experience emotions in exactly the same way, it is possible to generalize. Fear, for example, involves predominantly sympathetic arousal, the perception of a threat, and beliefs to the effect that one is in danger. Anger may involve both sympathetic and parasympathetic arousal, a frustrating or provocative situation, and belief that the provocateur ought to be paid back. Such emotions are learned in childhood.
On the basis of Bridges observations of babies, she proposed that newborns experience one emotion diffuse excitement. By 3 month, tow other emotions have differentiated from this general state of excitement a negative emotion (distress) and a positive emotion (delight). By six months, fear, disgust, and anger will have developed from delight. Jealousy develops from distress, and joy develops from delight both during the second year. Alan Spouse has advanced Bridges theory, focusing on the ways in which cognitive development may provide the basis for emotional development. Jealousy, for example, cannot become differentiated without some understanding of the concept of possession.
Anger usually results from situations in which our intentions are thwarted. For example, 7 -month old infants show anger when a biscuit is almost placed in their mouths and then removed. It may be that the development of concepts of intentionality and of rudimentary causality precede the differentiation of anger. Development of fear of strangers to the perceptual-cognitive capacity to discriminate the faces of familiar people from those of unfamiliar people. Long-term memory is the third stage of processing of information. Some psychologists used to believe that nearly all of our perceptions and ideas were stored permanently.
Of course, people are not able to retrieve all of them, but such memories might be lost because of the unavailability of the proper cues, or they might be kept beneath the surface of conscious awareness by the forces of repression. Long-term memory is type of memory where materials are stored for a much longer time. They can be stored as long as a lifetime. Long-term storage is more likely to be achieved when smaller amounts of information are used. The main forms of encoding for long-term memory are semantic, and sometimes visual. There are two basic types of memory, declarative and procedural.
These are two types of memory devoted to facts and skills. Retrieval for long-term memory is dependent on priming by cues. There are also many mnemonic devices that are used to retrieve information from memory. The point of retrieving information from long-term memory is not like scanning an old picture. When people recall the past, they do not just locate and read off faithful mental representations. Instead, memory tends to be reconstructive and less than wholly reliable.
There is no evidence for any limit to the amount of information that can be stored in long-term memory. New information may replace older information in short-term memory, but there is no evidence that memories in long-term memory are lost by displacement. Long-term memories may last days, years, or for all practical purposes, a lifetime. From time to time it may seem as if have forgotten, or lost, a long-term memory, such as the names of elementary or high school classmates. Yet it may be that we cannot find the proper cues to help us retrieve the information. If it is lost, it usually becomes lost only in the same way as when we misplace an object but know that it is still somewhere in the house or apartment.
It is lost, but not eradicated or destroyed. The storehouse of long-term memory is usually well organized. Items are not just piled on the floor or thrown into closets. As we develop, we tend to organize information according to a hierarchical structure. A hierarchy is an arrangement of items into groups of classes according to common or distinctive features. When items are correctly organized in long-term memory, you are more likely to recall know accurate information about them.
The feeling-of-knowing experience also seems to reflect incomplete or imperfect learning. In such cases, our answers may be not on the mark. Thus, very often our sense that an answer is no the tips of our tongues reflects incomplete knowledge. We may not know that exact answer, but we know something. Two theories of forgetting are availability and accessibility.
Availability is information loss. The four theories of this type are trace-decay, disuse, interference, and encoding failure. Trace-decay theory is when there is no trace of memory due to lack of rehearsal. Disuse theory suggests that repeated retrieval of similar information lead to forgetting. Interference theory suggests that what is already in memory competes with newly learned information. Encoding failure occurs when there is not enough encoding.
Accessibility suggests that information is not totally forgotten from-long term memory but may be hard to retrieve. The two major accessibility theories are retrieval failure and motivational. Retrieval theory is where the material cannot be retrieved due to the lack of cues. Motivational theory is where selective forgetting happens in order to reduce anxiety. Encoding and retrieval are essential to the workings of the memory, and the fact that there are two main kinds of memory short term and long term is significant. Short-term memory holds information for fairly short intervals, whereas long-term memory stores information for a far longer amount of time.
The relationship between both, as some Psychologists claim, is envisaged by stage theory. When information is encoded, it is stored in short-term memory. It must remain there for a long time in order for it to be finally stored in long-term memory. The means for retaining it in short term memory is known as rehearsal. By recalling information repeatedly, the chances of this information being transferred from short term to long-term memory increases each time. Information stored in short-term memory has a very limited time span, and there are two main reasons for this.
Information can be displaced (old information somehow keeps being dumped whenever more recent information enters). Information can decay where the memory trace becomes eroded over time by an unknown physiological process, so its detail becomes progressively extinct. Often, each factor plays an equal role in memory loss. One way to encode information before it is erased in short term memory is by a process of organization. This means the individual groups together or pairs off the necessary information given in order to remember it (store it in short term memory) rather than learning information off at random. This process of organization makes it much easier to remember information.
In order for learning to occur, the information in short-term memory must be manipulated or transformed. The person will have to rehearse it, convert it, link it, or perform some other action with the information or else it will fade. Cognitive Psychologists present a framework for analyzing this process based upon teacher characteristics, knowledge and presentation: learner prior knowledge, strategies, cognitive processing and affective processing. They call this information manipulation process the encoding process.
These strategies emphasize one or more of the four fundamental cognitive processes of the encoding process - selection, construction, integration and acquisition. Rehearsal and affective strategies emphasize the selection and acquisition processes, while elaboration and organization emphasized the construction and integration processes. Copying, underlining and taking selective verbatim notes are obviously selective activities. Retrieval is most likely successful if the context at the time of retrieval approximates that during original decoding, and the role of retrieval can help explain why there are better ways of encoding than others for later recall (the compatibility principle). This may help in storing information more efficiently, but there is a more important aspect to this it allows information to be found more easily when being retrieved.
The key to good encoding is to provide means for later retrieval.
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