In this video I introduce learning theory and the basic concepts of behaviorism. This begins with the work of Ivan Pavlov on classical conditioning and covers the basic vocabulary for discussing this type of learning including neutral stimulus, unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned stimulus, and conditioned response.
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Video Transcript:
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to begin looking at learning theory.
So first you might ask, “well what is learning?”. Now of course you know in a common sense way what learning is and what it refers to but if we’re going to define learning, what would we say that it is?
So a general definition of learning is to say that learning occurs if you have some experience and it results in a change in your thought or behavior. So if you have experience and then your thinking or your behavior changes, we can say that you’ve learned something. Some sort of learning has occurred.
Now most of the learning that we’re going to be looking at in this unit would fall under the heading of behaviorism. The reason for this is behaviorism focuses on behavior. By that I mean that we look for observable changes in behavior as evidence that learning has occurred. Part of the reason for this is that behavioral psychologists mostly studied animals. They studied dogs, and rats, and pigeons, and they used these as proxies for humans. They thought of them as sort of a simplified version of a human.
This means that they had to focus on observable behavior, right? Because you can’t really get into the internal mental processes of a pigeon. You can try, but it’s pretty difficult. So as a result this means you pretty much have to focus on observable behavior.
If you want to see if a pigeon has learned something you have to look for a change in the pigeon’s behavior. This is why this type of research is referred to as behaviorism. We’ll see it’s not the only way to study learning and the influence of behaviorism has faded in the past few decades and that’s partly because we have new methods for observing changes that don’t necessarily rely on observable behavior. But we’ll get to that at the end of this unit.
One of the most important ideas in learning theory is classical conditioning. This is based on the work of a Russian physiologist named Ivan Pavlov. Here’s a picture of Pavlov here. He looks remarkably like the neighbor from Home Alone. Pavlov was interested in studying digestion. He didn’t set out to study learning, he was studying digestion in dogs. In fact he won the Nobel prize, he was the first Russian to win a Nobel prize in 1904 for his work on digestion.
But while he was studying digestion, he noticed something strange happening in the dogs. He implanted little tubes connected to the salivary glands of these dogs, so he could collect saliva. He would feed the dogs, this would cause them to salivate, then he could analyze the saliva. But he noticed the strange thing that was happening was that the dogs would start salivating before he gave them the food. He would start preparing to feed the dogs and these little tubes would start filling up with saliva.
He thought “that’s strange, it seems the dogs have learned. They know that food is coming”. This preparation process has somehow given them a clue and their body is actually responding, they’re salivating as if the food is already there, even though it isn’t yet.
So he began investigating this to try to figure what sort of things could we do to teach the dog that food is on its way. The essential idea of classical conditioning is that we pair things with, in this case food, and we try to see if we can get those things we paired it with to actually cause the same response. We’re going to introduce a number of terms to refer to these different items.
Let’s use a different color.
We have to start with a neutral stimulus. So this means we start with something that doesn’t have any meaning to the dog. So the famous example is a bell, Pavlov using a bell, some people have suggested that he didn’t actually use bells, but he used a number of different stimuli, lights, metronomes ticking, and tuning forks, but for the the sake of simplicity we’ll say he used a bell.
OK so the reason we say that a bell is a neutral stimulus, is if you go up to a dog and you ring a bell, there’s no predictable response that occurs. So it’s neutral. The dog might react in some way but there’s not a predictable way that all dogs react. OK so that’s our bell, that’s our neutral stimulus.
Then we also have to have what’s called an unconditioned stimulus. The way to keep these terms straight is I prefer to think of unconditioned as just “not taught”, it hasn’t been taught to the animal. So the unconditioned stimulus is a stimulus that doesn’t need to be taught to the animal to cause some response. So in this case it’s the food.
If you give a dog food, a predictable thing will happen in all cases. Any dog, no prior learning necessary, give them food what will happen, they’ll salivate. So the salivation, the salvation is going to be called an unconditioned response.
In other words, the dog doesn’t need to be taught anything in or to salivate to the food. With these three parts here, we can see how to do this classical conditioning process. The conditioning process is that we start with a neutral stimulus the bell we follow that, oops, wrong color, We start with the neutral stimulus and then we follow that with the unconditioned stimulus that we haven’t had to teach to the dog, in this case the food, and then that unconditioned stimulus will automatically be followed by an unconditioned response.
So we have bell, food, salivating. Then we just repeat this over and over. The conditioning process involves just repeating this. Bell, food, salivation, bell, food, salivation. If you do this enough times, the goal is that eventually you don’t need the food to get to the salivation. It’s bell, salivation.
Once that has occurred we have to use some new terms here.
So the neutral stimulus is no longer neutral. Now it’s actually causing a response and it’s a response that we’ve taught to the dog. So now we’re going to switch out the word neutral, because it’s not neutral anymore, we’re going to say that now the bell is a conditioned stimulus, meaning a stimulus that has been taught to the dog. It required training in order to get this to occur.
So the bell goes from being a neutral stimulus to now being a conditioned stimulus. The unconditioned response, salivating to food, is now a conditioned response, it’s one that has been taught. So we say it’s a conditioned response. In this case we mean salivating to the bell is what has been taught.
This is essentially the process of classical conditioning. You pair a neutral stimulus, you pair it with an unconditioned stimulus, over and over again, each time you get an unconditioned response until eventually you have a situation where the conditioned stimulus evokes the conditioned response.
Now we can see that some form of learning has occurred. We’ve conditioned the dog to salivate to a bell. This is what we’ve thought this is what’s been conditioned. In the next video we’ll go into more detail about what happens after this. What happens if we stop pairing this? What other things could the dog salivate to? What other stimuli could we introduce? We’ll see it gets a little more detailed than this but this is the general process of classical conditioning.
You pair a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus enough times that it becomes a conditioned stimulus which causes a conditioned response.
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Thanks for watching!
