Unit 6: Study Questions

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Define learning. Be able to provide and recognize original examples of learning. (p. 249)

Define phobias. (p. 250)

Are animal learning principles fundamentally different from those that describe human learning? Explain. (p. 251)

Comment: As Weiten and McCann suggest, the same basic principles describe animal and human learning. There are, however, sometimes instances in which human verbal behaviour, language, causes human learning to differ from that of animals to some extent. For example, when we follow verbal rules, human behaviour sometimes becomes more rigid and less flexible than animal behaviour. Overall, verbal behaviour makes humans more effective and capable of advanced communication, so it is an overall advantage.

Define conditioning. (p. 251)

Define classical conditioning. (p. 251)

Describe Pavlov’s discovery of psychic reflexes. (pp. 251-253)

Identify the basic elements of conditioning using Pavlov’s terminology (i.e., unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, neutral stimulus, conditioned stimulus, and conditioned response ). Be able to provide and recognize original examples of these concepts. (pp. 253-254)

Explain how fears and anxieties that occur in everyday life can be due to classical conditioning. (pp. 254-255)

Comment: Many of our fears and attractions are learned through classical conditioning. A key element in classical conditioning is the process of generalization. Suppose someone has a bad experience with a police officer, for example, and this “spills over” to fear of all police officers. This “spilling-over” effect is a process of generalization, in which a behaviour such as fear originally occurs in one specific instance (e.g., one police officer) and then generalizes to all members of a stimulus class (e.g., all police officers).

What is evaluative conditioning? Explain how advertisers condition our behaviour. (p. 255)

What is immunosuppression? Describe how classical conditioning can suppress the immune response, produce conditioned allergic reactions, cause drug tolerance, and influence sexual arousal. (pp. 256-257)

Describe the procedures and results of the studies by Domjan and colleagues of the classical conditioning of sexual arousal in quail. What are possible implications of these studies for humans? (pp. 256-257)

Does classical conditioning always occur as a mechanical process, as in the way salivation occurs to food cues? Explain why, or why not. (p. 257)

Define acquisition. What is stimulus contiguity? How is it related to the acquisition of a conditioned response ? (pp. 257-258)

Comment: Weiten and McCann define stimulus contiguity in terms of stimuli that “occur together in time and space.” The specific important contiguity in classical conditioning is the co-occurrence of the neutral stimulus (NS) and the unconditioned stimulus (US). Conditioning is generally most effective when the NS occurs and then the US occurs quickly afterward. This is temporal (time-based) contiguity because the two stimuli must occur close together in time. Spatial contiguity is also involved because the two stimuli must occur together at the same location and thereby be capable of stimulating the sensory receptors of the animal or person whose behaviour is being conditioned.

What features of a neutral stimulus make it likely that it will become an effective conditioned stimulus? (p. 258)

Define extinction as it occurs in classical conditioning. Be able to provide and recognize original examples of extinction. (p. 258)

Describe the classical conditioning phenomena of spontaneous recovery. Describe the renewal effect. Can classical conditioning be unlearned through extinction? Explain. (pp. 258-259)

Define and describe the process of stimulus generalization as it occurs in classical conditioning. Be able to provide and recognize instances of the stimulus generalization of classical conditioning. Define generalization gradient. What does the curve of a generalization gradient represent if it is narrowly dispersed around a CS? What does it represent if it is widely dispersed around a CS? (pp. 259-260)

Describe Watson and Rayner's work with Little Albert. (p. 260)

Define and describe the process of stimulus discrimination as it occurs in classical conditioning. Be able to provide and recognize instances of the stimulus discrimination of classical conditioning. (p. 260)

Define higher-order conditioning. Why does higher-order conditioning “extend the reach” of classical conditioning? (p. 261)

Define operant conditioning. Who invented this term? (p. 262)

Define Thorndike’s law of effect. (p. 263)

Comment: Thorndike defined the law of effect in terms of “satisfying effects,” which turned out to be one of the less satisfying features of the law of effect. The problem is that “satisfying effects” are difficult to define. What is the difference between a satisfying effect and one that is not so satisfying? The solution to this problem is to define the law of effect in terms of some change in behaviour, such as performing the response more frequently. This is essentially what Skinner did in his definition of reinforcement. Instead of defining a reinforcer in terms of satisfying effects, Skinner defined it in terms of the effect of engaging in the response more often.

Define Skinner’s concept of reinforcement. (p. 264)

Comment: Skinner’s concept of reinforcement is a functional definition because reinforcement is defined in terms of its function in increasing the frequency of the reinforced response.

What is a Skinner box? (p. 264)

Comment: A Skinner box is an apparatus that provides a simplified environment in which behaviour can be studied. It includes a device such as a lever for making and recording a response. The Skinner Box is often confused with the Air-Crib, the temperature-controlled baby crib that Weiten and McCann also describe in this chapter. Remember that the Skinner Box is used for studying behaviour, whereas the Air-Crib was designed as an improvement on the conventional baby crib.

What are reinforcement contingencies? (p. 264)

Comment: Think of reinforcement contingencies as if-then relationships between behaviour and consequences. So, for example, in this course if you engage in the behaviour of studying hard, you will get a good grade as a consequence. The if-then relationship between studying and grades is a reinforcement contingency. More complex contingencies also involve more specific conditions. If you go to the movies on Tuesdays, the ticket price is reduced. That reinforcement contingency has the same if-then relationship, but it applies only on Tuesdays. Spend a few moments to think about the reinforcement contingencies that apply to you—how, for example, you have to behave in a certain way with some people to obtain reinforcing consequences and another way with other people.

Define and describe a cumulative recorder. Explain the meaning of a steep slope and a shallow slope of a cumulative record. (pp. 264-265)

Comment: The cumulative recorder is sometimes called the “behaviourist's microscope” because it reveals patterns of behaviour over time that might otherwise not be seen with the naked eye.

Define shaping. Be able to provide and recognize original examples of shaping. (pp. 265-266)

Define operant extinction and resistance to extinction. Be able to provide and recognize original examples of operant extinction. (pp. 266-267)

Define discriminative stimuli. Provide and recognize original examples of discriminative stimuli. Be able to define the processes of acquisition, extinction, stimulus generalization, and stimulus discrimination as they apply to both classical and operant conditioning. (pp. 267-268)

Why do behaviourists object to the practice of defining reinforcement in terms of reward or pleasure? (pp. 268-269, and Study Guide Comment)

Comment: Weiten and McCann state that behaviourists object to defining reinforcement in terms of pleasure because pleasure is unobservable. However, the main problem with using pleasure to define reinforcement has more to do with its ambiguity and subjectivity than its unobservability. How would you clearly define pleasure? Is what is pleasurable for one person pleasurable for another? These ambiguities are all avoided by defining reinforcement in terms of its effect in making the response more likely to occur. Therefore, behaviourists prefer to define reinforcement in terms of response consequences that make responses occur more frequently. Frequency of behaviour can be measured and defined clearly, so there is no need to speculate about what is or is not pleasurable.

Do most behaviourists believe that scientific assertions must be limited to what can be observed? (p. 268, and Study Guide Comment)

Comment: Behaviourists often concern themselves with unobservable behaviours. As discussed in Unit 1, contemporary behaviourists do not limit themselves to what can be publicly observed. Skinner’s book entitled Notebooks, for example, is full of observations of his own private behaviour, illustrating that behaviourists often make use of unobservables. Skinner's main point about unobservables is that studying them poses special problems, which is a bit like saying that it is more difficult to find things in the dark than in bright light.

Here we reiterate a point made in Chapter 1: Especially if you continue on in psychology, read widely to obtain different points of view in psychology. It is particularly helpful to read the original writings of such key psychologists as Freud and Skinner directly. Reading these authors in the original works will help you develop a nuanced understanding of many issues and avoid oversimplifications.

What are unconditioned and conditioned reinforcers? Be able to provide and recognize original examples of these reinforcers. (pp. 268-269)

Comment: Unconditioned reinforcers are also called primary reinforcers or unlearned reinforcers. Conditioned reinforcers are also known as secondary reinforcers or learned reinforcers.

What is superstitious behaviour? What is accidental reinforcement? (pp. 269-270)

Comment: Once a Detroit Tigers baseball fan who lived in Windsor, Ontario, was watching a game on TV, but then left to mow the lawn. While the man was mowing, the Tigers scored many runs in the inning he missed. This led him to mow the lawn often during Tigers' games, even when it didn't need mowing. It also caused him to miss the action, because he was often out mowing the lawn rather than watching the games. The Tigers scoring a lot of runs that day was an accidental reinforcer for mowing the lawn: mowing the lawn did not cause the runs to be scored; the runs coincidentally occurred while he was mowing the lawn. Note that some sports fan behaviours are “unaccidentally” reinforced. For example, cheering good plays at a game makes the home-team players more likely to make great plays. Much of the home-field advantage is due to these types of reinforcement contingencies.

Define schedule of reinforcement. (p. 270)

Define and be able to provide and recognize original examples of the following reinforcement schedules: continuous reinforcement, intermittent reinforcement, fixed-ratio schedules, variable-ratio schedules, fixed-interval schedules, and variable-interval schedules. What type of patterns of responding are generated by fixed-ratio, variable-ratio, fixed-interval, and variable-interval schedules? (pp. 270-272)

Define positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. Provide and recognize original examples of each type of reinforcement. (pp. 272-273)

Comment: Many behaviour analysts no longer make use of the distinction between negative and positive reinforcement. One reason for dropping the distinction is its ambiguity. For example, Weiten and McCann suggest that rushing home in winter to get out of the cold is an example of negative reinforcement. Is this negative reinforcement because the cold is terminated by arriving home, or is it positive reinforcement because the warmth of home is presented upon arrival? The effective consequence in such situations is not removal of the cold or presentation of the warmth, but the stimulus change from cold to warmth. Cold is removed and warmth is presented simultaneously, which makes this type of example difficult to interpret as either negative or positive reinforcement. Note that all reinforcers will involve a stimulus change, as in this example, and it is the stimulus change that is the reinforcer. For example, at the end of this course, you will be assigned a course grade and at that point there will be a stimulus change from no assigned grade to an assigned grade. Whether the stimulus change is a reinforcer will depend on the effect it has on your subsequent behaviour.

Define escape learning. Provide and recognize original examples of escape learning (also called escape conditioning). (p. 273)

Define avoidance learning. Provide and recognize original examples of avoidance learning (also called avoidance conditioning). What puzzle does avoidance conditioning present? (pp. 273-274)

Describe the two-process theory of avoidance. (pp. 273-274)

Define punishment. Provide and recognize original examples of punishment. (pp. 274-275)

Distinguish between punishment and negative reinforcement. (pp. 274-275)

Comment: In punishment, a consequence for a response acts to make the response less likely to occur. In negative reinforcement, a consequence for a response acts to make the response more likely to occur. Punishment decreases some measure of the punished response. Negative reinforcement increases some measure of the negatively reinforced response.

For what two reasons is the concept of punishment confusing to many students? (pp. 274-275)

What side effects are associated with physical punishment? What are the general disadvantages of punishment? (pp. 275-276)

Comment: Weiten and McCann confine their discussion of the side effects of punishment to physical punishment, which is misleading because it does not address the disadvantages of all types of punishment. Punishment can produce undesirable emotional responses, aggressive behaviours, undesired imitation of the act of punishment, inappropriate conditioned punishers, and escape from and avoidance of people who use punishment. There is also a lack of acceptance of punishment in modern society.

Identify and describe the five guidelines for using punishment properly. (pp. 276-277)

Define instinctive drift. Explain how the Brelands observed instinctive drift in the raccoons they trained. (p. 278)

Define conditioned taste aversion. What principle of conditioning do taste aversions appear to violate? How did Garcia’s work shed light on this issue? Describe the suspected role that evolution has had in forming special connections among taste stimuli, nausea, and conditioned aversions. (pp. 278-279)

What is preparedness as it applies to conditioning processes? How is it suspected that preparedness has been established through evolutionary processes? (pp. 279-280)

Comment: Evolution is an ongoing process. Modern threats to humans tend not to be snakes and spiders, but tend to be human inventions such as motor vehicles, which kill 1.2 million people annually according to the World Health Organization. If humans continue to use motor vehicles for millions of years, will they develop preparedness for a conditioned aversion to motor vehicles?

Describe Tolman's work in latent learning and cognitive maps. What theoretical implications did this work have? (pp. 280-281)

Comment: Tolman's work is often held up as showing that learning can occur without reinforcement, but this interpretation demands that each instance of exploratory behaviour be reinforced. However, both rats and people develop a class of exploratory behaviours that are intermittently reinforced. We often explore new environments, and our behaviour of remembering and recalling what we explored will sometimes (intermittently) be reinforced at a later time as we find ourselves able to successfully navigate again. So what we wind up with is a reinforced class of exploratory behaviours. While specific instances of the class may go unreinforced, this disguises the fact that the class itself is maintained by intermittent reinforcement. As such, latent learning does not necessarily show that learning occurs without reinforcement.

Identify what makes a stimulus a potentially effective CS, according to Robert Rescorla’s research. (pp. 281-282)

Comment: At the beginning of the section on signal relations, Weiten and McCann suggest that cognitive processes are important. However, the extent to which a neutral stimulus predicts an US is not a cognitive process; it is a relationship between stimuli and behaviour elicited by the US.

Suppose you listen to a song while studying for an exam and later do well on the exam. Does this make listening to the song more likely to occur through reinforcement? Explain. (p. 282)

Comment: In this section, Weiten and McCann conclude that if a you listen to a song while studying and then later do well on the exam, then listening to the song is unlikely to be strengthened because you would come to a logical conclusion that there was no relationship between the song and doing well on the exam. However, Weiten and McCann’s analysis in this section is at odds with several examples they provided at the outset of the chapter. For example, Wayne Gretzky played hockey with his jersey tucked into his hockey pants on one side. Why did Gretzky’s cognitive processes not override the effects of reinforcement on his goal scoring and playmaking?

It is true that sometimes irrelevant features of our behaviour are reinforced along with the features that actually produced reinforcement. So Gretzky’s dressing habits, a feature of his behaviour irrelevant to goal scoring, were reinforced along with the skills that allowed him to score goals. It is also true that sometimes a logical process occurs in which we identify the features of our behaviour that are responsible for our successes. Note, however, that this logical process in which we identify what we do that is successful is itself a behaviour established through discrimination, reinforcement, and conditioning processes, not a process unrelated to these more basic processes.

The Weiten and McCann example of listening to the song is unlikely to be reinforced by doing well on the exam due to the delay between the song and receiving the exam mark (or concluding that you did well on the exam). On the other hand, holding a pen in a particular way, tapping one’s foot, and looking toward the ceiling are behaviours that are probably reinforced often because they precede recall of the correct answer on an exam. You may notice many of these behaviours the next time you are taking an exam, either in yourself or in other students.

Define observational learning. Be able to provide and recognize original examples of observational learning. What are models? What are the four key processes that Albert Bandura identified as being crucial in observational learning? (pp. 283-284)

Describe the distinction between the acquisition of a behaviour and the performance of a behaviour. (p. 284)

Comment: Weiten and McCann imply that Skinner rejects the notion that learning can occur without the learned behaviour occurring. For Skinner, learning includes instances in which, for example, a stimulus becomes an effective discriminative stimulus for a behaviour even though that behaviour has not yet been performed. For Skinner, learning is not a process of acquiring behaviours but a process in which relationships are established between stimuli, behaviours, and consequences. For example, suppose you see someone perform a simple card trick and you are then able to imitate it. Once you see the trick, particular discriminative relationships have been set up between the cards and your behaviour. You have learned the trick when those relationships have been established, even though you have not yet performed the trick.

Describe the work of Bandura that established a connection between observation of aggression and imitation of such behaviours. What has more contemporary research established regarding this relationship? (pp. 284-290)

Comment: One of the most shocking practices in Western culture is the depiction of violence on television and in movies. As Weiten and McCann state, it is known that viewing violent acts increases the likelihood that those acts will be imitated. Much of the violence in Western society can be logically attributed to the violence portrayed in the media. However, Western culture places a high value on freedom, including the freedom to present acts of violence in entertainment media despite the data showing that society is worse off as a result.

Comment: If a target behaviour increases in frequency from watching another human being reinforced for engaging in that same behaviour, the target behaviour has been vicariously reinforced. If a target behaviour decreases in frequency from watching another being punished for engaging in that same behaviour, the target behaviour has been vicariously punished.

Describe the procedure and results of the featured study entitled "Longitudinal Relations Between Children's Exposure to TV Violence and their Aggressive and Violent Behaviour in Young Adulthood." What are the practical implications of these findings? (pp. 286-287)

Define mirror neurons, and explain what role they play in observational learning. (pp. 290-291)

What is behaviour modification? Describe the steps that must be taken in designing an effective program in which you modify your own behaviour. What are antecedents? What is a token economy? Is it best to end behaviour modification programs suddenly or gradually? Explain. (pp. 292-295)

Does classical conditioning of emotional responses occur without our awareness? Explain. Describe how classical conditioning is used in advertising, in business negotiations, and in politics. Is it possible to avoid being manipulated by classical conditioning? Explain. (pp. 296-297)