Chapter 3

LEARNING
 Much of what we do results from what we have learned. In psychology, learning is any relatively
permanent change in behaviour as a result of practice or experience.
 The definition has three important elements:
 Learning is a change in behaviour, for better or worse.
 It is a change that takes place through practice or experience; changes due to growth or
maturation are not learning.
 Before it can be called learning, the change must be relatively permanent; it must last as fairly
long time.
 Research on learning has been heavily influenced by behaviourism, the school of psychology that
accounts for behaviour in terms of observable acts and events, without reference to mental entities,
such as “mind” or “will.”
 Behaviourists focus on a basic kind of learning called conditioning, which involves associations
between environmental stimuli and responses.
 Behaviourists have shown that two types of conditioning- classical conditioning and operant
conditioning- can explain much of human behaviour.
 But, other approaches, known as cognitive learning theories hold that omitting mental processes
from explanations of human learning is like omitting passion from description of sex: you may
explain the form, but you miss the substance. To cognitive learning theorists, learning is not so much
a change in behaviour as a change in knowledge that has the potential for affecting behaviour.
 Consequently, most psychologists today seem to agree that learning is the result of three basic
processes: Classical Conditioning, operant conditioning and cognitive learning.
 These theories of learning tend to share three assumptions. The first is that experience shapes
behaviour. Particularly in complex organisms such as humans, the vast majority of responses are
learned rather than innate. Second, learning is adaptive. Just as nature eliminates organisms that are
not well suited to their environments, the environment naturally selects those behaviours in an
individual that are adaptive and weeds out those that are not. A third assumption is that careful
experimentation can uncover laws of learning, many of which apply to human and non human
animals a like.

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I. Classical Conditioning
 Classical conditioning was the first kind of learning to be studied systematically.
 At the turn of the 19th century the Great Russian physiologist was studying salivation in dogs as part of
a research program on digestion.
 One of his procedures was to make a surgical opening in a dog’s cheek and insert a tube that conduct
saliva away from the animals salivary gland so that the saliva could be measured.
 To stimulate the reflexive flow of saliva, Pavlov placed meat powder or other food in the dog’s mouth.
 During the salivation studies, one of Pavlov’s students noticed something that most people would have
overlooked or dismissed as trivial.
 After a dog had been brought to the laboratory a number of times, it started to salivate before the food
was placed in its mouth. The sight or smell of the food, the dish in which the food was kept, even the
sight of the person who delivered the food each day or the sound of the person’s footsteps were enough
to start the dog’s mouth watering.
 At first, Pavlov treated the dog's salivation as just an annoying secretion. But, he quickly realized that
his student had stumbled onto an important phenomenon, one that Pavlov came to believe was the basis
of a great deal of learning in human beings and other animals. He called that phenomenon a conditional
reflex- conditional because it depended on environmental conditions.
 Later, an error in the translation of his writings transformed conditional into conditioned, the word most
commonly used today.
 Pavlov soon dropped what he had been doing and turned to the study of conditioned reflexes, to which
he dropped the last three decades of his life. Why were his dogs salivating to things other than food?
 At first Pavlov speculated about what his dogs might be thinking and feeling to make them salivate
before getting their food. Eventually, however, he decided that speculating about his dog’s mental
abilities was pointless.
 Instead, he focused on analysing the environment in which the conditioned reflex arose. The original
salivary reflex, according to Pavlov, consisted of an unconditioned stimulus (US), food, and
unconditioned response (UR), salivation.
 By unconditioned stimulus, Pavlov meant an event or thing that elicits a response automatically or
reflexively. By an unconditional response, he meant the response that is automatically produced.
 Learning occurs, said Pavlov, when a neutral stimulus is regularly paired with an unconditioned
stimulus. The neutral stimulus then becomes a conditioned stimulus (CS), which elicits a learned or a
conditioned response (CR) that is usually similar to the original, unlearned one.

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 In Pavlov’s laboratory, the sight of the food dish, which had not previously elicited salivation, became a
CS for salivation. The procedure by which a neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus became
known as Classical Conditioning, also called Pavlovian or Respondent conditioning.
 Since Pavlov’s day, many automatic involuntary responses besides salivation have been classically
conditioned- for example, heartbeat, stomach secretions, blood pressure, reflexive movements,
blinking, and muscle contractions.
 The optimal interval between the presentation of the neutral stimulus and the presentation of the US
depends on the kind of response involved; in the laboratory, the interval is often less than a second.
 In general for classical conditioning to be most effective, the stimulus to be conditioned should precede
the unconditioned stimulus rather than follow it or occur simultaneously with it. The diagram below
summarizes the steps involved in classical conditioning.

Steps in Classical conditioning

Before Conditioning
Neutral Stimulus (CS?) No Response/ Irrelevant Response
(Bell)
Unconditioned Stimulus (US) UR (Salivation)
(Meat)

During Conditioning
NS (CS?) (Bell)
+
US (Meat) UR (Salivation)
After Conditioning

CS (Bell) CR (Salivation).

Factors that Affect Classical conditioning

Several factors influence the extent to which classical conditioning will occur. These include the inter
stimulus interval, the individual’s earning history and the organism’s preparedness to learn.
1. Interstimulus interval: This is the duration of time between the presentation of the CS and the US. For
most motor and skeletal responses, the optimal interval between the CS and the US is very brief. The
temporal relationship between the CS and US- i.e. which stimulus comes first- is also crucial. Maximal
conditioning occurs when the onset of the CS precedes the US, known as forward conditioning. Less
effective than forward conditioning is simultaneous conditioning, in which the CS and US are
presented at the same time. A third pattern, backward conditioning, is the least effective of all. Here,
the CS is presented after the US has occurred.

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2. The individual’s learning history: An extinguished response tends to be easier to learn the second
time around because the stimulus was once associated with the response. Sometimes previous
conditioning can also hinder learning. Consider a dog that has been conditioned to salivate at the sound
of a bell. The researcher now wants to condition the dog to associate the food with an additional
stimulus, a flash of light. The dog will probably have difficulty learning this new association. This
phenomenon is known as blocking. It is failure of a stimulus to elicit a CR when it is combined with
another stimulus that is already effective in eliciting the response.
3. Preparedness to learn: This bears the imprint of evolution. Subsequent research suggested that some
responses can be conditioned much more readily to certain stimuli than to others and that this
contributes to adaptation. From an evolutionary perspective animals appear to have become prone to
connect certain stimuli and responses through natural selection.

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 Principles of Classical Conditioning
 Extinction and Spontaneous Recovery: Extinction in classical conditioning refers to a condition by
which a CR is weakened by presentation of the CS without the US. Without the continued association
with the US the CS loses its power to illicit CR. In other words, if after conditioning, the CS is
repeatedly presented without the US, the CR eventually disappears, and extinction is said to have
occurred. Pavlov rang the bell repeatedly in a single session and did not give the dog any food.
Eventually, the dog stopped salivating.
Extinction is not always the end of the CR. After extinction a CR may suddenly reappear even without
further conditioning trials. This is referred to as Spontaneous Recovery. The day after Pavlov
extinguished the conditioned salivation at the sound of a bell, he took the dog to the laboratory and rang
the bell, still not giving the dog meat powder. The dog salivated, indicating that an extinguished
response can spontaneously recur. The spontaneous recovery of CR is short lived however, will
rapidly extinguish again without renewed pairings of the CS and US.
 Stimulus Generalization and Discrimination: After a stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus
for some response, other, similar stimuli may produce a similar reaction- a phenomenon known as
stimulus generalization. It occurs when an organism produces a CR to other stimuli that have not
been paired with the original US. For instance, in Watson and Rayner’s experiment, the pairing of
the rat and the loud noise produced a fear n little Albert not only of the rat but also of other furry or
hairy objects, including the rabbit, the dog, the fur coat, and even Santa’s face. As one might guess,
the more a stimulus resembles the original CS, the more likely stimulus generalization will take
place.
 The capacity for stimulus generalization is highly adaptive. A child who associates feelings of
comfort and relief with the neighborhood police officer will seek out other officers when she needs
help because they, too, evoke feelings of relief. Generalization is not always adaptive however. A
major component f adaptive learning is knowing when to generalize and when to be more specific
or discriminating. Maladaptive patterns in humans often involve inappropriate generalization from
one set of circumstances to others, as when a person who has been frequently criticized by a parent
responds negatively to all authority figures.
 Most of the time, however, people do not generalize quite so broadly. Instead like other animals,
they discriminate between stimuli. Stimulus generalization is the opposite of stimulus
generalization. Pavlov’s dog did not salivate in response to just any sound.
 Higher Order Conditioning: Sometimes a neutral stimulus can become a CS by being paired with
an already established CS, a procedure known as higher order conditioning.

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II. Operant Conditioning:
 An emphasis on environmental consequences is at the heart of Operant Conditioning (also called
Instrumental Conditioning), the second type of conditioning studied by Behaviourists.
 In operant conditioning, the organism's response operates or produces effects on the environment.
These effects, in turn, influence, whether the response will occur again.
 Operant conditioning has been studied since the start of the 20 th century, although it was not called that
until later. Edward Thorndike set the stage by observing cats as they tried to escape from a complex
“puzzle box” to reach a scrap of fish located just outside the box.
 In this study a hungry cat was placed in a small cage, or “puzzle box” with food available just outside.
The cat could escape to obtain the food by performing a simple response such as pulling a wire or
depressing a lever. After each escape the cat was rewarded with a small amount of food and then
returned to the cage for another trial.
 Thorndike monitored how long it took the cat get out of the box on each trial- over a long series of
trials. If the cat could think, Thorndike reasoned, there would be a sudden drop in the time required to
escape when the cat recognized the solution to the problem.
 Instead of a sudden drop, Thorndike observed a very gradual, uneven decline in the time it took the cats
to escape from his puzzle boxes. The decline in solution time showed that the cats were learning but,
Thorndike concluded that their learning did not depend on thinking and understanding.
 Instead he attributed this learning to a principle called the Law of Effect. According to the law of effect,
if a response in the presence of a stimulus leads to satisfying effects, the association between the
stimulus and the response is strengthened.
 This general principle was elaborated and extended to more complex forms of behaviour by B.F
Skinner. He moved beyond Thorndike by arguing that this principle governs complex human learning
as well as simple animal learning.
 Skinner argued that to understand behaviour we should focus on the external causes of an action and
the action’s consequences. To explain behaviour, he said, we should look outside the individual, not
inside.
 In Skinner’s analysis, a response (“operant”) can lead to three types of consequences:
a) A neutral Consequence that does not alter the response.
b) A reinforcement that strengthens the response or makes it more likely to recur. A reinforcer is any
event that increases the probability that the behaviour that precedes it will be repeated. There are two
basic types of reinforcers or reinforcing stimuli: primary and secondary reinforcers.

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 o Primary reinforcers: Food, water. Light, stroking of the skin, and a comfortable air
temperature are naturally reinforcing because they satisfy biological needs. They are, therefore,
known as primary reinforcers. Primary reinforcers, in general, have the ability to reinforce
without prior learning.
o Secondary Reinforcers: Behaviours can be controlled by secondary reinforcers. They reinforce
behaviour because of their prior association with primary reinforcing stimuli. Money, praise,
applause, good grades, awards, and gold stars are common secondary reinforcers.
 Both primary and secondary reinforcers can be positive or negative. Positive reinforcement is the
process whereby presentation of a stimulus is makes behaviour more likely to occur again. Negative
reinforcement is the process whereby termination of an aversive stimulus makes behaviour more likely
to occur. The basic principle of negative reinforcement is that eliminating something aversive can itself
be a reinforser or a reward. For example, if someone nags you all the time to study, but stops nagging
when you comply, your studying is likely to increase- because you will then avoid the nagging.
 This can be an example of what is called escape learning. In escape learning animals learn to make a
response that terminates/stops a noxious, painful or unpleasant stimulus. Another kind of learning,
which is similar, but not the same as escape learning is Avoidance Learning, which refers to learning
to avoid a painful, noxious stimulus prior to exposure.

Schedules of Reinforcement
 When a response is first acquired, learning is usually most rapid if the response is reinforced each time
it occurs. This procedure is called continuous reinforcement.
 However, once a response has become reliable, it will be more resistant to extinction if it is rewarded
on an intermittent (partial) schedule of reinforcement, which involves reinforcing only some responses,
not all of them. There are four types of intermittent schedules.
1. Fixed-ratio schedules: On fixed ration schedules reinforcement occurs after a fixed number of
responses. They produce very rate of responding. Employers to increase productivity often use
fixed ration schedules. An interesting feature of a fixed ratio schedule is that performance
sometimes drops off just after reinforcement.
2. Variable Ratio Schedules: In variable ratio schedules reinforcement occurs after some average
number of responses, but the number varies from reinforcement to reinforcement. Variable ratio
schedules produce extremely high steady rates of responding. The responses are more resistant
to extinction than when a fixed ratio schedule is used.

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 3. Fixed Interval Schedules: In fixed interval schedules reinforcement of a response occurs only
if a fixed amount of time has passed since the previous reinforcer.
4. Variable Interval Schedule: In variable interval schedule reinforcement of a response occurs
only if a variable amount of time has passed since the previous reinforcer.
 A basic principle of operant conditioning is that if you want a response to persist after it has been
learned, you should reinforce it intermittently, not continuously. Because the change form continuous
reinforcement to none at all will be so large that the animal/ person will soon stop responding. But if
you have been giving the reinforcement only every so often, the change will not be dramatic and the
animal/ person will keep responding for a while.

c) Punishment: that weakens the response or makes it less likely to recur. Punishers can be
any aversive (unpleasant) stimuli that weaken responses or make them unlikely to recur.
Like reinforcers, punishers can also be primary or secondary.
 Pain and extreme heat or cold are inherently punishing and are therefore known as primary punishers.
 Criticism, demerits, catcalls, scolding, fines, and bad grades are common secondary punishers.
 The positive negative distinction can also be applied to puishment. Something unpleasant may occur
following some behaviour (positive punishment), or something pleasant may be removed (negative
punishment).

The Pros and Cons of Punishment

When Punishment works:
 Immediacy – When punishment follows immediately after the behaviour to be punished.
 Consistency- when punishment is inconsistent the behaviour being punished is intermittently
reinforced and therefore becomes resistant to extinction.
 Intensity- In general terms severe punishments are more effective than mild ones. But, there
are studies that indicate that even less intense punishments are effective provided that they are
applied immediately and consistently.

When punishment fails

1. People often administer punishment inappropriately or mindlessly. They swing in a blind rag or shout
things they do not mean applying punishment so broadly that it covers all sorts of irrelevant behaviors.
2. The recipient of punishment often responds with anxiety, fear or rage. Through a process of classical
conditioning, these emotional side effects may then generalize to the entire situation in which the
punishment occurs- the place, the person delivering the punishment, and the circumstances. These
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 negative emotional reactions can create more problems than the punishment solves. A teenager who has
been severely punished may strike back or run away. Being physically punished in childhood is a risk
factor for depression, low self-esteem, violent behavior and many other problems.
3. The effectiveness of punishment is often temporary, depending heavily on the presence of the
punishing person or circumstances
4. Most behavior is hard to punish immediately.
5. Punishment conveys little information. An action intended to punish may instead be reinforcing
because it brings attention.

Shaping
 For a response to be reinforced, it must first occur. But, suppose you to train a child to use a knife
and a fork properly. Such behaviours, and most others in every day life, have almost no probability
appearing spontaneously.
 The operant solution for this is shaping. Shaping is an operant conditioning procedure in which
successive approximations of a desired response are reinforced.
 In shaping you start by reinforcing a tendency in the right direction. Then you gradually require
responses that are more and more similar to the final, desired response. The responses that you
reinforce on the way to the final one are called successive approximations.

Principles of Operant Conditioning

 Extinction: In operant conditioning, extinction refers to the gradual weakening of and disappearance of
a response tendency because the response is no longer followed by a reinforcer.
 Spontaneous Recovery: Just as in classical conditioning, animals and people whose operant behaviors
have been extinguished may recover them. This is called spontaneous recovery.
 Stimulus Generalization: Stimulus generalization describes the phenomenon whereby an animal or
person has learned a response to one stimulus and then applies it to other similar stimuli.
 Stimulus Discrimination: The tendency for a response to occur in the presence of a stimulus but not in
the presence of other, similar stimuli that differ from it on some dimension.

III. Cognitive Learning Theories:

 For half a century, most American learning theories held that learning could be explained by specifying
the behavioral “ABCs” – antecedents (events preceding behavior), behaviors, and consequences.

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 In the 1940s, two social scientists proposed a modification they called social learning theory. Most
human learning, they argued, is acquired by observing other people in social context, rather than
through standard conditioning procedures.
 By 1960s and 1970s, social learning theory was in full bloom, and a new element had been added: the
human capacity for higher level of cognitive processes.
 Its proponents agreed with behaviorists that human beings, along with the rat and the rabbit, are
subject to the laws of operant and classical conditioning. But, they added that human beings, unlike the
rat and the rabbit, are full of attitudes, beliefs and expectations that affect the way they acquire
information, make decisions, reason, and solve problems.
 These mental processes affect what individuals will do at any given moment and also, more generally
the personality traits they develop.

Learning by observing
 Refers to learning by watching what others do and what happens to them for doing it).
 Behaviorists have always acknowledged the importance of observational learning, which they call
vicarious conditioning, and have tried to explain it in stimulus response terms.
 But social cognitive theorists believe that in human beings, observational learning cannot be fully
understood without taking into account the thought processes of the learner.
 They emphasize the knowledge that results when a person sees a model- behaving in certain ways and
experiencing the consequences.
 Many years ago, Albert Bandura and his colleagues showed just how important observational learning
is, especially for children who are learning the rules of social behavior.

Latent Learning
 ‘Latent’ means hidden, and thus latent learning is learning that occurs but is not evident in behavior
until later, when conditions for its appearance are favorable.
 It is said to occur without reinforcement of particular responses and seems to involve changes in the
way information is processed.
 In a classic experiment, Tolman and C.H Honzic(1930) placed three groups of rats in mazes and
observed their behavior each day for more than two weeks.
 The rats in Group 1 always found food at the end of the maze. Group 2 never found food. Group 3
found no food for ten days but then received food on the eleventh. The Group 1 rats quickly learned to
head straight the end of the without going blind alleys, whereas Group 2 rats did not learn to go to the

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 end. But, the group three rats were different. For ten days they appeared to follow no particular route.
Then, on the eleventh day they quickly learned to run to the end of the maze. By the next day, they
were doing, as well as group one, which had been rewarded from the beginning.
 Group three rats had demonstrated latent learning, learning that is not immediately expressed. A great
deal of human learning also remains latent until circumstances allow or require it to be expressed.

Insight Learning
 It is cognitive process where by we reorganize our perception of a problem. It doesn’t depend on
conditioning of particular behaviours for its occurrence. Sometimes, for example, people even wake
from sleep with the solution to a problem that they had not been able to solve during the day.
 In a typical insight situation a problem is posed, a period follows during which no apparent progress
is made, then the solution comes suddenly. What has been learned in insight learning can also be
applied easily to other similar situations.
 Human beings who solve a problem insightfully usually experience a good feeling called an 'aha'
experience.

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