Regimen

1. Introduction
1. Animals tend to live by an instinctive genetic code. For example, a salmon’s life is pretty much hard-wired into its genes – birth, youth in the stream, adulthood in the ocean, then return to the stream to spawn and die.
2. Humans also have an instinctive genetic code, but we however, can adapt to our environment and learn new behaviors and make changes.
3.Learning is defined as a relatively permanent behavior change due to experience.
4. This brings up the question, “How do we learn?”
1. We learn by making associations. This is connecting events that occur one after another. These events can be good, like connecting the birthday song to eating cake, or bad like seeing a flash of lightning then hearing loud thunder.
2. Ifa stimulus occurs normally in an environment, an animal’s natural response may dwindle. This lessening of a response is called habituation. Think of the stimulus as becoming habit, so why respond to it?
3. The examples above illustrate associative learning.
5. To a psychologist, “learning” is more specific than what we think of learning in school. To psychologists, there arethree main types of learning…
1. Classical conditioning occurs when we associate two stimuli and thus expect result.
2. Operant conditioning occurs when we learn to associate our own behavior (or our response) and its consequence. We therefore repeat behaviors with good results, we cut down on behaviors with bad results.
3. Observational learning occurs by watchingothers’ experiences.
4. One additional form of learning is through language. In this way, we can learn without experiencing something or watching someone else experience it.
2. Pavlov’s experiments
1. Classical conditioning falls under the psychological approach called behaviorism. Behaviorism is only concerned with observable behavior – things an animal or person does that canbe seen and counted (measured).
1. Behaviorism shunned the “mentalist” approaches as hogwash. They’re unconcerned with anything that goes on in your head. They’re only concerned with what you do, your behavior.
2. Ivan Pavlov is the godfather of behaviorism.
1. Pavlov was a Russian doctor who used dogs as his subjects.
2. He noticed dogs salivated at thesight of food. This is a natural reaction. He wondered if he could associate somethingunnatural to salivation.
1. Pavlov rang a bell, then fed the dog. The bell meant nothing to the dog.
2. He repeated this over and over and over until, the bell did mean something – the bell meant food was coming!
3. Eventually, the bell alone could cause thedog to salivate.
4. He rigged tubes to the dog’s neck to measure the salivation (and thus the response).
3. Using this dog experiment, we can see the “parts” of classical conditioning…
1. UCS (unconditioned stimulus) – this is the natural stimulus – the food.
2. UCR (unconditioned response) – this is the natural response –salivation.
3. CS (conditioned stimulus) – this is what’s associated to the UCS – the bell.
4. CR (conditioned response) – this is the response (which is the same as the UCR) – salivation.
4. The key to classical conditioning is that it’s a natural thing, there is no decision involved. Usually it’s a biological process over which the person/animal has nocontrol.
1. A person could be classically conditioned using the pucker response to a lemon, or cringe response to fingernails on a chalkboard, or dilated eyes to the change from light to dark.
3. There are five main conditioning processes…
1. Acquisition is the initial learning of a stimulus-response relationship. This is where the dogs learned to associate the...