B.F. Skinner
Learning
To Listen to an audio introduction to Chapter 5: Click Here
Short Videos
Pavlov's Discovery
Classical Conditioning Video
Little Albert
Additional Power Point Slides #2
How often have you heard or used the word
learning? Have you ever asked what learning is?
And how does learning
occur?
Is a child’s crying an example of learning? Does
a seal or an elephant performing tricks at an
amusement park exhibit learning?
Adaptation or adjustment to a changed
environment can take many forms, involving
changes
in attention, emotion, thinking, perception, and behavior. Many forms of animal and human adaptation follow principles of learning, the process by which experience modifies preexisting behavior and understanding. Learning requires identifying relationships between events and noting regularity in the world.
Classical conditioning and
instrumental/operant conditioning
are two important models of how such associations may form.
Our
understanding of
learning began with the work of a physiologist who was studying
digestion in dogs. Ivan Pavlov found his experimental animals
frequently began to salivate at times he did not anticipate. For example, they might salivate when they heard the footsteps of the person who was to feed them. The dogs had learned to associate stimuli such as footsteps or a tone with food. This type of learning is called
Classical or Pavlovian conditioning.A common example of classical conditioning occurs when
individuals learn to fear a stimulus that was associated with some
trauma.
The well-known case of Little Albert shows how a young
child learned to fear a white rat when its presence had been
associated with a loud noise. Classical conditioning is also at work
when we learn to avoid certain foods because they were associated
with negative consequences such as illness. is simple—behavior
operates to change the environment in some way. If the change is
pleasant then we are likely to repeat the behavior; if the change is not
pleasant we are less likely to repeat the behavior. Reinforcers are
events that follow behaviors and increase the frequency of the
behaviors. Careful use of positive reinforcers can lead to the
development of complex forms of behaviors. For example, many cases
of animal training involve the use of shaping, which can also be
used with humans. Reinforcers
can be given on schedules of reinforcement ranging
from continuous to intermittent or partial reinforcement. Think of
intermittent schedules as "sometimes I get reinforcement." When we
want to stop a behavior from occurring we often rely on punishment;
however, psychologists found many pitfalls in the use of punishment
When we can identify the
reinforcer that follows a particular behavior, we can use extinction to stop that behavior. What happens in
extinction? In a word—nothing— because the reinforcer
is not delivered and the behavior is often
eliminated. However the schedule of reinforcement that a behavior
was on influences the speed of extinction.Classical and operant conditioning are not the only forms of learning. A powerful form of learning called observational learning occurs frequently in our lives. You probably learned to drive a car, write with a pencil, and hit a baseball by watching others.
Behavior modification is the application of the principles of learning to alter inappropriate behaviors. It is a major contribution of the principles of learning identified by psychologists.