Learning What does it mean to learn something

Learning • What does it mean to learn something? • How do you know you’ve learned?

Learning • A relatively permanent change in behavior that results from experience • Seal balances ball receives food • Balances ball again to gain more food

How do we learn? Most learning is associative learning • Learning that certain events occur together.

Classical Conditioning Operant Conditioning A brief overview of each and things we will look at Observational Learning

Classical Conditioning • Do you cringe at the sound of a dentist’s drill? ? • Do you salivate when passing your favorite restaurant? ? How did you learn these behaviors? • It all started with Ivan Pavlov, his dogs, and classical conditioning – A type of learning where a stimulus (something that we can respond to) gains the power to cause a behavior or action

Operant Conditioning • This is the Reinforcement and punishment type of learning – Learning in which the frequency of a behavior depends on the consequence that follows that behavior – Touching a hot oven • learn not to touch same hot oven because of reinforcement of behavior • burning hand

“The Law of Effect” • “Any behavior that has good consequences will be repeated any behavior that has bad consequences will be avoided” – Edward Thorndike

Observational Learning • Learning by observing others – learning that occurs as a function of observing, retaining and replicating behavior observed in others

Bandura and the Bobo Dolls

Observational Learning influenced debates on the effect of television violence and parental role models

Antisocial models vs. prosocial models

How about fear? Are we born with it or do we acquire it? ? Classical Conditioning and Little Baby Albert