- Describe innate and learned causes for behavior
- Explain classical conditioning
- Identify the various types of stimuli and responses seen in classical conditioning situations
In this module, you’ll learn about learning. It might not be “learning” as you typically think of the word, because we’re not talking about going to school, or studying, or even effortfully trying to remember something. Instead, you’ll learn about behaviors that we pick up—sometimes automatically, as in classical conditioning, or sometimes because we are “trained” through rewards or punishments. First, let’s talk generally about what we mean by learning.
We’ll start with unlearned behaviors. Dogs shake water off wet fur. Birds build nests. Salmon swim upstream to spawn, and spiders spin intricate webs. What do these seemingly unrelated behaviors have in common? They all are unlearned behaviors. Both instincts and reflexes are innate (unlearned) behaviors that organisms are born with.
reflexes
Reflexes are a motor or neural reaction to a specific stimulus in the environment. They tend to be simpler than instincts, involve the activity of specific body parts and systems (e.g., the knee-jerk reflex and the contraction of the pupil in bright light), and involve more primitive centers of the central nervous system (e.g., the spinal cord and the medulla).
instincts
In contrast to reflexes, instincts are innate behaviors that are triggered by a broader range of events, such as maturation and the change of seasons. They are more complex patterns of behavior, involve movement of the organism as a whole (e.g., sexual activity and migration), and involve higher brain centers.
Both reflexes and instincts help an organism adapt to its environment and do not have to be learned. For example, every healthy human baby has a sucking reflex, present at birth. Babies are born knowing how to suck on a nipple, whether artificial (from a bottle) or human. Nobody teaches the baby to suck, just as no one teaches a sea turtle hatchling to move toward the ocean.
learning
Learning, like reflexes and instincts, allows an organism to adapt to its environment. But unlike instincts and reflexes, learned behaviors involve change and experience: learning is a relatively permanent change in behavior or knowledge that results from experience. In contrast to the innate behaviors discussed above, learning involves acquiring knowledge and skills through experience.
Learning a new skill, like how to skate, involves a complex interaction of conscious and unconscious processes. Learning has traditionally been studied in terms of its simplest components—the associations our minds automatically make between events. Our minds have a natural tendency to connect events that occur closely together or in sequence.
associative learning
Associative learning occurs when an organism makes connections between stimuli or events that occur together in the environment. You will see that associative learning is central to all three of the main learning processes discussed in this module—classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational learning.
- In classical conditioning, also known as Pavlovian conditioning, organisms learn to associate events—or stimuli—that repeatedly happen together. We experience this process throughout our daily lives. For example, you might see a flash of lightning in the sky during a storm and then hear a loud boom of thunder. The sound of the thunder naturally makes you jump (loud noises have that effect by reflex). Because lightning reliably predicts the impending boom of thunder, you may associate the two and jump when you see lightning. In classical conditioning, psychologists focus on how involuntary behaviors, like reflexes, can be learned to be associated with new stimuli.
- In operant conditioning, organisms learn to associate voluntary behavior and its consequence (reinforcement or punishment). A pleasant consequence encourages more of that behavior in the future, whereas a punishment deters the behavior. Imagine you are teaching your dog, Hodor, to sit. You tell Hodor to sit, and give him a treat when he does. After repeated experiences, Hodor begins to associate the act of sitting with receiving a treat. He learns that the consequence of sitting is that he gets a doggie biscuit. Conversely, if the dog is punished when exhibiting a behavior, it becomes conditioned to avoid that behavior (e.g., receiving a small shock when crossing the boundary of an invisible electric fence).
- Observational learning extends the effective range of both classical and operant conditioning. In contrast to classical and operant conditioning, in which learning occurs only through direct experience, observational learning is the process of watching others and then imitating what they do. A lot of learning among humans and other animals comes from observational learning. For example, if you were learning how to rollerskate, much of your learning would come from watching others.
All of the approaches covered in this module are part of a particular tradition in psychology, called behaviorism. However, these approaches you’ll be introduced to do not represent the entire study of learning. Separate traditions of learning have taken shape within different fields of psychology, such as memory and cognition, so you will find that other sections of this book will round out your understanding of the topic. Over time these traditions tend to converge. For example, in this module you will see how cognition has come to play a larger role in behaviorism, whose more extreme adherents once insisted that behaviors are triggered by the environment with no intervening thought.