Lecture 8 Flashcards
What is the difference between Operant and Respondent (classical) conditioning?
- Operant: organism learns to actively manipulate/control their environments (can explain all types of behaviour)
- Respondent: more passive; new connections formed btw stimuli/responses (more limited!)
Who coined the term “Respondent Conditioning”?
Skinner (his term for classical/Pavlovian conditioning)
How is Skinner’s Operant Chamber or “Skinner Box” different from Thorndike’s puzzle box?
- generally similar concept
- box is more complex than Thorndike’s
- Thorndike’s work was comparative psychology, Skinner is focusing on behaviour
- Skinner had way more research projects
What is Thorndike’s law of effect?
- certain stimulus-response sequences are followed by pleasure and they tend to be strengthened (“stamped in”); those followed by pain tend to be weakened (“stamped out”)
An extinction curve, first used in _____’s research, is a mathematical curve that represents a reduction in ______ in the absence of _______
SKINNER
response rate; reinforcers
How did Skinner come up with the extinction curve?
- discovered it bc the food delivery mechanism for his pigeons was broken!!
What is a fixed-interval reinforcement schedule?
- operant conditioning schedule in which only first response after some specified period of time is reinforced
- eg can only be reinforced for response once every 30 seconds
What is behaviour shaping?
- can condition very complex behaviours by breaking them down into small components
- eg clicker training with dogs (pair click with food so it becomes secondary reinforcer so you can reinforce complex sequences of behaviour without stopping to give food)
What is the difference between primary and secondary reinforcers?
- Primary: unconditioned/natural reinforcer; do not require pairing with another stimulus to function as a reinforcer
- Secondary: acquire power only after having been paired w primary reinforcers (eg clicker, money)
Skinner taught pigeons to play _____ using a technique called _____. The point of doing this was ______
ping pong!
behaviour shaping
point was to show that he could control behaviour and to introduce idea that this ability was pretty limitless…
What is programmed instruction?
- educational technique devised by Skinner
- complicated subjects like math broken down into simple stepwise components presented in order of increasing difficulty
- positively reinforce students for each incremental response
- very effective for learning simpler things! (eg multiplication)
- Dr. Roy’s kids use a platform at school that uses this
What was Skinner’s proposal to the US military in WWII to create teleguided missiles?
- he trained pigeons to peck buttons to keep missiles on course
- wasn’t perfectly reliable but ended up working really well by using avg. of 3 pigeons’ pecking
- military ended up picking a diff prototype :(
What did Skinner think about the idea of free will?
- free will is an illusion; we just FEEL like we are acting freely when under the influence of positive reinforcement
- by extension, punishing people for something they did out of their own “free will” is absurd
Skinner:
People are credited for good things they do of their own free will, but not if they have to do the thing. In reality, the only difference between the 2 is…..
in the latter we know the reinforcement contingencies involved
Skinner believes that the best and most ethical thing to do is to base society on ______
positive reinforcement
Define causal determinism and causal indeterminism
- Determinism: philosophical concept that every event or state of affairs is the result of preceding events in accordance with the principle of cause and effect (idea is that if we had all the relevant data, we could predict everything you will do from the moment you’re born)
- Indeterminism: philosophical concept that not all events/states of affairs are strictly determined by preceding events (making a decision is like tossing a coin)
What are the two positions one can have within incompatibilism?
- Libertarianism: we are free (causal det. is false)
- Skepticism: freedom is impossible (freedom is equally inconsistent w causal det. and causal indet.)
What is rational compatibilism?
- causal determination by recognition of what I should do
- once you understand the right thing to do, you kinda have to do it bc not doing it would be irrational and therefore not an example of free will
Hobbes is a naturalist in the sense that he believes that there is _______ between animal and human action
no stark distinction (both examples of free will)
What did Hobbes think about free will?
- freedom of action is when there are no obstacles preventing the realization of our desires
- actions that are freely willed are actions we take based on prior decisions (so reflexes for example are not freely willed)
What metaphor can be used to understand Hobbes’ position on free will?
- freedom of a marionette
- hand manipulating it is “desire”
What are 2 issues with Hobbes’ theory raised in class?
- view that freely willed actions are based on prior desired conflicts w common sense notion that sometimes desires can conflict w capacity to act freely (eg addiction; desire to take drug interferes w will not to)
- animals like sharks can act on prior desires but we can’t rly say they have free will
What did physicalists (18th/19th century physiology) believe about free will?
- believe ppl are just like sophisticated machines (like Skinner)
- no mind; no free will
What does Skinner think of Hobbes’ model of human/animal action?
- the “decision” (to raise hand or wtv) comes from past reinforcement contingencies, not free will
- Hobbes: passive desire/wanting to raise hand leads to raising one’s hand
- Skinner: past reinforcement contingencies lead to raising one’s hand
Skinner is a(n) (in/compatibilist) and believes in _____
incompatibilist; believes in causal determinism
What did Freud believe about free will?
- unconscious forces strongly influence our thoughts, emotions, and actions
- can be understood as limitations to free will, BUT ego has a degree of control over actions
- he is a compatibilist BUT idea of unconscious processes doesn’t rly leave room for freedom
What did Jung believe about free will?
- “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”
- more optimistic, says we can become freer if we choose to listen to our unconscious
- metaphor of rabbit (unconscious) calling Alice (ego) to become conscious of it
What did William James believe about free will?
- “my first act of free will shall be to believe in free will”
- chose to believe in free will in personal life bc it was useful and believed in determinism in scientific work
According to Victor E. Frankl, what is the ultimate freedom?
- the freedom to choose your attitude towards your circumstances (even in most extreme and dehumanizing circumstances – eg holocaust)
To make psychology more scientific, Watson wanted to get rid of _______
introspection! (and by extension if we have to get rid of mind/consciousness, so be it)
Why did Dr. Roy use the metaphor of throwing the baby out with the bathwater in relation to Watson’s thinking?
- bc he was willing to throw out idea of mind/consciousness (the baby) to get rid of introspection (the bathwater)
In the 50s and 60s, behaviorism was directly challenged by ____ and ____
Linguistics (Chomsky) and Artificial Intelligence
What were the key points of Noam Chomsky’s 1957 “Syntactic Structures”? How did this go against behaviorism?
- we can understand correctness of syntax (surface structure) even is sentence is semantically meaningless (deep structure)
- the syntactic structure of language is too complex to be learned from associations or trials and error
- children have to have an innate “universal grammar” (general constraints/rules; not language specific)
- goes against behaviourism bc suggests that mind is not a blank slate!!
What were the key points of Skinner’s 1957 “Verbal Behaviour”?
- contrarily to intuition:
- we don’t generate internal copies of external objects to know them
- we act as if we know them based on previous reinforcement
- only way to demonstrate this knowledge is through behaviour, including verbal behaviour
- thought is internal verbal behaviour
**published at same time as Chomsky’s book and kinda argues opposite
In 1959, Chomsky wrote a response to Skinner, which is considered one of the turning points in favor of _______. He argued that ______
in favour of cognitive psychology!
argued that knowledge of grammatical structures is knowledge of a set of rules which can’t be learned through associations
What was the Pascaline created by Blaise Pascal?
- the first calculator (addition)
- not flexible (could only do 1 thing they were programmed to do)