Test: Learning- 2 - Humanities/Arts MCQ

In psychology, the term ‘learning’ covers a range of phenomena. A wider definition might go something like this: ‘Learning is the process whereby an organism interacts with its environment and becomes changed by the experience so that its subsequent behaviour is modified.’ The acquisition of new information and new skills falls within this definition, but so do the following events:
(a) A snail experiences a brief jolt of the surface on which it is crawling and reacts by retracting into its shell. Subsequent jolts, however, are found to be less effective in inducing withdrawal until the reaction finally disappears – it is this change in response which signifies learning;
(b) The first conspicuous moving object seen by a newly hatched chick is a laboratory attendant. As a consequence, the chick develops an attachment to that person, approaching and following him or her, and tending to avoid other things;
(c) A rat is given access to a distinctively flavoured foodstuff that has been laced with a small amount of poison, enough to induce nausea but not enough to kill. On recovering from its illness, the rat will tend to shun the flavour, even if it is one that it liked beforehand;
(d) A hungry pigeon is given a small amount of food each time it happens to make a turn in a particular direction. After experiencing a few rewards, the bird develops an increasing tendency to circle on the spot in the ‘correct’ direction.

Food represents the unconditioned stimulus, which trigger an unconditioned response, salivation. The presentation of light with food represents a conditioned stimulus that will eventually trigger a conditioned response, salivation with light in the absence of food. None of the other answers include the correct sequence.

Answers A, B and C each relate to the general rule underlying conditioning behaviour. UR and CR are not always the same response, but the CR is generally consistent with behavioural responses observed in UR.

Both illness-induced aversions and phobias develop based on the principles of classical conditioning. Neutral stimuli become paired or associated with aversive stimuli, and this produces conditioned responses to the aversive stimuli in the absence of the neutral stimuli. Answers A and C do not provide clear examples of how classical conditioning can explain human behaviour.

Instrumental learning is based on responses by the organism to determine whether learning occurs whereas classical condition is not contingent on the organisms’ response. Both instrumental learning and classical conditioning can vary in the length of time for associations and learning to occur based on schedules of reinforcement and rate of pairings.

The phenomenon of blocking provides an interesting and much-studied instance of failure to learn, in spite of contiguous presentations of CS and US. In a blocking experiment, animals receive training with what is termed a compound CS (Phase 2) – in this example represented by the simultaneous presentation of a noise and a light followed by a shock reinforcer. However, the experimental group has first received a phase of training in which the noise alone is conditioned (Phase 1).
The performance of the control group of participants shows that training (Phase 2) with a compound CS is normally sufficient to establish associations between individual CS elements (noise, light) and the US (shock). So in this control group the light, when subsequently presented on its own, will evoke a CR. But the experimental group shows no (or very little) evidence of learning about the light in Phase 2. Although they have received light–US pairings, just as the control participants have, in Phase 2, the formation of the light–US association appears to have been blocked by initial training with the noise in Phase 1.

We know from other training procedures that rats can learn about combined (often referred to as configural) cues. But such learning tends to occur painfully slowly, whereas spatial tasks are mastered much more easily by rats. This suggests that spatial learning operates according to principles quite different from those that underlie classical and instrumental conditioning procedures. It is possible that exposure to an environment allows the animal to form a cognitive map of that environment – some sort of internal representation of the spatial relationships among the cues it has experienced. The animal is then able to navigate because it knows its own position with respect to this internal representation. But no one has yet supplied a full account of the process by which the map is constructed, how the animal knows its own position, and so on.

Automatic S-R habits can result from initially goal-directed behaviour, and these associations can override planned behaviour. Response-outcome associations would not explain the habitual walk from school to home, and the remaining answers also would not explain the learned habit.

By experiencing many discrimination problems of a similar type, the animal appears to abstract some general rule about how to behave in this situation – a rule that allows the near-instantaneous solution of a problem that it had, in fact, never faced before. The rule that operates in this case is the win–stay, lose–shift strategy: in other words, the animal learns to persist with a choice that yields food, but shift to the other object if it does not.
Associative theory can go some way towards explaining this. The occurrence of reward (or non-reward) can be regarded as a stimulus that, like any other, can enter into associations or acquire discriminative control over an instrumental action. The special feature of the learning-set procedure is that these stimuli and associations come to dominate the animal’s behaviour to the exclusion of all others.
So the animal learns to focus on classes of cues that are accurate predictors of reward and to ignore others that are not. Intensive research is currently going into the nature of such higher-level learning processes that might modulate the mechanisms of simpler associative processes.

In laboratory studies of conditioning, researchers have tended to assume that the results obtained reveal general principles about the nature of association formation, which apply to other species and other stimuli. The experiment by Garcia and Koelling (1966) presented an important challenge to this assumption by showing, for laboratory rats, that animals appear to be especially ‘prepared’ to associate some combinations of events and to have difficulty in forming associations between other combinations. Similar principles of preparedness may well apply to humans. Rats were allowed to drink a saccharin-flavoured solution while a light and noise were being presented: each lick at the drinking tube closed a circuit that produced a flash of light and a click.
So they experienced a compound CS comprising a taste element and an auditory–visual element. Some rats then received a nausea-inducing injection of lithium choride (LiCl) as the US; other rats received an electric shock to the feet as an aversive US. Both groups of rats showed a reduction in willingness to drink over the course of several training sessions. In the final test, animals received either access to the saccharin solution in the absence of the auditory–visual cue, or access to unflavoured water but with the auditory–visual cue still being presented.
Animals given LiCl as the US showed an aversion to saccharin but were willing to drink plain water even when it was accompanied by the light and the click. Animals given a shock as the US drank saccharin readily but shunned the ‘bright, noisy’ water. These results, and others like it, have led some researchers to suggest that we might be misguided in our attempt to establish general laws of learning.