Learning and Conditioning

Three kinds of learning are of particular importance to psychologists. Classical

conditioning is learning that depends on associations between events, such as learning to
walk far from the swings to avoid collisions. Operant conditioning is learning that
depends on the consequences of behavior, such as learning that getting a good night’s
sleep before an exam will help to earn a good grade. Observational learning involves
learning by watching others, such as learning to tie shoelaces by watching someone else
do it first.

Classical Conditioning
Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov was the first to describe classical conditioning. In
classical conditioning, also called “respondent conditioning” or “Pavlovian
conditioning,” a subject comes to respond to a neutral stimulus as he would to another,
nonneutral stimulus by learning to associate the two stimuli.

Pavlov’s contribution to learning began with his study of dogs. Not surprisingly, his dogs
drooled every time he gave them food. Then he noticed that if he sounded a tone every
time he fed them, the dogs soon started to drool at the sound of the tone, even if no food
followed it. The dogs had come to associate the tone, a neutral stimulus, with food, a
nonneutral stimulus.

Conditioned and Unconditioned Stimuli and Responses

Psychologists use several terms to talk about classical conditioning. In Pavlov’s

experiment, salivation was the unconditioned response, which is a response that occurs
naturally. Food was the unconditioned stimulus, the stimulus that naturally evoked
salivation. The tone was the conditioned stimulus, the stimulus that the dogs learned to
associate with food. The conditioned response to the tone was salivation. The
conditioned response is usually the same as, or similar to, the unconditioned response.

Example:
Suppose Adam has a psychology class with Professor Smith, who is determined to teach
him about classical conditioning. In the first class, Professor Smith whips out a revolver
and shoots it into the air. The revolver is loaded with blanks, but when Adam hears the
loud bang, he cringes out of surprise. Professor Smith repeats this action several times
during the class. By the end of the hour, Adam cringes as soon as she whips out the
revolver, expecting a bang. He cringes even if she doesn’t shoot. In this scenario, the
unconditioned stimulus is the bang, the unconditioned response is cringing, the
conditioned stimulus is the revolver, and the conditioned response is cringing.
Acquisition of Conditioned Responses

Subjects acquire a conditioned response when a conditioned stimulus is paired with an

unconditioned stimulus. Conditioning works best if the conditioned stimulus appears just
before the unconditioned stimulus and both stimuli end at about the same time. In the
above example, Professor Smith’s conditioning will work best if she displays the revolver
right before firing and puts it away after shooting.

Extinction

After Adam has been conditioned to cringe at the sight of the revolver, Professor Smith
comes into the next class and pulls out the revolver again. He cringes, but she doesn’t
shoot. If she pulls it out again and again on several occasions without shooting, Adam
will soon stop cringing when she pulls it out. This process called extinction is the gradual
weakening and disappearance of a conditioned response. Extinction happens when the
conditioned stimulus appears repeatedly without the unconditioned stimulus.

Spontaneous Recovery

Suppose that by the end of the second class, Adam has completely stopped cringing when
Professor Smith pulls out the revolver. His conditioned response has been extinguished.
However, if Professor Smith comes into class later in the semester and pulls out the
revolver again, Adam may still cringe, though maybe a little less than before. This is
called spontaneous recovery. Spontaneous recovery is the reappearance of an
extinguished conditioned response when the conditioned stimulus returns after a period
of absence.

Stimulus Generalization

Now suppose Professor Smith conditions Adam again to respond to the revolver as she
did in the first class. Soon he cringes every time she pulls out the revolver. While Adam
is in this conditioned state, the professor pulls out a cell phone. Adam is likely to cringe
at that too because of stimulus generalization—the tendency to respond to a new
stimulus as if it were the original conditioned stimulus. Stimulus generalization happens
most often when the new stimulus resembles the original conditioned stimulus.
Example:
In the 1920s, the behaviorist John Watson and his colleague Rosalie Rayner did a
famous study that demonstrated stimulus generalization. They gave a white rat to an
eleven-month-old boy named Little Albert, who liked the rat and enjoyed playing with it.
In the next stage of the experiment, the researchers repeatedly made a loud noise behind
Albert while offering him the rat. Each time, Albert fell to the floor, frightened. When the
researchers then offered the rat to him without making the noise, Albert showed fear of
the rat and crawled away from it. The researchers were subsequently able to generalize
Albert’s fear to other furry, white stimuli, including a rabbit, a dog, a fur coat, a Santa
Claus mask, and Watson’s hair. This experiment is considered highly unethical by
today’s standards.

Stimulus Discrimination

Suppose Professor Smith used a gray revolver to condition Adam. Once Adam is
conditioned, if she pulls out a brown revolver, he’ll initially cringe at that, too. But
suppose Professor Smith never shoots when she pulls out the brown revolver and always
shoots when she pulls out the gray one. Soon, Adam will cringe only at the gray revolver.
He is showing stimulus discrimination—the tendency to lack a conditioned response to
a new stimulus that resembles the original conditioned stimulus.

Higher-Order Conditioning

Now suppose that after Adam has been conditioned to cringe at the sight of the revolver,
Professor Smith comes to class one day and pulls out the revolver while yelling, “Fire!”
She does this many times. Each time, Adam cringes because he is conditioned to respond
to the revolver. If she then yells, “Fire!” without pulling out the revolver, Adam will still
cringe due to higher-order conditioning—the process by which a neutral stimulus
comes to act as a conditioned stimulus by being paired with another stimulus that already
evokes a conditioned response.

Phobias and Conditioning

A phobia is an intense, irrational fear that impairs a person’s ability to function normally
or participate in normal activities. Phobias, such as Little Albert’s fear of rats and white,
furry objects, may result from classical conditioning. For example, if someone has a near-
drowning experience, he may become afraid of water in general.
Operant Conditioning
In the late nineteenth century, psychologist Edward Thorndike proposed the law of
effect. The law of effect states that any behavior that has good consequences will tend to
be repeated, and any behavior that has bad consequences will tend to be avoided. In the
1930s, another psychologist, B. F. Skinner, extended this idea and began to study
operant conditioning. Operant conditioning is a type of learning in which responses
come to be controlled by their consequences. Operant responses are often new responses.

Just as Pavlov’s fame stems from his experiments with salivating dogs, Skinner’s fame
stems from his experiments with animal boxes. Skinner used a device called the Skinner
box to study operant conditioning. A Skinner box is a cage set up so that an animal can
automatically get a food reward if it makes a particular kind of response. The box also
contains an instrument that records the number of responses an animal makes.

Psychologists use several key terms to discuss operant conditioning principles, including
reinforcement and punishment.

Reinforcement

Reinforcement is delivery of a consequence that increases the likelihood that a response

will occur. Positive reinforcement is the presentation of a stimulus after a response so
that the response will occur more often. Negative reinforcement is the removal of a
stimulus after a response so that the response will occur more often. In this terminology,
positive and negative don’t mean good and bad. Instead, positive means adding a
stimulus, and negative means removing a stimulus.

Punishment

Punishment is the delivery of a consequence that decreases the likelihood that a response
will occur. Positive and negative punishments are analogous to positive and negative
reinforcement. Positive punishment is the presentation of a stimulus after a response so
that the response will occur less often. Negative punishment is the removal of a stimulus
after a response so that the response will occur less often.

Reinforcement helps to increase a behavior, while punishment helps to decrease a

behavior.
Primary and Secondary Reinforcers and Punishers

• Primary reinforcers, such as food, water, and caresses, are naturally satisfying.
• Primary punishers, such as pain and freezing temperatures, are naturally
unpleasant.
• Secondary reinforcers, such as money, fast cars, and good grades, are satisfying
because they’ve become associated with primary reinforcers.
• Secondary punishers, such as failing grades and social disapproval, are
unpleasant because they’ve become associated with primary punishers.
• Secondary reinforcers and punishers are also called conditioned reinforcers and
punishers because they arise through classical conditioning.

Is It Primary or Secondary?
To distinguish between primary and secondary reinforcers, people can ask themselves
this question: “Would a newborn baby find this stimulus satisfying?” If the answer is yes,
the reinforcer is primary. If the answer is no, it’s secondary. The same idea can be
applied to punishers by asking whether a baby would find the stimulus unpleasant.

Shaping

Shaping is a procedure in which reinforcement is used to guide a response closer and

closer to a desired response.

Example:
Lisa wants to teach her dog, Rover, to bring her the TV remote control. She places the
remote in Rover’s mouth and then sits down in her favorite TV–watching chair. Rover
doesn’t know what to do with the remote, and he just drops it on the floor. So Lisa
teaches him by first praising him every time he accidentally walks toward her before
dropping the remote. He likes the praise, so he starts to walk toward her with the remote
more often. Then she praises him only when he brings the remote close to the chair.
When he starts doing this often, she praises him only when he manages to bring the
remote right up to her. Pretty soon, he brings her the remote regularly, and she has
succeeded in shaping a response.

Reinforcement Schedules

A reinforcement schedule is the pattern in which reinforcement is given over time.

Reinforcement schedules can be continuous or intermittent. In continuous
reinforcement, someone provides reinforcement every time a particular response occurs.
Suppose Rover, Lisa’s dog, pushes the remote under her chair. If she finds this amusing
and pats him every time he does it, she is providing continuous reinforcement for his
behavior. In intermittent or partial reinforcement, someone provides reinforcement on
only some of the occasions on which the response occurs.
Types of Intermittent Reinforcement Schedules

There are four main types of intermittent schedules, which fall into two categories: ratio
or interval. In a ratio schedule, reinforcement happens after a certain number of
responses. In an interval schedule, reinforcement happens after a particular time interval.

• In a fixed-ratio schedule, reinforcement happens after a set number of responses,

such as when a car salesman earns a bonus after every three cars he sells.
• In a variable-ratio schedule, reinforcement happens after a particular average
number of responses. For example, a person trying to win a game by getting heads
on a coin toss gets heads every two times, on average, that she tosses a penny.
Sometimes she may toss a penny just once and get heads, but other times she may
have to toss the penny two, three, four, or more times before getting heads.
• In a fixed-interval schedule, reinforcement happens after a set amount of time,
such as when an attorney at a law firm gets a bonus once a year.
• In a variable-interval schedule, reinforcement happens after a particular average
amount of time. For example, a boss who wants to keep her employees working
productively might walk by their workstations and check on them periodically,
usually about once a day, but sometimes twice a day, or some-times every other
day. If an employee is slacking off, she reprimands him. Since the employees
know there is a variable interval between their boss’s appearances, they must stay
on task to avoid a reprimand.

Response Patterns

These different types of reinforcement schedules result in different patterns of responses:

• Partial or intermittent schedules of reinforcement result in responses that resist

extinction better than responses resulting from continuous reinforcement.
Psychologists call this resistance to extinction the partial reinforcement effect.
• Response rate is faster in ratio schedules than in interval schedules. Ratio
schedules depend on number of responses, so the faster the subject responds, the
more quickly reinforcement happens.
• A fixed-interval schedule tends to result in a scalloped response pattern, which
means that responses are slow in the beginning of the interval and faster just
before reinforcement happens. If people know when reinforcement will occur,
they will respond more at that time and less at other times.
• Variable schedules result in steadier response rates than fixed schedules because
reinforcement is less predictable. Responses to variable schedules also cannot be
extinguished easily.
Extinction

As in classical conditioning, extinction in operant conditioning is the gradual

disappearance of a response when it stops being reinforced. In the earlier example, Lisa’s
dog, Rover, started to put the remote under her chair regularly because she continuously
reinforced the behavior with pats on his head. If she decides that the game has gone too
far and stops patting him when he does it, he’ll eventually stop the behavior. The
response will be extinguished.

Stimulus Discrimination

If Lisa enjoys Rover’s antics with the TV remote only in the daytime and not at night
when she feels tired, Rover will put the remote under her chair only during the day,
because daylight has become a signal that tells Rover his behavior will be reinforced.
Daylight has become a discriminative stimulus. A discriminative stimulus is a cue that
indicates the kind of consequence that’s likely to occur after a response. In operant
conditioning, stimulus discrimination is the tendency for a response to happen only
when a particular stimulus is present.

Stimulus Generalization

Suppose Lisa’s dog, Rover, began to put the remote under her chair not only during the
day but also whenever a bright light was on at night, thinking she would probably pat
him. This is called stimulus generalization. In operant conditioning, stimulus
generalization is the tendency to respond to a new stimulus as if it is the original
discriminative stimulus.
Biological Influences
Conditioning accounts for a lot of learning, both in humans and nonhuman species.
However, biological factors can limit the capacity for conditioning. Two good examples
of biological influences on conditioning are taste aversion and instinctive drift.

Taste Aversion

Psychologist John Garcia and his colleagues found that aversion to a particular taste is
conditioned only by pairing the taste (a conditioned stimulus) with nausea (an
unconditioned stimulus). If taste is paired with other unconditioned stimuli, conditioning
doesn’t occur.

Similarly, nausea paired with most other conditioned stimuli doesn’t produce aversion to
those stimuli. Pairing taste and nausea, on the other hand, produces conditioning very
quickly, even with a delay of several hours between the conditioned stimulus of the taste
and the unconditioned stimulus of nausea. This phenomenon is unusual, since normally
classical conditioning occurs only when the unconditioned stimulus immediately follows
the conditioned stimulus.

Example:
Joe eats pepperoni pizza while watching a movie with his roommate, and three hours
later, he becomes nauseated. He may develop an aversion to pepperoni pizza, but he
won’t develop an aversion to the movie he was watching or to his roommate, even though
they were also present at the same time as the pizza. Joe’s roommate and the movie won’t
become conditioned stimuli, but the pizza will. If, right after eating the pizza, Joe gets a
sharp pain in his elbow instead of nausea, it’s unlikely that he will develop an aversion to
pizza as a result. Unlike nausea, the pain won’t act as an unconditioned stimulus.

An Evolutionary Adaptation
The combination of taste and nausea seems to be a special case. Researchers think that
learning to quickly associate taste and nausea is an evolutionary adaptation, since this
association helps people to know what foods to avoid in order to survive.

Instinctive Drift

Instinctive drift is the tendency for conditioning to be hindered by natural instincts. Two
psychologists, Keller and Marian Breland, were the first to describe instinctive drift. The
Brelands found that through operant conditioning, they could teach raccoons to put a coin
in a box by using food as a reinforcer. However, they couldn’t teach raccoons to put two
coins in a box. If given two coins, raccoons just held on to the coins and rubbed them
together. Giving the raccoons two coins brought out their instinctive food-washing
behavior: raccoons instinctively rub edible things together to clean them before eating
them. Once the coins became associated with food, it became impossible to train them to
drop the coins into the box.
Cognitive Influences
Researchers once thought of conditioning as automatic and not involving much in the
way of higher mental processes. However, now researchers believe that conditioning
does involve some information processing.

The psychologist Robert Rescorla showed that in classical conditioning, pairing two
stimuli doesn’t always produce the same level of conditioning. Conditioning works better
if the conditioned stimulus acts as a reliable signal that predicts the appearance of the
unconditioned stimulus.

Example:
Consider the earlier example in which Adam’s professor, Professor Smith, pulled out a
revolver in class and shot it into the air, causing Adam to cringe. If Adam heard a
gunshot only when Professor Smith pulled out her revolver, he would be conditioned to
cringe at the sight of the revolver. Now suppose Professor Smith sometimes took out the
revolver as before and fired it. Other times, she played an audio recording of a gunshot
without taking out the revolver. The revolver wouldn’t predict the gunshot sound as well
now, since gunshots happen both with and without the revolver. In this case, Adam
wouldn’t respond as strongly to the sight of the revolver.

The fact that classical conditioning depends on the predictive power of the conditioned
stimulus, rather than just association of two stimuli, means that some information
processing happens during classical conditioning. Cognitive processes are also involved
in operant conditioning. A response doesn’t increase just because satisfying
consequences follow the response. People usually think about whether the response
caused the consequence. If the response did cause the consequence, then it makes sense
to keep responding the same way. Otherwise, it doesn’t.
Observational Learning
People and animals don’t learn only by conditioning; they also learn by observing others.
Observational learning is the process of learning to respond in a particular way by
watching others, who are called models. Observational learning is also called “vicarious
conditioning” because it involves learning by watching others acquire responses through
classical or operant conditioning.

Example:
Brian might learn not to stand too close to a soccer goal because he saw another spectator
move away after getting whacked on the head by a wayward soccer ball. The other
spectator stopped standing close to the soccer goal because of operant conditioning—
getting clobbered by the ball acted as positive punishment for standing too close. Brian
was indirectly, or vicariously, conditioned to move away.

Bandura and the Bobo Dolls

The person best known for research on observational learning is psychologist Albert
Bandura, who did some landmark experiments showing that children who watched adults
behaving aggressively were more likely to behave aggressively themselves. His most
famous experiment was the Bobo doll study. Bandura let a group of kindergarteners
watch a film of an adult violently attacking an inflatable plastic toy shaped like Bobo the
Clown by hitting it, sitting on it, hammering it, and so forth. He then let the children into
a room with Bobo dolls. The children precisely imitated the adult’s behavior, gleefully
attacking Bobo. Their behavior was a type of observational learning.
Classical Conditioning

• Ivan Pavlov was the first to describe classical conditioning, the type of learning
in which a subject comes to respond to a neutral stimulus as he would to another
stimulus by learning to associate the two stimuli.
• An unconditioned response is the naturally occurring response; an
unconditioned stimulus is the stimulus that evokes an innate response. A
conditioned response is the learned response; a conditioned stimulus is the
learned or associated stimulus.
• A conditioned response is acquired when a conditioned stimulus is paired with an
unconditioned stimulus.
• Extinction is the gradual weakening and disappearance of a conditioned
response. Spontaneous recovery is the reappearance of an extinguished
conditioned response when the conditioned stimulus returns after a period of
absence.
• Stimulus generalization is the tendency to respond to a new stimulus as if it is
the original conditioned stimulus. Stimulus discrimination is the tendency to
lack a conditioned response to a new stimulus that’s similar to the original
conditioned stimulus.
• Higher-order conditioning occurs when a neutral stimulus comes to act as a
conditioned stimulus by being paired with another stimulus that already evokes a
conditioned response.

Operant Conditioning

• Operant conditioning is a type of learning in which responses come to be

controlled by their consequences.
• B. F. Skinner used a device called a Skinner box to study operant conditioning
in rats. He set up the boxes so that the rats could automatically get rewards or
punishments for particular types of responses.
• Reinforcement is delivery of a consequence that increases the likelihood that a
response will occur. Positive reinforcement is the presentation of a stimulus after
a response. Negative reinforcement is the removal of a stimulus after a response.
• Punishment is the delivery of a consequence that decreases the likelihood that a
response will occur. Positive punishment is the presentation of a stimulus after a
response. Negative punishment is the removal of a stimulus after a response.
• Primary reinforcers and punishers are naturally satisfying and unpleasant,
respectively. Secondary reinforcers and punishers are satisfying or unpleasant,
respectively, because they’ve become associated with primary reinforcers or
punishers.
• Shaping is a procedure in which reinforcement is used to guide a response closer
and closer to a desired response.
• A reinforcement schedule is the pattern in which reinforcement is given over
time. Reinforcement can be continuous or intermittent.
 • Intermittent reinforcement schedules include fixed-ratio, variable-ratio, fixed-
interval, and variable-interval schedules.
• In operant conditioning, extinction is the gradual disappearance of a response
when it stops being reinforced.
• A discriminative stimulus is a cue that indicates the kind of consequence that is
likely to occur after a response. Stimulus discrimination is the tendency for a
response to occur only when a particular stimulus is present.
• In operant conditioning, stimulus generalization is the tendency to respond to a
new stimulus as if it’s the original discriminative stimulus.

Biological Influences

• Biological factors can limit conditioning.

• Aversion to a particular taste can be conditioned only by pairing the taste with
nausea.
• Instinctive drift is the tendency for conditioning to be hindered by natural
instincts.

Cognitive Influences

• Conditioning involves higher mental processes, as it depends on the predictive

power of the conditioned stimulus rather than mere association of stimuli.

Observational Learning

• Observational learning is the process of learning to respond in a particular way

by watching others, or models.
• Albert Bandura conducted experiments showing that children who watched
adults behaving aggressively were more likely to behave aggressively themselves.