HPSY011-Topic 4:

Lecture 1 Learning
and conditioning
LECTURER: MS MP MAMABOLO
Learning objectives
1. Brief overview of Cognitive Psychology(Part 5 of the book)
2. What is learning
3. Theoretical perspectives on the learning process
3.1 Classical conditioning
3.2 Operant conditioning
3.3 Social(Observational) learning theory
3.4 Cognitive-behaviourism
1. Brief overview of Cognitive Psychology
• Cognitive psychology is described as a field of psychology that studies what
goes into the mind.

• Cognition concerns the mental processes or capacities that exist when people
are engaged in activities such as:

- learning, thinking, remembering,

- being creative, planning, analysing,
- reasoning and problem solving.
Brief overview of Cognitive Psychology cont..
• There are a number of specific areas of focus within the broad field of cognitive psychology.

• Amongst these are the following:

1. Learning and conditioning (Chapter 9): Explains how animals and humans learn
behaviour.

2. Motivation (Chapter10): Describes the basic urges of our bodies and the highest desires of
our minds

3. Thinking(Chapter 11): Focus on how people reason, solve problems and think in their
everyday lives.
Brief overview of Cognitive Psychology cont..

4. Attention(Chapter 12): Describes how and what information people select to

attend to from vast array of information with which they are confronted with.

5. Language(Chapter 14): Focuses on the relationship between thought and language.

6. Memory(Chapter 13): Concerned with how and why people remember or forget
things.

7. Intelligence(Chapter 15) : Concerned with the measurement of individual

differences in the capacity for intellectual activities.
Brief overview of Cognitive Psychology cont..

• The focus of part 4 lecture will be on the following chapters:

1. Learning and conditioning.

2. Thinking.

3. Memory.
2. What is learning

• Learning can be considered to be a more or less permanent change in

behaviour or knowledge that is due to experience (or conditioning).

• Learning process is crucial to all organisms, including people,

• since it helps all organisms to adapt to changing conditions in the world

around us.
What is learning cont…
• Four factors are involved in the definition of learning: A combination of these
factors constitutes definition of learning

a) Learning is inferred(deduced) from a change in behaviour

b) It involves the initiation of an inferred change in memory
c) It is the result of experience
d) It is relatively permanent.
 3. Theoretical perspective on learning process
• Primarily from behavioural perspective,

• we learn how to respond to the world around us through direct or indirect

experiences that we accumulate over a life time.

• In associative learning, the person learns to associate experiences with each other.

• In some situations, reinforcement helps us to make associations.

• In order to understand the dynamics of associative learning, we need to note what

comes to before the behaviour ( the antecedents) and what follows it ( the
consequences).
3.1 Classical conditioning
• Deals with what happens before the behaviour ( i.e the response) and usually
includes physiological reflexes like sweating, blinking or salivating.

• E.g You walk past a fast-food outlet(US) and the smell immediately makes
you salivate(UR)

• At same, you see the sign on the shop. You learn to associate the sign with the
delicious smell, over time you start to salivate when you see the sign even if
you cannot smell the food at that time.

• This means learning has occurred.

Classical conditioning cont..
• Theorist: Ivan Pavlov(1849-1936)

• Best known for offering classical conditioning to understand and predict

behaviour.

• He studied the digestive process of dogs and noted that, over time,

they would begin to salivate even before their food was presented to them.
Classical conditioning cont..
• Pavlov knew that salivation is a reflexive response to food that aids chewing
and digestion.

• To him dogs were not suppose to salivate before they were given food.
• He realised that some kind of learning has occurred in the dogs

• and he went on to do a series of classic experiments to demonstrate what he

called ‘conditioning’ in the dogs.
Classical conditioning cont..
• CD is therefore defined as: a type of learning where a stimulus(S) acquires the
capacity to evoke a reflexive response(R).

• In Pavlov’s experiment, the food is a stimulus, which evokes the natural

reflexive response of the dog salivating.

• In this situation, because when salivating when food is present is a natural

reaction(or reflex), we say that both the stimulus and response are
unconditioned.
Classical conditioning cont..

• Some typical unconditioned S-R bonds are:

Hearing a sad story and crying

Being told a funny joke and laughing
Eating contaminated food and vomiting
Classical conditioning cont..
1. A person can condition a behaviour when they repeatedly present another(unrelated)
stimulus at the same time as the unconditioned stimulus(UCS).

2. This stimulus (that is not initially related to the unconditioned stimulus) is referred to
as the neutral stimulus.

• Pavlov paired the presentation of food with the ringing of the bell. The dog’s reaction
was to continue to salivate(the unconditioned response-UCR) because the bell was
rung only when the food was presented.

• The bell was the neutral stimulus, because hearing the bell would normally make the
dog to salivate.
Classical conditioning cont..
• With repeated associations of food and the ringing bell, the dogs eventually
salivated when the bell was rung even though the food was not presented.

• Thus at this stage, the bell took the characteristics of the unconditioned
stimulus, in that it elicited a conditioned response-CR.

• The CR was salivating at just the sound of the bell (with no food).

• The bell now became the conditioned stimulus (CS). This process is called
acquisition, as the dog has learned or acquired a new S-R pairing.
Classical conditioning cont…
3.2 Operant conditioning
• Is based on the consequences of the behaviour.

• Theorist: B.F Skinner (1904-1990)- One of the founders of behaviourism.

• It is a type of learning in which voluntary (controllable, non-reflexive)

behaviour is strengthened through reinforcement but weakened when that
behaviour is punished.

• A reinforcer is anything that increases the likelihood of the behaviour being

repeated.
Operant conditioning cont…
• OC is a form of associative learning that explains much of our day-to-day behaviour.

• Called operant conditioning because the person actively ‘operates’ on the environment.

• Widely used in a variety of contexts (e.g parenting, schools, mental hospitals, and
prisons).

• OC differs from CC in that the behaviour studied in CC are reflexive(e.g salivating),

• whereas the behaviours studied and governed by the principles of OC are non-
reflexive(e.g disciplining children, gambling, or dog training).
Operant conditioning cont…
• Learning is achieved when the person continues to behave in ways that are
reinforced (e.g reward such as money or food)

• or avoids such behaviours that bring about punishment(e.g being scolded or

paying a fine)

• E.g different ways of reinforcement or punishment based on the person’s

unique way. Tailor-made to that.
Operant conditioning cont…
 Principles of reinforcement
• Skinner proposed 2 types of reinforcement which encourage the repetition of the desired behaviour, as
they result in the participant experiencing a beneficial outcome
1. Positive reinforcement: When something pleasant (such as reward) is delivered to the participant,
while

2. Negative reinforcement: When something unpleasant is removed from the participant (e.g when
taking a painkiller headache relieved, likely to take it again next time you have a headache). Anxiety
minimize

• In either case, the point of reinforcement is to increase the frequency or probability of a desired
response occuring again

• NR does not refer to punishment nor encouraging negative or bad behaviour.

Operant conditioning cont…
Skinner identified 2 types of reinforcers:

1. Primary reinforcers: stimulus that naturally strengthens any response that

preceds it without the need for any learning on the part of the organism.

• This reinforcers tend to be biologically based such as the satisfaction that

comes from receiving food, water and sex.

2. Secondary reinforcers: previously neutral stimuli that acquire the ability to

strengthen responses because the stimuli have been paired with a primary
reinforcer.
Operant conditioning cont…
 Punishment
• Skinner proposed an alternative(but not opposite) method of changing
behaviour.

• Whereas reinforcement increases the probability of a response occurring

again,

• punishment operates on the notion that the delivery of an unpleasant stimulus

will decrease the frequency or probability of a response being repeated.
Operant conditioning cont…
• Two types of punishment, both carried-out with aim of reducing or stopping particular
behaviour:

1. Positive punishment: When an aversive (unpleasant) stimulus is administered to reduce the

likelihood of certain behaviours being repeated.

E.g When driver has to pay hefty fine for speeding.

2. Negative punishment: The removal of a pleasant stimulus, reducing the probability that the
behaviour will be repeated.

E.g When child’s favourite toy is taken away when they have tantrum.
3.3 Social(observational) learning theory
• Theorist : Albert Bandura(1925)- States that learning occurs when one’s behaviour changes after
viewing the behaviour of a model.

• His theory argues that people can learn new information and behaviours by watching other people.

• This can happen directly or indirectly

• Directly: e.g a young soccer player may watch his hero in a Premier League match and try to play
like him

• Indirectly: e,g a child may not learn to tell a lie when they observe sibling being punished for
doing so( known as vacarious learning)
Social(observational) learning theory
• For observational learning to occur, the following four process need to take
place(Bandura,1965)
1st: Attention- For leaning to occur, you must pay attention to the behaviour
being modelled.
2nd: Retention- The ability to store and recall the information
3rd: Reproduction- Ability to perform/imitate the learned behaviour. Repetition
and practice will result in the mastery of the skill needed to perform that
behaviour.
4th: Motivation- Without motivation there will be no desire to imitate a given
behaviour. Occurs through reinforcement or punishment.
3.4 Cognitive-behaviourism
• Theorist: Aaron Beck

• Holds that mental events(including thoughts, feelings, and internal dialogue)

guide learned behaviour

• A therapist who support this approach would assist people developing new
ways of thinking about themselves in relation to the reality of the world.

• Cognitive behaviour therapy will thus help clients overcome problems like
(anxiety and depression) caused by dysfunctional and destructive thinking.
END: LECTURE 1