Chapter 6

The first thing we learn about in this chapter is classical conditioning. This is when we associate to things together even though only one may be responsible for the response. This can be a reason a person is addicted to drugs. They may have first experienced it when at a party and had a good time. So they now associate having a good time with the drug and think they cant have a good time without the drug. We then learn about extinction, when the conditioned response is weakened by presenting the conditioned stimulus without the unconditioned.There is evidence though that extinction doesn't eliminate the association it shows it with the dogs saliva experiment in the book. When presented with the bell and no food after extinction it still had reactions to it. Thornedike studied learning in animals by creating a box for a cat that when a lever was pressed it opened a exit. After a few times the cat was able to escape immediately after being placed in the box. Positive reinforcement encourages someone to do something again since they received something good out of it last time. Negative reinforcement occurs when people associate things with a negative result discouraging that kind of behavior. Expectations are a big factor in classical conditioning. People relate things with each other such as practicing to get better this is an example of classical conditioning. There are four different schedules for reinforcement. The first is a fixed interval where the reward is presented each time the task is done. The next is fixed ratio this is when the reward is presented every few times the task is done. Then we have variable interval where the reward is at different rates or different times. Finally we have variable ratio where it is based on the number of times the task is completed. Cognitive maps are a mental representation of an environment. The lab rats put in a maze showed this when one group was positively reinforced each time and the other after ten times through. The rats with no reinforcement continued to make the same number of mistakes while the reinforced gradually improved. Once the rats found reinforcement at the end after ten trials they soon made very few errors proving that they had been learning the maze but just had no motivation.