Understanding Phobias and Conditioning in Psychology
Sensation, perception, learning, memory
People actively construct interpretations of the world, illusions occur because your mind is actively constructing an interpretation of the whole scene
Boundary extension: People extend the boundary of a picture when reconstructed from memory
Behaviorists: Believed that psychology should be the study of observable behavior and not unobservable. Believed that all human behaviors can be explained by studying lab animals
Sigmund Freud believed that human behavior was mainly the result of the interaction between unconscious and conscious mental forces. Doubted it was possible to scientifically study mental processes that couldn’t be observed
Behaviorists movement: BF Skinner and John B Watson
BF Skinner wrote a book called Walden 2, the community tried to emulate Skinner’s fictional utopia
Phobias: Intense fear that is excessive or unreasonable triggered by the presence of a specific object or situation exposure= anxiety. Person recognizes that the fear is excessive and unreasonable. Clinical phobia: interfere significantly with the person’s life and or creates significant distress. Phobias are a good illustration of several specific aspects of learning, including classical, observational learning, and biological preparedness. Can develop later in childhood, can be traced to a single event, but can appear gradually without an obvious cause
Classical conditioning – Pavlovian conditioning: helps understand how someone develops a phobia
Baseline: Bell: neutral stimulus, Meat powder: unconditioned stimulus, Salivation: unconditioned response
Test: bell= conditioned stimulus, salivation in response to bell= conditioned response
Phobia= classical conditioning= fear conditioning: neutral stimulus is conditioned to elicit a fear response
Fear response: can be used as unconditioned response ex: loud sound
SCR: objective measure that is related to sweating, change in electrical properties of the skin
John B Watson: Conditioning phase: The white rat is paired with banging of an iron bar, fear in response to the rat, little al showed a conditioned fear response to the rat= conditioned stimulus. Challenged Freud’s ideas that phobias were caused by repressed sexual desires=> phobia is caused by classical conditioning
Extinction and spontaneous recovery
Extinction: the conditioning fades if the conditioned stimulus is presented many times without the unconditioned stimulus. If the conditioned stimulus occurs many times without the unconditioned stimulus, the conditioned stimulus may no longer elicit a conditioned response
Spontaneous recovery: after being extinguished, the conditioning returns without any new pairings of the conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus. Can make it hard to get rid of phobias
Generalization and discrimination Generalization: another classical conditioning phenomenon, that helps us to understand phobias, when a stimulus that is similar to the conditioned stimulus also produces a conditioned response. Discriminate: if stimulus is far enough away from the original conditioned stimulus that it doesn’t produce the conditioned response, the subject is able to discriminate
Classical vs operant DIFF: whether the subject has control over what happens
Classical conditioning: subject has no control. The conditioned stimulus is followed by unconditioned stimulus whether or not the subject makes a conditioned response. No control of the conditioned and unconditioned stimuli, Unconditioned stimulus is not contingent on the subject’s behavior
Operant conditioning: delivery of the reinforcer is contingent (depends on) the subject’s behavior. Subject has some control. Ex: pressing q key= operant response and chocolate is the reinforcer
When pressing the q key, the subject has control over the chocolate being squirted in mouth = operant (delivery of chocolate is dependent on pressing the q key. In conditional= the buzzing and association of buzz with chocolate is conditional
A schedule of reinforcement: set of rules defining when the subject will be reinforced for producing the behavior
Fixed ratio schedule: the subject is reinforced after every n response
After a constant number of responses
Intermittent reinforcement: a reinforcer after only a subset of responses is typically more effective than continuous reinforcement (a reinforcer after every response)
Leads to higher rates of responding than constant reinforcement. The rate of responding tends to go up as the number of responses needed to produce a reinforcer (ex: chocolate) goes up
Variable Ratio Schedule Reinforcement: if you want them to respond at an even faster and more consistent rate, you should vary the number of responses for them to get a squirt of chocolate
Variable ratio schedule produces the greatest resistance to extinction
The fastest and most consistent = variable ratio schedule of reinforcement
Extinction in classical conditioning: experimenter stops delivering the unconditioned stimulus (ie loud horn) following the conditioned stimulus (ie blue square). Eventually, the conditioned response (fear) is extinguished
Extinction in operant conditioning: The experimenter stops delivering the reinforcer following the operant response. Eventually, the operant response extinguishes. Noticed easily in a fixed ratio, Variable ratio schedules produce the greatest resistance to extinction
Classical conditioning can explain why phobias generalize, why they fade away, and why they spontaneously recover. Can’t fully explain. Problem 1: phobias can be learned in a single event. Problem 2: phobias often begin with a milder fear that cannot be explained. Problem 3: phobias are much more likely to occur with some stimulus (snakes, spiders) than others
Conditioned taste aversion: the conditioned stimulus (snails) produces a conditioned response (a feeling of disgust). This is an association between a stimulus (food) and a response (illness) that forms after a single experience of the food illness pairing
Biological preparedness: we are biologically prepared to learn these kinds of associations very easily. Very rapid learning of evolutionarily significant pairings
Observational learning: where we learn just by watching other people; Helps us to understand how fears develop without conditioning. Ex: Bandura’s Bobo doll experiment
Perceptual constancies: the visual system is trying to have a constant perception of the true nature of the object in the face of changes in the viewing conditions, to perceive lightness shape or size of something being constant even when the actual information hitting our eyes varies
Lightness constancy
Need to factor out the intensity of the lighting to perceive the lightness of the shirt
Shape constancy
Need to factor out the viewing angle to perceive the shape of the laptop
Size constancy
Need to factor out the viewing distance to perceive the player’s size
Light does not have color, color constructed by the mind, black is a color not a hue. Color has 3 dimensions: hue, saturation, brightness
RODS: sensitive and used in near darkness. Cones= color (long-red, med=green, short=blue), light-additive, pigment-subtractive. Trichromatic theory of color perception (cones): combination of red, green, blue, opponent process: opponent pair (ganglion) (red-green, blue-yellow)
Famous patient HM
Seizure from medial temporal lobe, after removal= could remember the first 25 years of his life but could no longer store new memories for events that occurred after the surgery
Anterograde amnesia: no new memories for events after the surgery
Temporally graded retrograde amnesia: no memory for the period immediately prior to the surgery, but intact memory for his youth
HM could no longer store new memories for events that occurred after the surgery and he could not remember events that occurred immediately prior to the surgery. Had long-term memory, did not have a short-term memory deficit
Amygdala: role in fear and anger
Medial lobe: crucial for creating new memories, less important for accessing old memories
Did well in digit span test- experimenter reads a series of digits to participants who then repeat them back after a delay, the longest list they can repeat back= DIGIT SPAN
HM had the ability to keep info active in memory for a few seconds but once he stopped paying attention to the info, it was lost forever. HM could also learn new motor skills (mirror drawing) HM and other patients with damage to the medial temporal lobes exhibit normal motor skill learning
Sensory memory (iconic- vision, echoic- auditory) = retain info briefly often for less than a second
Working memory: mechanism for temporarily storing info that you currently need for ongoing mental processes- hold info that the mind is currently working on, also called short term; memories typically last between a few seconds and minutes
Long-term: stores info for minutes, hours, days, weeks, years
Explicit vs implicit: whether the person is trying to retrieve a memory or whether the info stored in memory is influencing behavior
Explicit: stores info that you are aware of and can describe, memory that you can intentionally access
→ episodic: memory for specific events that happened to you
→ semantic: memory for facts
Implicit: HM HAD NORMAL IMPLICIT memories that can influence behavior, can’t consciously describe
Priming: sees how word influences the processing of the same stimulus, procedural: memory for how to do something, conditioning: has explicit concepts memory for the stimuli and the responses but the actual memory causes implicit response
Primacy effect: better memory performance for the first word in a list. Word in the middle is hard to remember
Irrelevant lure: a word that was not on the list and is unrelated to everything that was on the list
Von Restorff effect: things that are distinctive are typically remembered well
Related lure: words that were not in the initial list, but are related to the words that were in the list
False memory: having a memory for something that did not actually happen
Memory= actively construct
Encoding specificity: the way someone encodes a piece of info determines what is stored in memory and how it can be retrieved
Detection sensitivity: the degree to which subject perception is reliably stronger when the signal is present than when it’s absent
D’: measure of detection sensitivity, bigger d’ = better at telling the difference between the presence and absence of the signal, independent of your response signal
C: measure threshold, (response criterion), convert the threshold into a set of units that are related to the units used for d’ 0 when you have an equal bias for yes and no Positive when you have a bias toward no When c is positive, high threshold, so you’re biased to say no Negative when you have a bias toward yes Say yes when you have strong evidence
Having a low threshold causes a lot of false alarms (false positives)
Having a high threshold causes lots of misses/ false negatives
Choosing a threshold
Use a high threshold when
Cost of a miss is low
Costs of false alarm is high
BIASED TO SAY NO
Use low threshold when
Cost of miss is high
Cost of false alarm is low
BIASED TO SAY YES
Lots of false alarms= false positives
Few misses/ false negatives
Use medium threshold ⇒ NEUTRAL
Costs of miss is similar to the cost of false alarm
As you decrease your threshold, you decrease the number of misses but you increase the number of false alarms
As you increase your threshold, you decrease the number of false alarms but you increase the number of misses