Class notes PSY 111

Psychology Chapter 6

 How do we learn?
o Like other animals, humans learn form experience
o Nature’s more important gift may be out adaptability
 Our capacity to learn new behaviors that help us cope with
our changing world
 Learning
o Involves acquisition of new and relatively enduring information
or behaviors through experience
o Associative learning
 Learning that certain events occur together
 Events may be
o two stimuli (classical conditioning) or
o a response and its consequence (operant
conditioning)
 classical conditioning
 one learns to link two or more stimuli and anticipate
events
 produces respondent behavior
o behavior that occurs as an automatic response
to some stimuli
 conditioning: a process of learning associations
 stimulus: any event or situation that evokes a
response
 example

, o Pavlov
 Experiment with dogs, bells and food
 His legacy
 Most psychologists agree that
classical conditioning is a basic
learning form
o Modern neuroscience agrees
by identifying neural circuits
that link a conditioned
stimulus (warning signal)
with an upcoming
unconditioned stimulus
(threat)
 Showed how a process such as
learning can be studied objectively
o Many responses to many
stimuli can be classically
conditioned in many other
species
 Conditioning principles can
influence human health and well-
being
o Medical treatments
o Drug graving
o Food craving
 Concepts
o Neutral stimulus
 Evokes no response before conditioning
o Unconditioned stimulus



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