📚 Unit 3:  Development & Learning 📚

College Board Expects Students To...


Developmental Psychology

Developmental psychology is the branch of psychology that studies physical, cognitive, and social change throughout the lifespan.

In developmental psychology, we see major issues that are continually debated:


How do we study it?

Longitudinal Studies: research that follows and retests the same people over time

Cross-Sectional Studies: research that compares people of different ages at the same point in time

Physical Development 

Prenatal Development

Note: Because pinpointing the moment of conception is nearly impossible, prenatal development is measured based on the date of the last menstrual cycle.

Stages of Prenatal Development:

Influences on Prenatal Development

A growing human is fully dependent on the human it inhabits, and the life they lead and the choices they make can have a huge impact on the development of their baby. Teratogens are agents, such as chemicals and viruses, that can reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal development and cause potential harm:


Influences on Fertility & Birthrates

The current birth rate for the world is 17.299 births per 1000 people, a 0.94% decline from 2023.

Factors that Increase Infertility:

Additionally, cultural and generational changes also contribute to the declining birthrate. Fewer adults today have the desire to have children, whether it be for financial reasons (cost of daycare, healthcare, college, etc.), people waiting until they're older to get married (thus starting a family later in life), increased educational/career opportunities, expanded education on birth control, or personal preference. 

Newborns

Having survived prenatal hazards, we as newborns came equipped with automatic reflex responses ideally suited for our survival. We withdrew our limbs to escape pain. If a cloth over our face interfered with our breathing, we turned our head from side to side and swiped at it. New parents are often in awe of the coordinated sequence of reflexes by which their baby gets food. When something touches their cheek, babies turn toward that touch, open their mouth, and vigorously root for a nipple. Finding one, they automatically close on it and begin sucking. Other adaptive reflexes include the startle reflex (when arms and legs spring out, quickly followed by fist clenching and loud crying) and the surprisingly strong grasping reflex, both of which may have helped infants stay close to their caregivers.


Brain Development

In the womb, your developing brain formed nerve cells at the explosive rate of nearly one-quarter million per minute. From infancy on, brain and mind—neural hardware and cognitive software—develop together. On the day you were born, you had most of the brain cells you would ever have. However, your nervous system was immature: After birth, the brain’s branching neural networks that eventually enabled you to walk, talk, and remember had a wild growth spurt. This rapid development helps explain why infant brain size increases rapidly in the early days after birth. The brain’s association areas—those linked with thinking, memory, and language—were the last cortical areas to develop. As they did, your mental abilities surged. 

Developing neural connections prepare our brain for thought, language, and other later experiences. Mark Rosenzweig, David Krech, and their colleagues raised rats either alone in an environment without playthings, or with other rats in an environment enriched with playthings that changed daily. In 14 of 16 repetitions of this basic experiment, rats in the enriched environment developed significantly more cerebral cortex (relative to the rest of the brain’s tissue) than did those in the impoverished environment.

Studies suggest that we consciously recall little from before age 3. But as children mature, this infantile amnesia wanes, and they become increasingly capable of remembering experiences, even for a year or more. The brain areas underlying memory, such as the hippocampus and frontal lobes, continue to mature during and after adolescence.

Motor Development

The developing brain enables physical coordination. Skills emerge as infants exercise their maturing muscles and nervous system. With occasional exceptions, the motor development sequence is universal. Babies roll over before they sit unsupported, and they usually crawl before they walk. Most toddlers have learned to walk by the time they’re 15 months old.


Physical Development in Teens & Adults

A flood of hormones, primarily estrogen (main female sex hormone) & testosterone (main male sex hormone), triggers another period of dramatic physical change during adolescence, when boys and girls enter puberty. Girls’ slightly earlier entry into puberty can at first propel them to greater height than boys of the same age. But boys catch up when they begin puberty, and by age 14, they are usually taller than girls. 

During these growth spurts, the primary sex characteristics—the reproductive organs and external genitalia—develop dramatically. So do the nonreproductive secondary sex characteristics. Girls develop breasts and larger hips. Boys’ facial hair begins growing and their voices deepen. Pubic and underarm hair emerges in both girls and boys.

For boys, early maturation has mixed effects. Boys who are stronger and more athletic during their early teen years tend to be more popular, self-assured, and independent, though also more at risk for alcohol use, delinquency, and premature sexual activity.

For girls, early maturation can be a challenge. If a young girl’s body and hormone-fed feelings are out of sync with her emotional maturity and her friends’ physical development and experiences, she may begin associating with older adolescents, suffer teasing or sexual harassment, and experience increased rumination with anxiety or depression.

Adulthood begins sometime after a person’s mid-twenties, however, defining adulthood into stages is more difficult than defining stages during childhood or adolescence. Muscular strength, reaction time, sensory abilities and cardiac output begin to decline after the mid-twenties. Around age 50, women go through menopause (the time of natural cessation of menstruation), and men experience decreased levels of hormones and fertility. With age, sexual activity lessens. Nevertheless, most men and women remain capable of satisfying sexual activity, and most express satisfaction with their sex life.

In late adulthood, the immune system weakens, increasing susceptibility to life-threatening illnesses. Chromosome tips (telomeres) wear down, reducing the chances of normal genetic replication. But for some, longevity-supporting genes, low stress, and good health habits enable better health in later life.

Although physical decline begins in early adulthood, we are not usually acutely aware of it until later in life, when the stairs get steeper, the print gets smaller, and other people seem to mumble more. Visual sharpness diminishes, as does distance perception and adaptation to light-level changes. Muscle strength, reaction time, and stamina also diminish, as do smell, hearing, and touch. 

Elements of Aging


Gender & Sexual Orientation

Sex vs. Gender

Humans share an irresistible urge to organize our worlds into simple categories. Immediately after your birth (or before), everyone wanted to know, “Boy or girl?” Your parents may have offered clues with pink or blue clothing. The answer describes your sex, your biological status defined by your chromosomes and anatomy. For most people, those biological traits help define their assigned gender, the socially influenced characteristics by which people define boy, girl, man, and woman. 

Simply said, your body defines your sex. Your mind defines your gender. But your mind’s understanding of gender arises from the interplay between your biology and your experiences. 

Nature may blur the biological line between males and females. Intersex individuals are born with unusual combinations of male and female chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy. For example, a genetic male may be born with normal male hormones and testes but no penis or a micropenis. Such individuals may struggle with their gender identity.

Biological Differences

In two ways, biology influences our gender psychology:

Six weeks after you were conceived, you and someone of the other sex looked much the same. Then, as your genes kicked in, your biological sex—determined by your twenty-third pair of chromosomes (the two sex chromosomes)—became more apparent. Whether you are male or female, your mother’s contribution to that chromosome pair was an X chromosome. From your father, you received the 1 chromosome out of 46 that is not unisex—either another X chromosome, making you female, or a Y chromosome, making you male.

Forming Gender

Sexual Orientation

We express the direction of our sexual interest in our sexual orientation—which usually is our enduring sexual attraction toward members of our own sex (homosexual) or the other sex (heterosexual). Other variations include an attraction to both sexes (bisexual) or no sexual attraction at all (asexual). We experience our sexual orientation in our interests, thoughts, and fantasies. 

Due to the controversy surrounding differing sexual orientation, research has been done in regards to how it develops and have found the following:

Studies of Human Sexuality

Dr. Alfred Kinsey became the founding director of the new Institute for Sex Research and published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and the complementary work, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, in 1953. Both works were based on over 100,000 interviews he conducted on participants’ sexual history. His research concluded that there is more to sex than physical attraction and that human sexuality is a spectrum (known as the Kinsey Scale). 

Let's Talk About Sex!

Among the forces driving sexual behavior are the sex hormones. The main male sex hormone is testosterone. The main female sex hormones are the estrogens, such as estradiol. Both males and females have testosterone and estrogen, though at differing levels. Sex hormones influence us at many points in the life span:

Every day, more than 1 million people worldwide acquire a sexually transmitted infection (STI; also called STD, for sexually transmitted disease). Condoms offer only limited protection against certain skin-to-skin STIs, such as herpes, but they do reduce other risks. When used by people with an infected partner, condoms also have been 80 percent effective in preventing transmission of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), the virus that causes AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome). Although HIV can be transmitted by other means, such as needle sharing during drug use, its sexual transmission is most common. AIDS is a life-threatening, sexually transmitted infection that depletes the immune system, leaving the person vulnerable to infections. 

Sexual attitudes and behaviors vary dramatically across cultures and eras. So, what produces variations in teen sexuality? Twin studies show that genes influence teen sexual behavior—by influencing pubertal development and hormone levels. But what environmental factors contribute?


Factors that increase abstinence (not having sex):

Cognitive Development 

Jean Piaget

Once conscious, how did your mind grow? Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget spent his life searching for the answer. He studied children’s cognition—all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. His interest in children’s cognitive development began in 1920, when he was in Paris developing questions for children’s intelligence tests. While administering the tests, Piaget became intrigued by children’s wrong answers, which were often strikingly similar among same-age children. Where others saw childish mistakes, Piaget saw intelligence at work. Such accidental discoveries are among the fruits of psychological science.

Piaget’s core idea was that our intellectual progression reflects an unceasing struggle to make sense of our experiences. To this end, the maturing brain builds schemas, concepts or mental molds into which we pour our experiences.

To explain how we use and adjust our schemas, Piaget proposed two more concepts. First, we assimilate new experiences—we interpret them in terms of our current understandings (schemas). Having a simple schema for dog, for example, a toddler may call all four-legged animals dogs. But as we interact with the world, we also adjust, or accommodate, our schemas to incorporate information provided by new experiences. Thus, the child soon learns that the original dog schema is too broad and accommodates by refining the category. By adulthood we have built countless schemas, ranging from cats and dogs to our concept of love.

In other words, assimilation is forcing a new experience to fit into an existing box, accommodation is altering the box to fit the new experience. 

Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development

Piaget believed that children construct their understanding of the world while interacting with it. Their minds experience spurts of change, followed by greater stability as they move from one cognitive plateau to the next, each with distinctive characteristics that permit specific kinds of thinking. In Piaget’s view, cognitive development consisted of four major stages:

In the sensorimotor stage, from birth to nearly age 2, babies take in the world through their senses and actions—through looking, hearing, touching, mouthing, and grasping. As their hands and limbs begin to move, they learn to make things happen.


Piaget believed that until about age 6 or 7, children are in a preoperational stage—able to represent things with words and images but too young to perform mental operations (such as imagining an action and mentally reversing it).


By about age 7, said Piaget, children enter the concrete operational stage. Given concrete (physical) materials, they begin to grasp operations such as conservation. Understanding that change in form does not mean change in quantity, they can mentally pour milk back and forth between glasses of different shapes. 


By age 12, our reasoning expands from the purely concrete (involving actual experience) to encompass abstract thinking (involving imagined realities and symbols). As children approach adolescence, said Piaget, they can ponder hypothetical propositions and deduce consequences: If this, then that. Systematic reasoning, what Piaget called formal operational thinking, is now within their grasp. Although full-blown logic and reasoning await adolescence, the rudiments of formal operational thinking begin earlier than Piaget realized. 


Evaluating Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development

Criticisms of Piaget’s Theory:

Piaget’s stage theory has been influential globally, validating a number of ideas regarding growth and development in many cultures and societies. However, today’s researchers believe the following:

Lev Vygotsky's Social Learning Theory

As Piaget was forming his theory of cognitive development, Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky was also studying how children think and learn. Where Piaget emphasized how the child’s mind grows through interaction with the physical environment, Vygotsky emphasized how the child’s mind grows through interaction with the social environment. By giving children new words and mentoring them, parents and teachers provide what we now call a temporary scaffold (a framework that offers children temporary support as they develop higher levels of thinking) from which children can step to higher levels of thinking.

Moral Intuition

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes that much of our morality is rooted in moral intuitions—“quick gut feelings, or affectively laden intuitions.” According to this intuitionist view, the mind makes moral judgments in much the same way that it makes aesthetic judgments—quickly and automatically. Feelings of disgust or of elation trigger moral reasoning, says Haidt.

Our moral thinking and feeling surely affect our moral talk. But sometimes talk is cheap and emotions are fleeting. Morality involves doing the right thing, and what we do also depends on social influences. A big part of moral development is the self-discipline needed to restrain one’s own impulses—to delay small gratifications now to enable bigger rewards later. Our capacity to delay gratification—to decline small rewards now for bigger rewards later—is basic to our future academic, vocational, and social success. 

Cognitive Decline

As the years pass, recall begins to decline, especially for meaningless information, but recognition memory remains strong. Crystallized intelligence increases with age while fluid intelligence peaks in our 20s and then starts to decline. “Terminal decline” describes the cognitive decline in the final few years of life. 

Neurocognitive disorders (NCDs), formerly called dementia in older adults, are marked by cognitive deficits. Alzheimer’s disease causes the deterioration of memory, then reasoning. 

Developing Language

What is language?

Language is our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning. Language serves a variety of purposes:


Theories of Language Development:

Learning Language

While we are not born with language skills, we slowly acquire them over time. In our first months, we experience receptive language, where we focus on those that are speaking to us and try to respond. 

At 4 months, we begin babbling - uttering sounds. At 10 months, the babbles sound more like our household’s language. By a year, we know words, and by 2, we can talk in simple two-word phrases (telegraphic speech). From there, our vocabulary rapidly develops. 

Case Study: "Genie"

Childhood is a critical period for mastering certain aspects of language before the language-learning window gradually closes. Lack of exposure to either spoken or signed language by about age 7, can cause them to lose their ability to master any language. Children exposed to low-quality language—such as 4-year-olds in classrooms with 3-year-olds, or some children from impoverished homes—often display less language skill. We know this because of the case of “feral children” like Genie.

“Genie” was a teen girl discovered in Los Angeles in 1970 who became a crucial case study in linguistics and psychology. After being severely abused and isolated by her father, Genie had minimal human interaction and almost no exposure to language. Upon her discovery, Genie was malnourished and displayed developmental delays, was unable to speak beyond a few simple words and phrases, had a strange, bunny-like walk, and showed signs of profound psychological trauma. After her rescue, Genie became the subject of intense study by psychologists and linguists, particularly to understand the critical period hypothesis in language development—the idea that there is a window in early childhood when the human brain is particularly receptive to acquiring language.

Loss of Language

As previously discussed, there are two specialized regions for language in the brain - Broca’s area & Wernicke’s area. If either of these is damaged, it cause cause aphasia - the impairment of language. 

Linguistic Determinism

Thinking and language - which comes first? Benjamin Lee Whorf proposed the idea of linguistic determinism - the theory that our language influences the nature of our thought and how we interpret the world around us. If your language doesn’t have a word for something, it is hard for you to think about it. The Hopi tribe do not have a past tense, thus they don’t think about the past. While we have only one word for snow, Eskimo have dozens of different words for snow. Additionally, multilingual speakers report having a different sense of self depending on the language they are using.


Social-Emotional Development

Attachment

One-year-olds typically cling tightly to a parent when they are frightened or expect separation. Reunited after being apart, they often shower the parent with smiles and hugs. This striking parent-infant attachment (an emotional tie with another person, shown in children by seeking closeness to their caregiver and showing distress on separation) bond is a powerful survival impulse that keeps infants close to their caregivers. Infants normally become attached to those—typically their parents—who they are comfortable and familiar with. 

Three key studies helped researchers understand the importance of attachment:

Harlow's Monkeys

Harry Harlow, like many other researchers, believed that attachment came from nourishment, believing that we only bond with the caregivers that feed us because they keep us alive. To test this, Harlow designed an experiment in which he took newborn monkeys and placed them with two artificial mothers - one made of wire and one made of cloth. Some monkeys were fed from the cloth mother and some from the wire mother. 

To Harlow’s surprise, the newborn monkeys favored the cloth mother and when frightened, they always went to the cloth mother, regardless of whether they were fed from it or not. His experiment proved the importance of contact comfort in attachment. Furthermore, when these monkeys were reintroduced to their troop, they struggled to form bonds and were often neglectful and abusive parents, proving deprivation of attachment as a newborn led to problems with relationships later on. 

Lorenz's Imprinting

In many animals, attachments based on familiarity form during a critical period—an optimal period when certain events must take place to facilitate proper development. For goslings, ducklings, or chicks, that period falls in the hours shortly after hatching, when the first moving object they see is normally their mother. From then on, the young fowl follow her, and her alone.

Konrad Lorenz explored this rigid attachment process, called imprinting (the process by which certain animals form strong attachments during early life). He wondered: What would ducklings do if he was the first moving creature they observed? What they did was follow him around: Everywhere that Konrad went, the ducks were sure to go. Although baby birds imprint best to their own species, they also will imprint to a variety of moving objects—an animal of another species, a box on wheels, a bouncing ball. Once formed, this attachment is difficult to reverse.

Mary Ainsworth & the Strange Situation

  What accounts for children’s attachment differences? To answer this question, Mary Ainsworth designed the “strange situation” experiment. She observed 1-year-old infants in a strange situation (usually a laboratory playroom) with and without their mothers. Such research has shown that about 60% of infants and young children display secure attachment where, in their mother’s presence they play comfortably, happily exploring their new environment. When she leaves, they become distressed; when she returns, they seek contact with her. Other infants show insecure attachment, marked either by anxiety or by avoidance of trusting relationships. These infants are less likely to explore their surroundings; they may even cling to their mother. When she leaves, they either cry loudly and remain upset or seem indifferent to her departure and return. 

Like Harlow, Ainsworth’s findings also had implications for future social behavior. Infants with insecure attachment often struggle to form meaningful relationships as adults. 

Ainsworth and others found that sensitive, responsive mothers—those who noticed what their babies were doing and responded appropriately—had infants who exhibited secure attachment. Insensitive, unresponsive mothers—mothers who attended to their babies when they felt like doing so but ignored them at other times—often had infants who were insecurely attached.

Attachment & Future Relationships

Developmental psychologist Erik Erikson believed that securely attached children approach life with a sense of basic trust—a sense that the world is predictable and reliable. He attributed basic trust not to environment or inborn temperament, but to early parenting. He theorized that infants blessed with sensitive, loving caregivers form a lifelong attitude of trust rather than fear. Therefore, infancy’s major social achievement is attachment. 

Formation of the Self

Childhood’s major social achievement is a positive sense of self. By the end of childhood, at about age 12, most children have developed a self-concept—an understanding and assessment of who they are. Their self-esteem is how they feel about who they are. Children’s views of themselves affect their actions. Children who form a positive self-concept are more confident, independent, optimistic, assertive, and sociable.

To refine their sense of identity, adolescents in individualist cultures usually try out different “selves” in different situations. They may act out one self at home, another with friends, and still another at school or online. If two situations overlap—as when a teenager brings new friends home—the discomfort can be considerable.. The teen often wonders, “Which self should I be? Which is the real me?” The eventual resolution is a self-definition that unifies the various selves into a consistent and comfortable sense of who one is—an identity. 

Parenting Styles

Parents do matter. But parenting wields its largest effects at the extremes: the abused children who become abusive, the deeply loved but firmly handled who become self-confident and socially competent. As children mature, what other experiences do the work of nurturing? At all ages, but especially during childhood and adolescence, we seek to fit in with our groups.

Some parents spank, others reason. Some are strict, others are lax. Some show little affection, others liberally hug and kiss. How do parenting-style differences affect children? The most heavily researched aspect of parenting has been how, and to what extent, parents seek to control their children. Parenting styles can be described as a combination of two traits: how responsive and how demanding parents are. Investigators like Diana Baumrind have identified four parenting styles:


Although teens become independent of their parents as they grow older, they nevertheless relate to their parents on a number of things, including religion and career choices. For a some parents and their adolescents, differences lead to real splits and great stress. But most disagreements are at the level of harmless bickering. With sons, the issues often are behavior problems, such as acting out or hygiene; for daughters, the issues commonly involve relationships, such as dating and friendships. 

Peer approval and relationships are also very important. Adolescence is typically a time of diminishing parental influence and growing peer influence. As they are finding their identity, they want to fit in, and this requires peer approval. 

Erik Erikson

Erik Erikson contended that each stage of life has its own psychosocial task, a crisis that needs resolution. Young children wrestle with issues of trust, then autonomy (independence), then initiative. School-age children strive for competence, feeling able and productive. But for teenagers, the task is to synthesize past, present, and future possibilities into a clearer sense of self. Young adults mature and develop capacity for intimacy (the ability to form close loving relationships), while those in the later stages of adulthood look back on their life and wonder if things could be different. 

According to Erikson, each stage of life adds a new layer to our personality. 

Emerging Adulthood

Our concept our adulthood has shifted through the centuries. In the Middle Ages, it was not uncommon to be married and on your own at 14, while today that’s unthinkable. Then again, when your life expectancy was much shorter, it makes sense to become independent at a younger age. Due to improvements in medicine, nutrition, and understanding of development, we are living longer and have a different idea of what it means to be a teenager or adult. 


Types of Learning

What is learning?

Learning is the process of acquiring through experience new and relatively enduring information or behaviors. As humans, we have to learn to adapt to our environments- knowing when to expect pain, knowing how to act in certain social situations, knowing what behaviors will be rewarded and which will be punished, etc. Both humans and animals learn through association or associative learning - realizing that certain events occur together. 

Elements of Learning

Classical Conditioning

Classical Conditioning

Dr. Ivan Pavlov was a physician studying digestion in dogs who noticed that these dogs would start drooling at the sight of his lab assistants, despite the absence of food. Because they associated food with these assistants, the dogs knew food was coming and responded accordingly. Pavlov found this curious and decided to change his experiments to test the theory of what he called “psychic reflexes”.

Dogs were harnessed and equipped with a mechanism to collect saliva, then presented with a neutral external stimulus (bell/tone), followed immediately by the unconditioned stimulus (food/meat powder). After several repetitions, the dogs were presented with the external stimulus without the unconditioned stimulus to see if there was a response. If there was, the neutral stimulus has become a conditioned stimulus, and their reaction is a conditioned response. 

His work and findings became the basis for classical conditioning - a type of passive learning in which we link two or more stimuli. It also encouraged the growth of behaviorism - the view that psychology should be an objective science that studies observable actions without reference to internal mental processes. 

Elements of Classical Conditioning

Examples of Classical Conditioning

"Welcome to Moe's"

When you walk into Moe’s, you are greeted by the phrase “Welcome to Moe’s!”, then hit with the sights, sounds, and smells of food. Later, watching TV at home, you see a commercial where they say “Welcome to Moe’s” and suddenly you’re craving Mexican. 

Shower Surprise

One day, while taking a shower, someone flushes a toilet, causing the water to become scorching hot. Next time you shower and hear a toilet flush, you quickly hop aside to to avoid the hot spray. 

More Classical Conditioning

Generalization vs. Discrimination

Stimulus generalization is the tendency for stimuli  that are similar to the conditioned stimulus to elicit a similar response.

Stimulus discrimination is the learned ability to distinguish between a conditioned stimulus and similar stimuli that do not signal an unconditioned stimulus.

The Case of Little Albert

John B. Watson, a behaviorist, wanted to study if specific fears could be conditioned. In his experiment, Watson took the infant child of his graduate student nicknamed “Little Albert” and placed a white rat in his lap. Like most infants, Albert was amused by the creature. Watson then took it away, and when Little Albert reached for it, Watson struck a hammer against a steel bar, creating a loud noise that scared Little Albert (as it would most infants), who burst into tears. After a few rounds of this, Little Albert would cry at the sight of the rat, but also all things white and fuzzy - rabbits, dogs, coats, even Santa Claus. This experiment proved that fear can indeed be conditioned. This type of classical conditioning is also known as aversive conditioning.

Biological Constraints 

More than the early behaviorists realized, an animal’s capacity for conditioning is limited by biological constraints. For example, each species’ predispositions prepare it to learn the associations that enhance its survival—a phenomenon called preparedness. Environments are not the whole story. Biology matters.

John Garcia was among those who challenged the prevailing idea that all associations can be learned equally well. While researching the effects of radiation on laboratory animals, Garcia and Robert Koelling noticed that rats began to avoid drinking water from the plastic bottles in radiation chambers because it made them sick. Their findings came to be known as taste aversion - when exposed to the sight or smell of something that is associated with nausea or vomiting, one feels ill and is unlikely to expose themselves to it again.

Operant Conditioning

Operant Conditioning

Operant conditioning is a type of learning in which a behavior becomes more likely to recur if followed by a reinforcer or less likely to recur if followed by a punisher.

This is based on Edward Thorndike’s law of effect - the principle that behaviors followed by favorable consequences become more likely, and behaviors followed by unfavorable consequences become less likely.

Burrhus Frederic Skinner, the “Father of Behaviorism” or “Father of Operant Conditioning”, elaborated on the law of effect, studying how pigeons and rats learn through reinforcement.  

He crafted an operant chamber, or Skinner box, which contained a bar or key that an animal can manipulate to obtain food or water. 

Reinforcement

In operant conditioning, reinforcement is any event that strengthens (or increases the likelihood) the behavior that follows.

Schedules of Reinforcement

Fixed means a set number, variable means a random or changing number. Interval requires time to pass, ratio requires actions to be taken.

Punishment

Reinforcement increases the likelihood that a response will happen, while punishment decreases it. Punishment is any event that tends to decrease the behavior that it follows.

Shaping

Shaping is the process in which reinforcers guide behavior toward closer and closer (successive approximations) to the desired behavior (a.k.a. training).

For example, we you teach a puppy to sit, first they get a treat just for coming to you when called. When that is mastered, they get a treat for standing still. Finally, after a few times repeating the word “sit” and pushing their bottom down, they finally master the desired behavior of sitting when told to do so. 

To signal a response will be reinforced, discriminative stimuli (a stimulus that elicits a response after association with reinforcement) are often used in the shaping process. In later versions of Skinner’s operant chambers, an electrified grid was added to elicit a light shock to the animals as an aversive stimulus. To warn the rats of the impending shock, a tone or light would come on. The shock would stop if a button was pressed. Soon the rats learned to press the button as soon as the light came on to avoid the shock. 

Beyond instinct, we cannot dismiss all cognition from the learning process, as there is evidence that mental processes play a huge role in acquisition of knowledge.

Observational Learning

What is observational learning?

Observational learning is the acquisition of knowledge through watching others. Children often mimic the actions of their family members and peers, who act as models. Modeling is the process of observing and imitating a specific behavior. This process is accomplished through the use of mirror neurons, which fire when we observe an action and/or attempt to perform it. This is how we learn to perform certain tasks, but also how we learn things like empathy.

Albert Bandura

To test the effectiveness of observational learning, Albert Bandura devised an experiment in which children watched adults play with various toys in a room, one of which was an inflatable clown doll named Bobo. If the children witnessed the adults playing nicely with Bobo, they would do so when they entered the toy room. If the children witnessed the adults beating, kicking, and mistreating Bobo, they would mimic those actions as well. Bandura’s studies proved that much of the behavior we learn, good and bad, is learned through observation and imitation.

The good news is that people’s modeling of prosocial (positive, helpful) behaviors can have prosocial effects. Many business organizations effectively use behavior modeling to help new employees learn communications, sales, and customer service skills. Trainees gain these skills faster when they are able to observe the skills being modeled effectively by experienced workers (or actors simulating them).

The bad news is that observational learning may also have antisocial effects. This helps us understand why abusive parents might have aggressive children, why children who are lied to become more likely to cheat and lie, and why many men who beat their wives had wife-battering fathers. Critics note that such aggressiveness could be genetic. But with monkeys, we know it can be environmental. In study after study, young monkeys separated from their mothers and subjected to high levels of aggression grew up to be aggressive themselves. The lessons we learn as children are not easily replaced as adults, and they are sometimes visited on future generations.


Unit 3 Vocab