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Classical Conditioning Basics

Object Learning
1. Before conditioning
  1. US (food) elicits UR (salivation)
    1. NS (tuning fork) does not elicit Response (salivat)ion
2. During Conditioning
  1. Acquisition: US (food) and NS (tuning fork) paired enough times to elicit response (Salivation)
3. After Conditioning
  1. CS (Tuning fork) elicits CR (salivation) alone.
Acquisition
1. Extinction
  1. Rapid Reacquisition
    1. Even after complete extinction, conditioning a second time is faster than the initial training
    2. Spontaneous Recovery
      1. This reappearance of a CR after extinction is called spontaneous recovery.
      2. Disinhibition
        A novel situation or stimulus can make an extinguished CS effective again. This is known as disinhibition, on the assumption that extinction training produced an inhibition of the CS-CR association.
        Dishabituation
        when we respond to an old stimulus as if it were new again
  2. The procedure of re- peatedly presenting the CS alone is called extinction. When, as a result of this, the CR no longer occurs (or occurs no more than it did prior to conditioning), we say that it has been extinguished.
2. Acquisition refers to the first stages of learning when a response is established. In classical conditioning, it refers to the period when the stimulus comes to evoke the conditioned response.
Experimental Situations
1. Fear Conditioning
  1. Little Albert
  2. Startle Response
    1. In animals, including humans, the startle response is a largely unconscious defensive response to sudden or threatening stimuli, such as sudden noise or sharp movement, and is associated with negative affect
  3. Conditioned Suppression
    1. Baseline responding
    2. CS-US Pairing
    3. Compare Responding to Baseline
    4. Two Procedures
      1. Lick-suppression
        Similar to the conditioned emotional response (CER), or conditioned suppression procedure. However, instead of lever pressing for food serving as the behavior that is suppressed by conditioned fear, the baseline is licking a water spout by thirsty rats. The presentation of a fear-conditioned CS slows down the rate of drinking.
      2. Conditioned Emotional Response
        Suppression of positively reinforced instrumental behavior (e.g., lever pressing for food pellets) caused by the presentation of a stimulus that has become associated with an aversive stimulus. Also called conditioned suppression
    5. Pairing of a CS with an aversive US, such as an electrical shock. he researcher begins by training a rat to press a lever for food reinforcement. Once the rat is reliably lever pressing, the researcher presents a CS such as a tone or light, and terminates the CS with a brief footshock US. Fear is measured by the extent to which the tone elicits a freezing response and thus suppresses the rat's lever pressing.
  4. Fear conditioning is a behavioral paradigm in which organisms learn to predict aversive events
2. Eyeblink Conditioning
  1. a neutral stimulus such as a tone is repeatedly paired with an aversive stimulus such as an airpuff to the eye.
    1. With repeated pairings animals learn that the tone predicts the air puff and they will learn to blink when the tone is delivered by itself; a learned protective response involving co-opting a reflex pathway.
3. Sign Tracking or Autoshaping
  1. Brown and Jenkins
    1. Reliable acquisition of the pigeon's key-peck response resulted from repeated unconditional (response-independent) presentations of food after the response key was illuminated momentarily. Comparison groups showed that acquisition was dependent upon light—food pairings, in that order.
  2. Long-box Autoshaping
    1. US Grain
      1. Some behaviors happen even despite their consequences? The pigeon pecked the key even though it actually released less food if it did.
    2. DEF
4. Taste Conditioning
  1. Good
    1. Conditioned Taste Preferences
      1. A CTP can be established rather quickly by pairing a novel taste with recovery from a dietary deficiency, most notably the provision of thiamine to animals on a thiamine-deficient diet
        More commonly, however, the impact of a CTP on behavior is revealed only gradually over days of continuous pairing of taste with nutrition, though that impact can reach levels equal to those of a CTA in the opposite direction, i.e., approaching 100% preference
  2. Bad
    1. Conditioned Taste Aversion
5. Conditioned Taste Aversion
  1. While the food you ate was previously a neutral stimulus, it becomes a conditioned stimulus through its association with the unconditioned stimulus (illness). As a result, you may develop a taste aversion in which just the idea of eating that same food again causes you to feel ill.
  2. Single Trial
    1. Scientists used a conditioned taste aversion (CTA) procedure on individuals of the pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis and analyzed their subsequent behavior. We found that approximately 40% of trained snails possessed long term memory formation following a one-trial conditioning procedure.
    2. if they cooled snails to 4 degrees C for 30 min within 10 min after the one-trial conditioning, LTM was blocked. However, with delayed cooling (i.e. longer than 10 min), LTM was present. They could further interfere with LTM formation by inducing inhibitory learning (i.e. backward conditioning) after the one-trial conditioning. Finally, they examined whether they could motivate snails to acquire LTM by depriving them of food for 5 days before the one-trial conditioning. Food-deprived snails, however, failed to exhibit LTM following the one-trial conditioning. These results will help us begin to clarify why some individuals are better at learning and forming memory for specific tasks at the neuronal level.
  3. Long Delay
    1. Rats display a sexually dimorphic pattern of long-delay CTA learning
      1. We found that gonadally intact male rats displayed a more robust CTA response than intact female rats. Gonadectomy essentially eliminated this sex difference; gonadectomized males and gonadectomized females displayed similar CTA responses
        In gonadectomized rats, when their normal sex hormones were replaced with implanted hormone pellets, the sex difference in CTA learning was reinstated. In contrast, when gonadectomized rats were implanted with opposing hormones, the sex difference was reversed.
        our study suggests that an activational manipulation of circulating hormones serves to significantly influence long-delay CTA learning in rats.
  4. cancer patients can develop learned aversions to a novel ice cream flavor when it is consumed before drug treatments that produce nausea and vomiting. They also provided evidence that patients can acquire aversions to food in their usual diets when these foods are eaten before similar drug treatments.

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Classical Conditioning Basics

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	Created by Micailah Moore almost 7 years ago