Habituation and Respondent Learning

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Habituation and Respondent Learning

• Dr. Kelley Kline
• FSU-PC
• Developmental Psychology

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What is learning?

• Learninga relatively permanent change in
  behavior brought about by experience or
  knowledge.

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Three components of learning

• A. Learning is a change in the behavior-environmen
  t relationship. Behavior changes in relation to
  other events in the world.
• B. The change is relatively permanent. So
  changes may last longer than a few moments, but
  not necessarily a lifetime. Hence, we use
  percentage of time things change to describe
  learning that has taken place.
• C. Learning is due to experience with the
  environment. Physical growth and maturation do
  cause changes in development that we do not infer
  are due to learning per se.

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What role does learning play in human development?

• Learning is a process in development!!!
• We are hard-wired to acquire knowledge and skills
  through our interactions with the environment.
  This is the biology.
• Learning serves as the mechanism by which we
  acquire information and act on our environment.

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Types of learning

• 1. Classical conditioning referred to here as
  reflexive or respondent learning. Here reflexive
  actions are strengthened in relation to stimuli
  from the environment.
• 2. Operant conditioning- also called
  Instrumental conditioning, in which largely
  volitional behaviors are strengthened through
  reinforcers.

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I. Habituation

• A basic form of respondent learning, in which
  there is a decrease in the strength of a given
  action after repeated presentation of a stimulus
  that elicits the response.
• E.g., Imagine you are on vacation in October,
  staying in an idyllic little cottage near a lake.
  Its largely quite with the exception of the
  sounds of birds and crickets. However, you are
  advised that it is duck hunting season and you
  may hear gun shots go off. The first gun shot
  scares you half to death you are sure you are
  on the movie set of a teen slasher flick.
  However, after hearing several gunshot sounds, by
  the 3rd day, you barely observe the gunshots as
  you your family share a nice picnic lunch.

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Components of Habituation

• 1. In principle, any elicited response can
  habituate, but in practice it most often occurs
  to autonomic physiological responses.
• E.g., startle responses, sympathetic arousal,
  orienting response, etc.

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Habituation may explain some of our
thrill-seeking behaviors.

• How many people here, enjoy roller coaster rides,
  horror movies, the like???
• As a society, we keep upping the ante on the
  thrills we seek from rides, movies, etc.,
  possibly because we habituate to the ones we have
  already experienced.
• For example, we release dopamine each time we
  experience something pleasurable. This is the
  rush we feel when we fall in love, ride a
  coaster, or see a new scary horror movie.
  However, with time, less dopamine is released
  during these activities we look for new ways to
  get the same dopamine (feeling) release.

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Habituation is also a positive process in
treating some forms of psychopathology.

• Phobias, a type of anxiety disorder, involves the
  irrational fear of an object, event, or
  situation.(e.g., fear of snakes, spiders, public
  speaking).
• Flooding therapywhich involves full blown
  exposure to the feared stimulus, relies on the
  principle that our sympathetic nervous system
  will habituate over time, thereby allowing us to
  experience less autonomic arousal to the feared
  stimulus. Thus, we behaviorally treat the
  disorder using the principle of habituation.

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2. Habituation is Stimulus specific

• If we habituate to gunfire shots, we should still
  show a startle response to a door slam.
• An infant that stops turning its head towards a
  speaker playing the same word (ball), should
  moves its head when a new word is presented.
• Since we are constantly exposed to a variety of
  stimuli in our environments, some of these
  dangerous, others benign. We need to distinguish
  which stimuli are dangerous from others that are
  insignificant. Being continually startled or
  distracted by the same stimulus would deplete our
  energy and make it difficult for us to attend to
  the important stimuli in our environments.

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Evidence that habituation is important for normal
development

• Rate of habituation in babies is correlated with
  mental abilities in later development. Laucht,
  Esser, Schmidt (1994) reported that infants who
  displayed faster habituation to repetitive
  stimuli at 3 months of age, tended to score
  slightly higher on IQ tests when they were almost
  5 years old.
• Other evidence to support significance of
  habituation in development comes from the work of
  Hollister, Mednick, Brennan, Cannon (1994) in
  which adolescents with slow habituation rates
  were at a higher risk for developing
  schizophrenia later in adulthood.

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Classic studies on infant Habituation

• Bronstein Petrova (1967) reported that infant
  sucking habituated to repeated presentations of
  several auditory stimuli (whistle, harmonica) in
  neonates older infants.
• Bridger (1961) showed habituated accelerated
  heart rate the startle response to repetitive
  auditory stimuli in neonates.
• Adubato (1986) found habituated fetal movements
  in response to repetitive vibratory stimuli
  applied to the abdomens of pregnant women between
  28 and 37 weeks.

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Why is habituation important in development?

• 1. Habituation is an early form of learning that
  is adaptive for children to acquire for normal
  development. We need to learn to selectively
  attend to information that is important and to
  ignore information that isnt.
• 2. Habituation serves as a useful paradigm for
  understanding early infant development.

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II. Respondent Learning-Classical conditioning

• A more sophisticated form of learning, respondent
  learning, involves stimulus-response relations
  with reflexive stimuli.
• Here, reflexive responses (salivation, eye blink,
  startle, hunger pangs, sweating, etc.) are
  elicited in response to stimuli that previously
  produced no influence on such events.

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General termsoverview

• Unconditioned stimulus (UCS)stimulus that
  normally will elicit a reflexive response (air
  puff normally elicits an eye blink).
• Unconditioned response (UCR)reflexive response
  that normally occurs (startle in response to loud
  noise).
• Conditioned Stimulus (CS)-previously neutral
  stimulus that by being repeatedly paired with a
  UCS, elicits a CR.
• Conditioned Response (CR)-the conditioned
  reflexive response. Note CR is usually weaker
  than UCR.

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Non-human studies of respondent conditioning

• Does the name Pavlov ring a bell????
• Pavlovs best known for discovering classical
  conditioning. He was a Russian physiologist
  interested in gastric responses in dogs.
  Classical conditioning finding was
  serendipitous!!!!!

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Heres the basic paradigm

• Pavlovs classic dog salivation study
• Step 1 Meat Powder (UCS)---------Salivation
  (UCR)
• Step 2 Bell (Neutral stimulus) --------
• ---Meat Powder (UCS)--Salivation
  (UCR)
• (pair bell with meat)
• Step 3 Bell (CS)--------------------Salivatio
  n (CR)

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Infant Studies of Respondent Learning

• The best documented work on infant respondent
  learning comes from the classic work of Watson
  and Raynor (1920).
• These researchers conditioned emotional
  responses in an 11-month old infant (Little
  Albert).
• As with most infants, Albert was curious about a
  white rat. The infant crawled over to the rat
  and played with it.
• On subsequent trials, Watson Raynor, presented
  a loud obnoxious noise (UCS) produced by striking
  a metal rod with a hammer whenever Albert
  showed an interest in the white furry rat (CS).

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Watson Rayner (1920)

• Albert produced a reflexive startle response
  (including crying) with each pairing of the noise
  and the rat.
• Following several trials of this experiment,
  Albert recoiled and cried in response to the
  mere sight of a white rat.
• Learning generalized to other white furry objects
  (Santas beard, fur coat, cat, cotton balls,
  etc.).
• Hence, Watson Raynor successfully conditioned
  fear responses in the little infant.

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Other infant studies

• Lipsitt Kaye (1963) paired the presentation of
  a tone with the insertion of a nipple in the
  mouths of newborns three or four days old.
  Eventually, the tone itself elicited sucking.
• Spelt (1948) paired a loud clapper (UCS) with
  vibrotactile stimuli (NS) in fetuses between 7
  9 months gestation. Eventually, the vibrotactile
  stimuli alone elicited fetal movements.

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Conditions necessary for respondent learning

• 1. The initial S-R relation must be unlearned
  and automatic (reflexive).
• 2. The UCS must be paired with the NS.
• 3. Presentations of the CS alone must elicit the
  response.
• 4. The CR must not be the product of
  sensitization (presenting UCS alone may get
  responding).

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Other terms

• Stimulus generalization-When conditioning is
  established, CR may be elicited by similar
  stimuli.
• Stimulus DiscriminationLack of conditioning to
  other stimuli. In Watson Raynors study, the
  CR was not elicited in response to wooden blocks.
  

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Extinction-

• If CS is never again paired with UCS, then CS no
  longer elicits the CR. Thus, the CR is
  extinguished.
• Spontaneous recoveryCS may occasionally elicit
  the CR on new sessions, but only for a short
  number of responses.