Cats and dogs and conditioning
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Cats and dogs and conditioning
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[post_content] => Practice Passage (Question 1-5)
*This passage is the property of Khan Academy and has been reformatted into an AAMC-style interface in their entirety by MedLife Mastery. MedLife Mastery does not endorse and is not an affiliate of Khan Academy.
When Edward Thorndike put cats into puzzle boxes at the turn of the 20th century, he found that the cats got out more and more quickly over successive trials. Thorndike posited that positive consequences (such as escaping the box) strengthened certain behaviors, and negative consequences (like being stuck in the box) weakened other behaviors. This marked the beginning of the idea of operant conditioning, which holds that when behavior leads to certain consequences, those consequences then influence the behavior. Consequences can be thought of as reinforcements or punishments, which try to enforce or dissuade behavior, respectively.
Operant conditioning is not to be confused with classical conditioning, in which a neutral stimulus is paired with an unconditioned stimulus to elicit an unconditioned response. For example, say Thorndike rang a bell immediately before he put the cats in their boxes. Let us assume that the cats naturally have a negative reaction to being boxed, and begin to yowl loudly when this happens. If the bell was continually paired with being boxed over some period of time, the cats would probably develop a negative response to the sound of a bell, as they associated it with being put in a box. Once the neutral stimulus alone elicits the same response as the unconditioned stimulus, it is referred to as the conditioned stimulus, and its response is a conditioned response. Thus, when the cats begin to yowl just at the sound of the bell, the bell has become a conditioned stimulus.
A boy has decided to try to use conditioning to train his new dog. In order to teach his dog to fetch, he draws up the following plan:
Figure 1: The action plan to train the dog to fetch.
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[question] => Exposure therapy is a technique used to treat anxiety. Patients are encouraged to confront the source of their fear in a context without any danger, in the hopes that this will help them overcome it. What principle is this technique most closely related to?
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In this context, positive refers to the gain of something, while negative refers to the removal of a stimulus.
Punishments are designed to de-incentivize a certain behavior. While the patient may feel punished by being forced to interact with the source of their fear, the goal is to stop the fear response and not to create a new behavior.
Extinction is the negation of a conditioned response as the conditioned stimulus is presented without the unconditioned stimulus. Exposure therapy works along similar lines to present the object of fear (conditioned stimulus) without any untoward effects (unconditioned stimulus) to erase the fear response
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[each_answer] => A. Extinction
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[each_answer] => B. Positive punishment
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[each_answer] => C. Generalization
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[each_answer] => D. Negative punishment
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[question] => What is the major difference between classical and operant conditioning?
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[description] => Reason for the Correct Answer:
While it is true that generalization of stimulus is generally thought of as an attribute of classical conditioning, the same phenomenon can occur with operant conditioning. For example, the dog may begin fetching any round object hoping to get a treat, instead of just the ball.
Any learned behavior can be lost if the stimulus / response are unpaired for long enough. A driver who was very careful after getting a speeding ticket may start to speed again as the years go by and he isn’t pulled over, so both operant and classical conditioning can undergo extinction.
Classical conditioning ties one stimulus to another, while operant conditioning ties a behavior to a consequence – thus, only operant conditioning directly affects behavior.
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[each_answer] => A. Only operant conditioning directly affects behavior
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[each_answer] => B. Only classical conditioning can undergo extinction
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[each_answer] => C. Operant conditioning works better to deter a response, while classical is better at eliciting one
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[each_answer] => D. Classical conditioning can be generalized to a wide range of responses, while operant conditioning is very specific
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[question] => What is turning off the radio an example of?
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[description] => Reason for the Correct Answer:
In this context, positive refers to the gain of something, while negative refers to the removal of a stimulus.
Punishments are designed to de-incentivize a certain behavior, while reinforcements encourage behavior.
Turning off the radio removes a loud, high-pitched noise from the dog’s sensitive ears whenever he fetches the ball.
Turning off the radio is a form of negative reinforcement – the removal of something unpleasant to reward “goal” behavior.
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[each_answer] => A. Positive reinforcement
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[question] => A few days into training, the boy notices that the dog loves being sprayed with the water bottle, and will shake all the water off onto the boy. The boy decides to stop paying attention to the dog whenever it doesn’t fetch, instead. What conditioning has the boy undergone?
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[description] => Reason for the Correct Answer:
In this context, positive refers to the gain of something, while negative refers to the removal of a stimulus.
Punishments de-incentivize a certain behavior, while reinforcements encourage behavior. Getting wet makes the boy stop wanting to spray the water bottle.
Getting wet is a positive punishment – the addition of an unpleasant stimulus convinces the boy to stop spraying his dog. Whether the dog did it on purpose or not, he conditioned his human right back.
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[question] => The boy uses the phrase “Go get it!” to tell the dog to fetch. One day he says “Let it go!” to one of his friends and the dog brings him the ball. Which aspect of classical conditioning does this illustrate?
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[answer] => 1
[description] => Reason for the Correct Answer:
The dog has begun to associate similar phrases with the initial conditioned stimulus and thus performs the conditioned response.
Both generalization and discrimination are adaptive responses. Generalization allows us to link similar stimuli, while discrimination is how we discern between, for example, the sound of a police siren and our cell phone ring tone.
The dog is demonstrating generalization when he responds to a similar stimulus with the conditioned response.
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[each_answer] => A. Generalization
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[each_answer] => B. Spontaneous recovery
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[each_answer] => C. Extinction
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[each_answer] => D. Discrimination
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Figure 1