The Past, Present and the Future; Memory

Operant Conditioning

Try to recall the time that your mother would reward you with toy that you will kill to have if you manage to get good grades for you tests. What about a cane to the hand when you were caught lying to her?

Without you realizing it, you are a great example of operant conditioning!

Operant conditioning - depends on consequences and involves reinforcements and punishments.

This conditioning involves reinforcement and punishment. Let’s get down to business.

Reinforcements

There are two types;

Positive reinforcements and negative reinforcements

Positive reinforcement is giving something pleasant to increase a wanted behaviour or an attitude. Thus, this increases the continuity of this behavior as a reward is given.

For further clarification, examples!

 A mouse will be given food when a lever is pulled. (To develop pulling the lever as a behaviour)

The teacher or your parents will praise you for doing your homework early.

Negative Reinforcement

Negative reinforcement is taking away something unpleasant as a result of the behavior that is acceptable. This time, is to remove something to increase a wanted behavior.

For example…

Personally, I’ve been bullied before in school. That really made me not even wanting to go to school. After reporting it and actions were taken, the bully stopped. I started to like school back when there are no more threats, name calling and physical abuse.

Shaping

Rome isn’t built in a day, right?

Shaping is all about changing behavior gradually, step by step.

For example, when training circus animals, a trainer cannot immediately expect them to voluntarily risk it’s life to become the first grilled lion by jumping throught a hoop of fire.

A lion jumping through a hoop should first be trained to stay in a hoop.Then walk through a hoop, hop through a hoop, and then, jump through a hoop while it is blazing with FIRE!!!

“Care to listen to the schedule, Master Bruce?”

Schedules of Reinforcement

—  Partial reinforcement effect - the tendency for a response that is reinforced after some, but not all, correct responses to be very resistant to extinction.

—  Continuous reinforcement - the reinforcement of each and every correct response.

Fixed ratio schedules of reinforcement.

-The amount you need to achieve to get a reward is fixed.

 Variable schedules of reinforcement

-The amount you need to achieve to get a reward is not always the same.

Fixed interval schedules of reinforcement.

-Work for a set and constant amount of time, you would get a reward

We usually see this in games. Like Candy Crush. There is a “life” system. If you run out of lives, you cannot play. The game makes you wait for a specific amount of time to get those lives back.

 Variable schedules of interval

-The amount of time need to work for the reinforcement is changing to get the reward.

An example that I could give is waiting for a ride in the roller coaster. It could be a straight jump to the roller coaster or even 15 minutes of waiting to get on the ride.

Punishment

Punishments are events or objects that make a response less likely to happen again.

There also two types of punishment.

1. Punishment by Application

Punishment by application is also known as positive punishment. It involves the presence of an undesirable stimulus after a behavior. In simple words,

ADD UNPLEASANT STIMULI to REDUCE BEHAVIOR

Caning is great example

2. Punishment by Removal

Punishment by removal is known as negative punishment. It involves the removal of a pleasurable stimulus after a behavior. . In simple words,

REMOVE PLEASANT STIMULI to REDUCE BEHAVIOR

"Darkness, we meet again..."

How To Make Punishment More Effective

1. Punishment should follow the behavior it is meant to punish. The interval between the undesired behavior and the punishment should be small. This causes the person to associate the behavior with the unpleasant behavior.

2. Punishment should be consistent. If it’s not the person would not be scared and as guilty as the person should.

3. Punishment of the wrong behavior should be paired, whenever possible, with reinforcement of the right behavior. “Do you know why did you have to stand on your chair? It’s because you didn’t finish your homework! You should have done it earlier!” Seems familiar? You see, vintage example of including the proper behavior after the punishment.

Good old times...

“Do you know why did you have to stand on your chair? It’s because you didn’t finish your homework! You should have done it earlier!” Seems familiar? You see, vintage example of including the proper behavior after the punishment.

Cognitive Learning Theory

•  CLT is a learning that requires cognition which is thinking process.
•  Cognition in other words is the mental events that take place inside a person’s mind while behaviour could no longer be ignored.

Learned Helplessness

Basically, it is involves giving up, even when there is an opportunity to get out of a sticky situation after failing repeatedly for action to be done.

This is because the subject has learned even with any effort done; the subject thinks that failure is always the end result.

How do you even ... :(

On a personal example, I once tried skate boarding. I have the basics to skate but up until today, I am unable to perform an “Ollie” (a trick to jump with the board) because I have tried so many times before. Yet, I have never landed one properly and would almost fall for each attempt. Further attempts just make me feel that I would never be able to do one.

Latent Learning

-          is a learning that remains hidden until its application become useful.

A lot that we learn in class are latent learning which is in the form of theories. Later in life, we would use some knowledge that we had already learned and apply it in our daily lives.

 

You might know how to repair the sink in theory but you
have never done it before!

Insight also is one of the most popular behavior in psychology

• -          It is the sudden perception of relationships among various parts of problem, allowing the solution to the problem to come quickly and it cannot be gained through trial-and-error learning alone.
• This is usually seen when we are trying to solve mathematical problems. We need to understand the method need to be done because each problem is different.

Observational Learning

When you are a kid, ever felt that you could kick someone acrobatically like in those Chinese Kung Fu movies after your watched them?

Well, that is generally a type of observational learning.

Observational learning is learning new behavior by watching a model perform that behavior.

A child can be too aggressive after watching the video that shows people fighting with each other and they can be either way when they are watching the video with good values. This is because during the session, they are observing every action that came out in the video. This is called observational learning.

They observe what we do and then, they will try to do it. For example, when we are smoking in front of them, there is no doubt they will try smoking too.

I miss Toby as Spidey 

Personally, I still remember that as I got out from watching “Spiderman”, I tried to spray webs and swing from one destination to another. I even the hand gesture in hopes that webs would come out.

This can be proven through the experiment that had been conducted by Albert Bandura, Dorothea Ross, and Sheila Ross (1963). In this experiment, they asked two groups of children to watch films in which an adult or a cartoon character violently attacked an inflated ‘Bobo” doll. Another group watched a different film. They then left the children in a room with a Bobo doll. Only the children who had watched films with attacks on the doll attacked the doll themselves, using many of the same movements they had just seen.

To shape their actions and their minds, it shows that the children need a proper and good example as a model to be replicated.