animal behavior: why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?

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PSYC 2500 sec 01
Learning, Fall 2009
UConn Storrs Campus, MONT 143
TUE THU 5:00-6:15
Eric Lundquist

Click here to SUBMIT QUIZ QUESTIONS for QUIZ 2
(DON'T EMAIL THEM TO ME DIRECTLY, USE THIS FORM!)
Do this between Thursday 11/19/09 and Sunday 11/22/09 at the latest so I have time to choose 20 of your questions and make a quiz out of them for you in a timely manner. I'll give out bubble sheets in class; when the quiz is ready I'll post it right here on this web page as soon as I can, hopefully by NEXT Saturday or Sunday (after Thanksgiving). Then you'll do it at home -- using notes, text, and taking as much time as you like, but NOT talking to each other about it! -- and return your bubble sheet to me personally or to my mailbox or office, by Thursday 12/3/09. (If this date changes, it will be announced right here.) Hope this helps with your studying for the final, and the open-book nature of the quiz should help your grade overall.

As described in class, YOU make up this quiz. JUST FOR SUBMITTING A (DECENT) QUESTION, you will receive ONE POINT on this quiz. Plus if yours gets used, presumably you'll know the answer to it. And of course if I don't receive 20 decent questions covering this material, I can easily make up the balance myself -- but my questions are soooo hard...

You should submit one multiple choice question on material roughly since the midterm -- Rescorla's contingency experiments, the Rescorla-Wagner model of classical conditioning (a brief description is on slide 30 of the midterm PowerPoint slides) and associated phenomena, classical/operant comparison web page (see also slides 31-35 from the midterm slides), Guthrie & Hull web page, Skinner web page, and roughly Ch. 6 -- with one clearly correct answer (preferably marked as such) and three plausible but incorrect alternatives. Use the form I've provided at the above link so as to save me as much typing and formatting as possible!

BE SURE TO INCLUDE YOUR NAME SO I CAN CREDIT YOU FOR CONTRIBUTING A QUESTION! Otherwise I can't tell who it came from.

EXAM 1 RESULTS
and may I once again urge you to take your well-deserved vacation time AFTER class, because missing class could hurt you later!
EXAM 1 REVIEW INFO
EXAM 1 IS THURSDAY 10/29/09, MONT 143, 5:00 PM
REVIEW SESSION WEDNESDAY 10/28/09, MONT 143, 7:00 PM
check back here for review information to be posted

QUIZ 1 RESULTS
QUIZ 1 REVIEW INFO

READING:

1. REQUIRED: Mazur, James E. (2006). Learning And Behavior (6th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. (ISBN: 0-13-193163-6)
2. REQUIRED: On-Line Readings and Reserve Readings (to be announced)
3. OPTIONAL: Some classic papers in the Psychology of Learning - Here's a collection of links to papers I'll refer to in class - and a few of them may appear among the required readings for the class. Also see Classics In The History Of Psychology, if you're looking for extra stuff to read.

For those purchasing the older Fifth Edition of Mazur's text:
CLASS SYLLABUS for MAZUR FIFTH EDITION from Fall 2006.

Stellarium is a free program that will simulate a planetarium on your computer so that you will always know what stars you're looking at and when something interesting will be appearing. It's quite addictive.

Norman Borlaug died on Saturday September 12, 2009. Read the link for an appreciation, a short interview, and even the clip where they mentioned him on The West Wing in 2000, way back in its awesome days. And of course his Wikipedia entry is quite thorough and interesting and addresses some controversy as well. A billion lives saved by one man? Maybe...

Two short excerpts about James Gibson's Ecological Psychology: these are written by people who DON'T actually agree with Gibson and his ecological view, but who are describing him and his work fairly objectively. (While they're sort of skeptical, personally I'm not!) It's difficult to sum up the approach in brief; the linked passages are decent outsider views, but they're still incomplete and fail to appreciate some subtleties and philosophical implications. Ecological psychology is an approach to problems of perception and other aspects of psychology that is very different from conventional mainstream approaches. Instead of looking at the mind as a kind of computer involved in the processing of information (which is what mainstream psychology assumes), it is concerned with how animals and people can directly detect information in the environment which will be sufficient to guide their actions. The phrase "directly detect" is why the approach is often referred to as "direct perception"; it implies that the information doesn't need to be processed at all, which is controversial to say the least, and which certainly flies in the face of many centuries of epistemology. (At the end of the excerpt is an example of what a conventional "INdirect perception" approach looks like, for comparison.) The term "ecological" refers to a view of the animal and its environment as an integrated and co-evolving whole, as opposed to the conventional approach which seems to view the animal as an arbitrary observer placed into an arbitrary context. The ecological approach was developed by James Gibson over the whole course of his career, and today the University of Connecticut is the world leader in promoting and pursuing this approach. In particular the Psychology Department's Center For The Ecological Study Of Perception And Action (CESPA) is dedicated to advancing research and theory in ecological psychology.

Spiders and turkeys and bears: some pictures from backyards (mine, my brother's). You're free to exclaim "oh my!" after reading the album title. Just something to look at if you're bored.

Here is our common, useful, and sort of generic definition of learning: learning - a relatively permanent change in behavior or in behavioral potentiality that results from experience: relatively - because although the change should last some time, it needn't last forever (e.g., forgetting and extinction are allowed) behavior - because any change due to learning must be observable in principle if it is to be studied scientifically, and behavior is observable potentiality - because an organism may not have occasion to exhibit its modified behavior unless the appropriate circumstances arise experience - because modifications of behavior due to developmental or physical causes (maturation, injury, fatigue, etc.) aren't considered "learning"

Some Introductory notes: three important dates in the history of psychology; four defintions of psychology; a timeline and four terms that are central to epistemology. (For the full version of the epistemology distinctions, see the Outline of Epstemology linked below.) Brief overview of psychology's history: A few pages from Bruce Goldstein's Cognitive Psychology textbook that provide a sketch of the history of psychology from its beginnings up through the Cognitive Revolution of the 1950's and 1960's, for those who would like a text reference to go along with the class discussion. For our purposes this excerpt really begins on p. 9, "The First Psychology Laboratories." The "imageless thought debate" is not mentioned explicitly but problems with introspection are summarized under "Watson Founds Behaviorism." (And not that it matters for this course, but in a History Of Psychology course it would be important to recognize that Wundt's own view of psychology was not Structuralism but something a bit more subtle called Voluntarism.)

Two commentaries on the continuing vitality of behaviorism despite rumors of its demise:

• Roddy Roediger's March 2004 commentary from the APS Observer, 17(3) re-examines the simplistic story about behaviorism's fate after the rise of cognitive psychology, shedding some important light. One nice point he makes is that Chomsky contributed a rationalist intellectual foundation to refuting Skinner's behaviorism, but mainly was arguing at cross-purposes with Skinner and maybe shouldn't be thought of as have fomented a revolution.

• Alferink, Larry (2005). Behaviorism Died Today, Again! The General Psychologist, 40(1) (Spring 2005), 7-9. This is a brief mention of some of the many ways, both scientific and practical, in which behaviorism is still thriving today, which should counter the cliché that it's a thing of the past.

Here are a couple of ways to get things really wrong, in viewing the relationship between science and religion:

• Cognitive Psychologist Stephen Pinker argues in a commentary piece in Newsweek magazine that modern neuroscience has disproved the existence of the soul; responses from readers point out that no such scientific disproof is possible. Not stated explcitly is the fact that science is not the kind of inquiry that could ever be used to anwswer questions about the existence of souls or of God, and that deciding such questions is a matter of personal commitment that might then steer the type of inquiry you choose to pursue. See Lewontin's quote on materialism in science for a voice of reason.

• From a book on the "debate" over Intelligent Design: Intelligent Design is a euphemism for Biblical Creationism that atttempts to portray itself as science by supposing the "evidence" of the complexity of life leaves no possibility for its explanation in material terms, and that instead there must be a "designer" behind all of the complexity. That may sound like a plausible claim to some, but it's not a scientific one, since science only allows certain kinds of evidence and procedures to be used; science certainly doesn't throw up its hands and give up, and say "this is beyond us, so it all must have just been made by someone." If it all WAS made by someone, SCIENCE WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO DISCOVER THAT FACT, and will keep banging its head against the evidence FOREVER, in a noble failed attempt to stick to its principles. But the issue is far from settled, and probably never will be. In this excerpt, Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe (under "Conclusion") explicitly claims that science is not a game with arbitrary rules, when in fact that's exactly what it is -- well, not arbitrary rules, but rules nonetheless, which exclude the kind of conclusion Behe wants to force. Break those rules, and it's no longer science that you're doing. Then there are a few pages by noted philosopher of religion Alvin Plantinga, who tries to undermine those rules of science (what he calls science's "methodological naturalism" or commitment to non-supernatural explanation), so you can get a taste of the style of argument; notice the footnote that I think shows the bankruptcy of his point of view: #31, which essentially says the thing for scientists to do is to try to solve problems for a while, then give up and say "God did it." Again, even if it's true that "God did it," that's NOT SCIENCE!

• A reflection on changing the meaning of words like "science," or in this passage, the word "art." It's from the play Travesties by Tom Stoppard (author of things you've probably heard of like Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead and Shakespeare In Love and one spectacular thing you should check out, Arcadia, a mere hundred page play that could change how you look at the world). I should note that in this excerpt the character Carr's point of view is hardly the final word on the matter, though it is the reason I've posted this link.

Crimson by Josip Novakovich is a moving and disturbing short story that features this intriguing passage: "Milan thought how strange it was that he should be held responsible for the past, three years ago, when he was conscripted and enslaved--when he wasn't even himself. 'We all have multiple personalities,' he said. 'One of us is the past, and another the future, and there's no present me. We are vacant right now--spaces through which the past and the future disagree.'"

Outline of epistemology for psychology: This web page highlights some differences between empiricist and rationalist approaches to psychology, and calls them Platonic and Aristotelian in character -- but be warned: they are not exactly what Plato or Aristotle would have claimed, they're just descriptions of the spirit of the two families of claims! Plato and Aristotle: discussed in brief, from another textbook; this excerpt pretty well reproduces the gist of the lecture on these two figures. Illustration of top-down processing: in reading the words "THE CAT" as printed in the link, bottom-up or purely stimulus-driven processing is not sufficient to decide whether the ambiguous letter is an A or an H in each word, since it could be either; instead the reader makes use of higher-level knowledge (of vocabulary and word spellings) which is normally the end product of the reading process, to resolve the ambiguous stimulus in each context through what is known as top-down or knowledge-driven processing (i.e., the knowledge that there is a word C-A-T in English, but no word C-H-T).

Some excerpts from Plato's Dialogues: They're very readable even in this classic translation from the 19th century. "Meno" features the slave boy demonstrating that he knows the Pythagorean Theorem (this version with illustrations may be easier to follow). Book VII of The Republic contains the famous Allegory Of The Cave.

David Hume on causation, from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) -- in case you want to see where questions about causality all began. (See also the famous conclusion.)

Outline of Logical Positivism: This is a very brief sketch of the philosophy of science known as Logical Positivism, which was very influential in the development of psychology in the first half of the 20th century. It's mainly of interest for the concluding segment, an excerpt from the first English-language manifesto of logical positivism, in which Hume's influence is explicitly acknowledged.

Chomsky, Noam (1959). A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Language, 35(1), 26-58. The famous critique of the behaviorist approach is fairly difficult, but rewarding if you're interested.

• MacCorquodale, Kenneth (1970). On Chomsky's Review Of Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Journal Of The Experimental Analysis Of Behavior, 13(1), 83-99. This lesser known but fairly effective rebuttal of Chomsky's arguments shows how he missed the point of Skinner's book and chose instead to attack behaviorism in general; of course by 1970 this essay was a bit late to counter the perception that Chomsky had successfully demolished behaviorism, which of course he had not done.

Language Development: here are a couple of brief passages scanned from Erika Hoff's text that describe the Chomskyan view of language acquisition, for those who want something more than their notes to refer to. It also makes some of the same points about behaviorism and cognitivism as I made in class, and emphasizes that behaviorism fails as a theory of language. THIS IS PURELY OPTIONAL and introduces no new material that you would be responsible for. Note that Piaget is mentioned in a way that makes his theory sound more like a "quantitative accumulation" process than a "qualitative change" process, but in class we emphasized the qualitative change aspect. Also note that connectionism / parallel distributed processing / neural network models are mentioned in passing as embodying both nativist and empiricist elements. We described them as a type of information processing model (or "computer"), and therefore rationalist. At the same time, they are inspired by arch-empiricist David Hume's view of simple ideas "thinking for themselves" through the application of a small set of rules, rather than the complicated sets of instructions in a familiar computer "program" that might be more in line with Descartes's thinking.

Excerpt from an interview with philosopher Daniel Dennett (from Jonathan Miller's collection titled States Of Mind) on the strategy of investigating the workings of the brain by probing the information processing capacities of the mind, rather than approaching it directly through neuroscience. Note that this difference in investigational strategies is also referred to as top-down vs. bottom-up in a different context.

Two excerpts from Stephen Pinker's book How The Mind Works in which the Computational Theory of Mind is nicely described. Note that at one point, Pinker claims this theory is different from "the despised computer metaphor," which he suggests is the idea that the brain is exactly like a digital computer. But no one actually thinks that, and when people "despise" the computer metaphor, it actually is Pinker's own view that they mean. Pinker just wants to make it seem that no one could possibly have any reasonable objection to what he's saying. This is typical of Pinker, and part of the reason many people (including me) can't stand him; another believer in the Computational Theory of Mind, the famous philosopher Jerry Fodor, found enough to disagree with in this book that he wrote his own book as a response, titled The Mind Doesn't Work That Way. These pages are an interesting read nonetheless.

The Venus Of Willendorf: for those who want to judge for themselves whether this artifact can be viewed as something analogous to a supernormal stimulus.

• A brief clip from "The Office" in which Dwight tries to haze Ryan at his cousin's farmhouse as an initation into the sales force, but annoys him and has to apologize.

Classical conditioning affects fertility in birds, according to a recently published report described here; apart from some technical stuff about the DNA work, it's pretty readable.

In school, we learned about "this scientist" who trained dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell... (my mouth tastes so bad all of a sudden... gaah...) [starts at 6:15]

• A further comment about scientists
• This has nothing to do with anything

John Watson and Rosalie Rayner's original paper on Little Albert: Judge for yourself whether this paper is a well-controlled and judiciously interpreted study deserving of the attention it's gotten for the better part of a century. Is ONE subject enough? Are they doing classical or operant conditioning? Is Albert's crying really attributable uniquely to that rat and the noise associated with it?

• To help you decide, look at this video of Watson's skill at upsetting a child regardless of the stimulus being employed. I think this would make most babies cry under the best of circumstances!
• Consider this modern evaluation:
  "By itself the Albert study was not very convincing proof of the correctness of Watson's general view of personality and emotions. In addition to the study's reliance on only one subject, the experimental stimuli were insufficient to test for generalization effects, the observers' accounts were too subjective, and the technology did not exist to permit reliable assessment of emotional responses (see Sherman, 1927); there was insufficient follow-up and there was a confounding of instrumental and classical conditioning paradigms. These methodological flaws were also apparent to critical reviewers of the day (e.g., English, 1929; Valentine, 1930) and surely to Watson and Rayner themselves... [I]t seems time, finally, to place the Watson and Rayner data in the category of 'interesting but uninterpretable results.'"
  Harris, B. (1979). Whatever happened to Little Albert? American Psychologist, 34, 151-160.
• Some notes on the intrigue surrounding John Watson: This is the fairly amazing story of John Watson's life outside academia, based on biographies by David Cohen and Kerry Buckley. It won't be on the exams, but you'll want to read it.

Some common phobias and an extinction-based treatment

Rescorla's (1966) experiment on contingencies in forward and backward conditioning of dogs - from a different textbook, in case you want a text description to supplement your notes. The other contingency experiment with rats is covered in your textbook, though Mazur only mentions the 40% and 20% shock groups, and not the 10% group. Makes the same point though.

PowerPoint slides as of the midterm exam: the last slide to be covered on the midterm is on Rescorla's contingency experiments (slide 29), NOT anything on the Rescorla-Wagner model (slide 30) or operant conditioning (slides 31-35)! As you know, there is not a slide corresponding to every concept we discussed, but at least you can see all the slides I actually did display in class, in case that's useful in reconciling your notes with the lecture.

Some Notes On Classical and Operant Conditioning, including a definition of "learning", a brief note on the processes of inhibition and excitation, and a comparison of classical and operant conditioning. The comparison of classical and operant conditioning will not be covered at all on the midterm. It WILL be covered on the FINAL!

OPTIONAL extended discussion of the Rescorla-Wagner model from Mazur's FIFTH edition. The main difference is that here he runs through some numerical examples which may make it easier to follow what's going on. In my opinion this material should not have been deleted for the 6th edition. (Anyone who has the FIFTH edition, you already have this so ignore this link!)

Web page on Guthrie's and Hull's learning theories: this summarizes everything you'd need to know about these two theorists, who are only barely mentioned in Mazur's textbook. For those who missed the class discussion, and those who may want to have a firmer reference for this material, here are two OPTIONAL chapters from an excellent older textbook by Robert Bolles, on Guthrie and on Hull. There is far more detail in each chapter than you are responsible for; if you do read them, you only need to read as much as will make the above web page notes understandable to you. Which is not to say you shouldn't read the rest of it for fun. How To Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off, a blog entry that is implicitly making use of Guthrie's principles of learning. A description of the vast number of micro-stimuli present in your environment at a given moment, taken totally out of context from Michael Pollan's The Botany Of Desire, from a segment in which he suggests that a useful function of a cannabinoid (THC-related) receptor in the nervous system might be to mute our awareness of all the irrelevant things in our world that might otherwise occupy our attention. Figure illustrating the Crespi-Zeaman effect from p.105 of the chapter on Hull posted above.

Tolman, Edward C. (1948). Cognitive maps in rats and men. Psychological Review, 55(4), 189-208. This is optional reading since Latent Learning is covered in Mazur on pp. 202-203. If you're interested though, this paper shows the range of his experiments and arguments. It's worth reading about experiments (1) "latent learning", (4) "hypotheses", and (5) "spatial orientation", at least. And the conclusion, which is nice. I've also provided a sort of abridgement leading up to that conclusion in the link above labeled "Some Relevant Quotes."

Race a rat through this maze, by pausing the video on the maze overview and tracing through it on your own, and then hitting play to see if you can actually stay ahead of him when they show his whole run in the second half. I'm not saying it's hard, just that he's faster than you think - and the rat doesn't get the bird's eye view that you get either.

Web page on Skinner's learning theory A page from B.F. Skinner's paper "A Case History In Scientific Method" from 1956, illustrating consistency across species in cumulative records produced by similar reinforcement schedules. It's worth reading the text on these two pages, starting just below the diagram. (Don't worry about the specific schedules employed.)