How to find a mind

Sequestering Cognition

The job of psychology is to provide causes and mechanisms to explain systematic behavior, in humans and other organisms.

sequestering cognition is the process of isolating the thing we want to study as psychologists.

Insight 1: find places with apparent interventions, like iron vilings, where behavior is organized, systematic, and even adaptive, but needs cause and mechanism.

• if you can't identify cognition in typical ways, you can sequester it, find places where an explanation is needed.
• psycology experiences are setups where there's some input my experimenter, and some output generated by subject. Goal is to understand the middle portion.

Insight 2: If you can explain it "by stones and bricks", by assembling simple units of one or a few varieties.

• Associations are the stones and bricks of psychology: a default mode of explanation the promise of complexity emerging from chains of a basic kind of unit.

See if you can find cases that at least seem to need more than "stones and bricks".

• e.g., why am i here, doing this, right now?

Beliefs and desires

Conditioning

Classical Conditioning

Pavlov's research.

Conditioning is evolutionarily beneficial because it allows organisms to develop expectations that help prepare them for good or bad events.

• e.g., if food causes them to be sick, they won't eat it next time.

At first, you can give a conditioned stimulus (ringing a bell), followed by an unconditioned stimulus (food), which automatically elicits an unconditioned response (salivating). After some number of repetition, the conditioned stimulus alone causes teh conditioned response (salivating).

Classical conditioning: associates an involuntary response and a stimulus.

• The learning that occurs when a neutral stinimulus becomes associated with a stimulus that naturally produces a behaviour.

extinction is the reduction in responding that occurs when the conditioned stimulus is presented repeatedly without the unconditioned stimulus.

• eventually the dog will stop salivate.

spontaneuous recovery is the increase in responding to the CS following a pause after extenction.

• after a pause after extinction, if you ring the bell, it will salivate still.

Generalization is the tendency to respond to stimuli that resemble the original conditioned stimulus.

• if the conditioned stimulus was scraching, rubbing will also work.
• can cause discrimination: the tendency to respond differently to stimuli that are similar but not identifcal .

second-order conditioning is an existinc conditioned stimulus that can serve as an unconditional stimulus for a pairing with a new conditioned stimulis.

• pair the bell with the black square.

Classical conditioning explains the learning of a phobia (strong irrational fear of a specific object, activity or situation).

• drivin has become the CS that creates the fear response.

Classical conditional also explains post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a severe anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to a fearful event, such as threat of death.

Operant Conditioning

Operant conditioning associates a voluntary behavior and a consequence

• learning that occurs based on the consequences of behavior and can invovle the learning of new actions.
• e.g., dog rolls over because it will be praised, bully threatens because he can get away with things.

The law of effect is the principle that responses that create a typically pleasant outcome in a particular situation are more likely to occur again in a similar situation, where as responses that produce a typically unpleasant outcome are less likely to occur again in the situation.

Skinner boxes are operant chambers that help systematically study learning.

• a structure that can house a rodent/bird that contains a bar or key that the organism can press or peck to release food or water. contains a device to record the animal's response.

Terms related: reinforcer is any event that strengthens the likelihood of a behavior

punisher is any event that weakens or decreases the likelihood of a behaviour.

positive reinforcement strengthens a response by presenting something pleasant after the response

• always better.

negative reinforcement strengthens a response by reducing or removing something unpleasant

• sometimes the line between negative and positive reinforcement is blurry.

continuous reinforcement schedule is when the desired response is reinforced every time it occurs.

• fast learning but rapid extinction

partial (intermittent) reinforcement schedule is a scheudle in which the responses are sometimes reinforced and sometimes not.

• slower initial learning, but greater resistance to extinction.
• fixed-interval schedele: reinforcement occurs for the first response made after a specfic amount of time has passed. (e.g., how students study)
• variable interval schedule: reinforcers appear on an intervla schedule, but the timing is varied around the average interval. (e.g., email checking). Produces slow and steady rates of responding.
• fixed-ratio scheudle: behavior is reinforced after a specifc number of responses.
• variable-ratio: provides reinforcers after a specific but average number of responses (e.g., slot machine).

shaping is hte process of guiding an organism's behavior to the desired outcome through the use of successive approximation to a final desired behavior.

primary reinforcer includes stimuli that are naturally preferred, and a secondary reinforcer (conditioned reinforcer) is a neutrla event that has become associated with a primary reinforcer through classical conditioning.

Psychology

Psychology is the science of mental life, in its phenomena (feelings, desires, cognitions, reasonings) and their conditions.

A cue reminds us of whatever we are to recollect.