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Animal Learning - Coggle Diagram
Animal Learning
Associative Learning
- pavlovian (classical) conditioning:
- animal learns that one stimulus predicts another.
- important for our emotional reactions.
- unconditioned stimulus (US): usually a biologically relevant stimulus
- unconditioned response (UR): unlearned response to the US.
- conditioned stimulus (CS): a neutral stimulus that does not initially elicit the UR.
- conditioned response (CR): response to the CS after learning has occured.
- observational (vicarious) learning): learning that occurs from simply watching another (you yourself have no direct experience with the unconditioned stimulus)
- we can learn about the associations between two stimuli even if we don't directly experience them.
- the highly social world humans live in provides many opportunities to observe others' emotional reactions to various stimuli.
- instrumental conditioning:
- outcome is dependent on the animal's behaviour.
- there needs to be a contingency between the response and the outcome.
- there are different types of contingencies and outcomes.
- positive reinforcement: the outcome is something good > if you do this, something good will happen.
- there are a range of factors that influence instrumental conditioning:
- the delay between the response and outcome (contiguity)
- schedule of reinforcement
- continuous/partial reinforcement.
- partial reinforcement: you do the behaviour and sometimes you'll get a reward.
- fixed ratio > time
- post-reinforcement pause: taking a break after a reinforcement.
- variable ratio > number of responses
- gambling > don't know when the reward will come
Learning
what is learning?
- the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience.
- typically, learning is revealed by a change in behaviour and the brain; these changes allow an animal to adapt to their environment.
- all animals learn.
- in order to survive, learning helps animals gain advantages > obtain food, reproduce, avoid predation.
- animals that are better at learning solve these problems more effectively.
- sometimes, an animals fails to learn or they might even learn the "wrong" thing (both can lead to problems).
- why do we study animal learning?
- continuity of species > darwin:
- focused on anatomical similarity across species.
- many species have to solve certain problems, and they have similar structures to do so (eg: birds and bats w wings)
- behavioural continuity: similarities in how species respond in certain situations.
- structure of the brain similarities across species.
- changes that occur to these during learning are also similar between species.
- all animals use the same cascade when forming memories (NMDAr > CaMKII > cAMP-PKA, MAPK)
- the amygdala looks similar (location and structure) across many species.
- lots of potential applications: research in animal learning may help us understand our likes and dislikes, anxiety disorders and their treatment, and neural bases of learning and memory
- mental health is the number one health problem in developed countries, in terms of years lost to disability.
- the US National Institute of Mental Health committed US$1.54 billion dollars in 2017 in funding to reduce "the burden of mental illness and behavioural disorders through research on mind, brain, and behaviour."
- learning is involved in disorders like anxiety, and related disorders like phobias and ptsd.
- individuals with mental health problems may learn about the world in different ways > this could affect how they interact with others, and how they respond to treatments.
- people with specific disorders learn about the world in a specific way. treatments won't work if we don't acknowledge the difference between the average way of learning and the way a specific person learns.
Non-Associative
Learning
- a type of learning where an
animal's behaviour/physiology/brain
changes following repeated exposures
to a stimulus
- animals learn to recognise that the event
is familiar, but they DO NOT learn anything
about the relationship between that
event and any other.
- habituation: a decrease in response amplitude or frequency as a consequence of repeated experience with a stimulus.
- perhaps the most common type of learning (and is usually stimulus-specific > habituated to one stimulus, but maybe not another)
- critically important to our functioning in the world > allows the animal to ignore the familiar > limited attentional capacity.
- the amount of activity in the amygdala decreases with habituation
- in neuroimaging, the colour of an area represents the amount of activity increase/decrease from the start. blue means decrease, red/yellow means increase.
- individuals with ASD learn about the world in a different way > find it harder to habituate stimuli compared with NT.
- habituation occurs not just to sound, but also to other types of stimuli > in our species, faces convey a lot of information, and we respond to new faces.
- people with schizophrenia find it harder to habituate fearful faces compared with NT (increase in hippocampus response)
- sensitisation: an increase in response amplitude or frequency as a consequence of experience with a stimulus (is NOT stimulus specific > response transfers to other stimuli).
- usually administered through stronger stimuli compared to habituation.
- can help us understand addiction > some drugs cause a permanent sensitisation in our brains, causing it to be increasingly pleasurable each time (especially stimulants).
Extinction
- the decrease of the amplitude/frequency of a CR as a function of non-reinforced presentations of the CS.
- pairings of a CS+ with a shock US leads to the CS+ eliciting learned fear responses.
- learning applies not only to the acquisition of new associations but also to the rearrangement of existing ones.
- competing memory: the animal still remembers the first CS-US pairing, but in extinction, they learn a new association. The second association inhibits the first memory.
- spontaneous recovery: recovery of responding that occurs when the CS is tested sometime after the conclusion of extinction.
- the longer you wait to do a retention test after extinction learning, the more likely it is for the original CR to come back, because the original association is still there. it's just being inhibited.
- renewal: recovery of responding when the subject is tested in a context different from where that extinction occurred.
- CR comes back if retention is tested in context A because that's where the acquisition occurred.
- reinstatement: recovery of responding when the subject is tested after a non-signalled US presentation.
- for example: acquisition of a CS-US pairing (giving rats a shock), going through extinction, and then giving the rats a shock again (shock alone).
- those who were shocked retain the fear.