Extinction, Generalization, & Discrimination (Intro Psych Tutorial #60)

hi I'm Michael courier and this is psych exam review in the previous video we saw the basic steps in classical conditioning and this shows how we take a neutral stimulus that doesn't cause a particular response and then by repeatedly pairing it with an unconditioned stimulus that causes an unconditioned response we can turn that neutral stimulus into a conditioned stimulus which now evokes a conditioned response and so this process of learning this association between the previously neutral stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus is called acquisition so for instance in the case of the bell ringing and food presentation that is associated with Pavlov's work we have this idea that once the dog has learned that the Bell means that food is being presented and then the Bell causes the dog to salivate we can say that acquisition has occurred but this learning won't last forever if we keep ringing the bell but never presenting food eventually the conditioned response will go away and so this is a process called extinction and this process of extinction doesn't happen all at once so for instance if I take one of the dogs and I teach him to salivate to a bell and then I keep ringing the bell without presenting food eventually the dog will stop salivating to the Bell we can say extinction has occurred but it's not a complete extinction because if I take a break let's say I wait 24 hours or so this is what Pavlov did and then he came back and rang the bell again for the dog he found that the conditioned response came back and he referred to this as spontaneous recovery and this indicates that the learning hasn't been completely forgotten it's not gone from the dogs mind right he still has some association between the BAL in the food but it's then reduced the intensity of that response has been reduced but after a short break it comes back and if it's still the case that the bell is no longer paired with food then eventually the extinction will occur again and the response will go away now even then it doesn't mean that the dog has completely forgotten this because Pavla found that if he retaught the dogs of particular association they were able to learn it faster than dogs who hadn't been taught it in the first place in other words if I take a dog who's learned to salivate to a bell and then I get extinction to a cur by just repeatedly ringing the bell without food eventually the response goes away but then if I decide I want to teach this dog to salivate to a bell again he'll learn it faster than some dog who has never been taught to salivate to a bell at all so this idea that our e-learning can occur faster also indicates that there's some sort of lingering learning happening so this idea that relearning occurs more quickly the relearning is faster for dogs that have previously learned particular Association okay another thing that Pavlov found was that when he would let's say he taught a dog to salivate to a particular Bell he could ring a different belt that was similar but not the same and the dog would also salivate and so this is referred to as stimulus generalization so the dogs were able to generalize and see that this Bell is similar enough to some other Bell that it will also evoke the conditioned response so he did this with tuning forks for instance we play a particular tone he could teach a dog to salivate to a particular tone and then he would play a different tone and the dog would also salivate but the response wouldn't be as strong and as he got further away from the original note the response would get weaker and weaker but an interesting note here is that when he got to an octave the dog would salivate more the response would suddenly get stronger more similar to the original stimulus and this indicates that dogs hear octaves the same way that we do right so we described a particular note that's an octave apart as sounding like the same note right so a C and as you know an octave above that sounds like the same note even though they're very different frequencies and it appears that dogs have this same sort of recognition that octaves are the same note now papa also found that he could teach dogs to discriminate between similar stimuli and so this is referred to as stimulus discrimination and so if he taught a dog to salivate to a particular note by pairing it with food but he had another note that he played they never paired with food if he did this enough times the dog had actually learned to only salivate to one particular note and not another note that'll be an example of stimulus discrimination dog has learned that only this particular form of the stimulus means that food is going to be presented whereas this other note that sounds similar but isn't the same doesn't mean that food will be presented and with enough pairings you could teach the dog to discriminate these similar stimuli okay the last thing that Pavlov was able to demonstrate was what's called second order conditioning or higher order conditioning and this means it would introduce a new neutral stimulus to it addition to a previously conditioned stimulus so what does that so in the case of second order conditioning we already have some conditioned stimulus that causes some conditioned response we ring a bell and the dog salivate so we've already taught something and now we're going to go to sort of a second layer of learning second-quarter conditioning and that means we're going to introduce a new neutral stimulus before the conditioned stimulus and then we're going to pair these repeatedly so we have a new stimulus than the usual conditioned stimulus in the conditioned response so for instance Pavlov would do something like turn on the light and then ring a bell and then the dog would salivate and he found that if he did this enough times he could actually get the dog to salivate to the light turning on in other words this neutral stimulus would now become a second-order conditioned stimulus and what the light would cause salivation and this is really interesting because the light has never been paired with food there was never a case where the light meant that food was coming all that the light meant was that the Bell is coming in the Bell meant that the food was coming right and so it's sort of a layer away from the original unconditioned stimulus and yet the dogs are still able to learn this association the light means the bell the Bell means food therefore they salivate to the light okay in the next video we'll look at some other research on classical conditioning and we'll also look at some of the constraints on classical conditioning the types of things that don't really work as well with this type of learning okay I hope you found this helpful if so please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more thanks for watching