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MCAT
Course: MCAT > Unit 11
Lesson 9: Learning- Learning questions
- Classical and operant conditioning article
- Classical conditioning: Neutral, conditioned, and unconditioned stimuli and responses
- Classical conditioning: Extinction, spontaneous recovery, generalization, discrimination
- Operant conditioning: Positive-and-negative reinforcement and punishment
- Operant conditioning: Shaping
- Operant conditioning: Schedules of reinforcement
- Operant conditioning: Innate vs learned behaviors
- Operant conditioning: Escape and avoidance learning
- Observational learning: Bobo doll experiment and social cognitive theory
- Long term potentiation and synaptic plasticity
- Non associative learning
- Biological constraints on learning
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Non associative learning
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Want to join the conversation?
- What's the difference between habituation and desensitization(8 votes)
- From my understanding, habituation is a decrease in the response to the stimulus that essentially starts from your baseline response. So if your baseline response is "50," anything trending down from that would be habituation.
Desensitization is a decrease to the heightened or sensitized response to the stimulus back down to baseline. So if you become sensitized and your heightened response is now "100," dropping back down to your baseline response of 50 would be desensitization.
I think you can only become desensitized if you have already been sensitized, if that makes sense.(13 votes)
- Confused at, if there is no reinforcement or punishment, what determines if you become sensitized or habituated to the stimulus? Temperment? Chance? Doesn't there have to be a consequence or absence of a consequence to your reaction that determines how you react the next time? 3:06(3 votes)
- Non-associative learning doesn't have to do with reinforcement or punishment. Your response/behavior (ie jumping out of the bed a certain height) is not controlled by a consequence. Instead, what determines sensitization or habituation is more of a neurological response and has to do with the time between stimuli and how your neurons are firing and responding.
In the example that they give, habituation would typically occur if the timing between the thunderclaps is really close together. When a thunderclap occurs, your neurons would fire in response, causing you to jump from your bed. If the thunderclaps are happening very frequently, your neurons would be firing a lot in response. However, to prevent over-firing of neurons, your neurons have a homeostatic response and will actually start firing less, so you become "habituated" to the thunderclaps and not jump as high from your bed.
The opposite homeostatic effect is observed in sensitization. The thunderclaps are most likely happening with greater time intervals between them, and we would observe a lower frequency of neural firing. As a result, your neurons will elicit a homeostatic response (opposite in direction to the one in habituation) and will start to fire more for each thunderclap, so you become "sensitized" to the thunderclaps and jump higher from your bed.
There is a lot more detail than what I gave in my explanation, and lot that is unknown about homeostatic neural activity, but I doubt that the MCAT requires knowledge of habituation/sensitization to this extent. What they have in the video should suffice.(6 votes)
- what is the phenomenon called in the middle, where response doesnt change to the same repeated stimulus?(4 votes)
- Isn't observational learning a form of non-associative learning? Also wouldn't latent learning fall into that category as well?(2 votes)
- Wouldn't the example from the popcorn burning with no punishment from the RA be non associative learning rather than operant conditioning?(1 vote)
- What's the difference between habituation and desensitization(0 votes)
- What is the difference between habituation and desensitization?(0 votes)
- What's the difference between habituation and desensitization(0 votes)
Video transcript
- Okay, let's draw a graph. Let's look at the horizontal axis. And let's think about this
as being the number of times that you hear thunder. Say you're sitting in your bedroom and you hear some loud thunder claps. Okay, so we've got six thunder claps. And now on the vertical axis, let's think about this
being how high you jump out of your bed when you hear them. Let's use a bit of an arbitrary measure. Let's say you typically
jump 10 centimeters. So one thing that could happen is that every time you heard a thunder clap, you could jump 10
centimeters out of your bed. You were surprised and you
jumped that much out of your bed. So the first time you hear it, you jump 10 centimeters
up out of your bed. Second time is the same,
third time is the same, fourth, fifth, and sixth. But the stimulus, which
is the thunder clap, results in more or less the same response. But let's think about this: What else can potentially happen? Well one of the other
things that could happen is that you may start to jump
less and less out of bed. Your response may diminish with every subsequent thunder clap. You may essentially start
getting used to the thunder claps and stop getting as worried. The first time you may startle a lot, but over time you may get less
and less and less startled and jump less and less out of bed. Now if this happened, this
actually has a particular name, and this is called habituation. And what habituation means is that we still have the same stimulus, but with every progressive
episode of this stimulus, our response decreases. Now can you see what else
can potentially happen? Another thing that can happen
is that with each thunder clap that we hear we start to
get more and more agitated, more and more frightened. And we start to jump higher
and higher out of bed. So what's happening here
and what we can say here, we're actually experiencing
something called sensitization. And what sensitization means
`is that the response increases with every episode of stimulus, so it's actually the
opposite of habituation. And what's important here is that habituation and sensitization are the two key forms of
non-associative learning. And when I say non-associative learning, focus on the associative. The reason why this is
non-associative learning is that it does not contain any
reinforcement or punishment. We're not rewarding or punishing this increase or decrease in response. So, we're not giving you a cookie every time you
jump higher out of bed or we're not attempting to give
you a reward or a punishment if you stay in bed and
don't respond as well. We're simply noticing
how your response changes in relation to the stimulus. And this is different to associative and operant conditioning, which do involve things like reinforcement and punishment, for example.