Non associative learning

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 thunderclaps okay so we've got six thunderclaps and now on the vertical axis let's think about this being how high you jump out of your bed when you hear them oh let's use a let's use a bit of an arbitrary measure let's do let's say you typically jump 10 centimetres so one thing that could happen is that every time you heard a thump thunderclap you could jump 10 centimetres as out of you're out of your bed you were surprised and you jump that much out of your bed so the first time you hear it you jump 10 centimetres up out of your bed second time is the same third time is the same fourth fifth and sixth the stimulus which is the thunderclap 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 can happen is that you may start to jump less and less out of bed your response may diminish with every subsequent thunderclap you may essentially start getting used to the thunderclaps and stop getting as worried the first time you may startle a lot but over time you may get less and less and less I'm startled and jump less and less out of bed now if this happened this actually has a particular name and this is called a [ __ ] ooh a tion and what habituation means is that we still have the same stimulus but with every progressive episode of the stimulus of response decreases now can you see what else can potentially happen another thing that can happen is that with each thunderclap that we hear we start to get more and more agitated more and more and we start to jump higher and higher out of bed so what's happening here and what we can say here we are 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-associated 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 high out of bed or we're not attempting to give you a reward or punishment if you stay in bed and don't respond as well we're simply noticing how you 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