What is the conditioned response

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What is the conditioned response?

• Traditional view (S-R view)
• - A specific response (muscle movement) becomes
  associated with a stimulus.
• - The experimenter can pretty much decide what
  that is.
• - Evidence

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Response Shaping

• You can shape animals to do a variety of tricks.
• A cat playing table tennis.
• A pigs going through a morning routine (making
  breakfast, pick up clothes, vacuuming)
• But..

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Problems with the traditional view

• 1. People noticed that animals often use a
  variety of responses to receive reinforcement.
• 2. Specific responses they learn by shaping are
  also influenced by their instinctive behaviors.

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Variety of responses

• Muenzinger (1928)
• Trained guinea pigs to press a bar.
• Animals pressed the bar with One paw, another
  paw, and teeth.
• Lashley (1924)
• Trained monkeys to manipulate an object with one
  hand.
• They could also do it with another hand.

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Many concluded.

• They dont associate particular responses to
  reinforcement.
• They learn how the environment is structured
  (i.e., what produces reinforcement).
• They respond with whatever responses that produce
  reinforcement.

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Response is.

• Organisms adaptation to the environment.
• Even Skinner recognized this.
• Operant - a collection of responses that produce
  the same reinforcing effect.
• So, the response is more complicated than what
  most behaviorists assumed.

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Instinctive drift

• Even the specific responses produced by shaping
  cannot escape animals instinctive behavior.
• Breland Breland (1961)
• Animal trainers - had difficulty
• Chicken, raccoon, pig.
• All drifted to instinctive behavior

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So.

• Animals are trying to adapt to the environment.
• So, of course, instinctive behaviors becomes
  apparent because these are the behaviors they
  have been using to adapt to the environment.

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Radial Maze

• Thats why they are good at Radial Maze.
• They are good at avoiding revisiting empty arms.
• This is the way they forage in their natural
  environment.
• Conditioning is easy if the task mimics the
  natural environment.

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T-maze

• Kamil (1978)
• Trained rats to use either stay or shift
  strategy.
• stay - go back to the same arm
• shift - go to the different arm
• Which is easier to learn? - shift because they
  have no reason to go back to where they have
  already depleted food.

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• But, if they are not allowed to deplete the food
  - shift strategy becomes harder to learn (Haig
  et al., 1983).
• So, response they learn - adaptive response

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How association is formed?

• Two views
• 1. Contiguity - Law of contiguity
• 2. Contingency - how response predicts
  reinforcement.

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ExperimentHammond (1980)

• Manipulated the probability of receiving a
  reinforcer.

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Predictions and Results

• Contiguity - no difference
• Contingency - association is formed only when
  response is predictive of reinforcer.
• Results - contingency

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Superstitious Behavior

• Skinner (1948)
• pigeons learn superstitious behavior if it occurs
  with reinforcement.
• Accidental contiguity produces an association.
• Staddon Simmelhag (1971)
• more complicated than that
• Two categories - interim and terminal
• only the terminal behavior is contiguous

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• Staddon (1983)
• interim behavior serves other purpose
• exercise and grooming
• Skinner was wrong.

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How humans learn?

• Animals learn instrumental condition by
  developing association.
• How about human?
• Wasserman (1990)
• how human develops causal belief.
• we respond because we believe that an event
  causes reinforcer.

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Experiment

• Key press - followed by a light
• No key press - followed by a light
• Manipulated the probability of these.
• P(OR) P(O-R)
• Asked subjects to rate their causal beliefs.

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Results

• Showed humans respond like animals.
• Influenced both by P(OR)and P(O-R).
• We are sensitive to contingency.
• These can be predicted by

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Wagner and Rescorla theory

• ?V ? (? - V)
• Competition
• Stimulus - Reinforcer
• Response - Reinforcer
• Each occurrence strengthens either association.

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So what?

• Two interpretations
• 1. Simple association is responsible for causal
  belief.
• 2. Causal belief underlies conditioning.
• Many believe 2 applies to human and higher
  nonhuman organisms.

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Role of hippocampus

• Some want to know the neural basis of
  conditioning.
• How hippocampus is used in instrumental
  conditioning.
• Morris (1981)
• important for spatial learning.
• Used water maze.

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Water maze experiment

• 1. Cue place
• 2. Place
• 3. Cue only.
• 4. Place random.
• Difficult to learn 4

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• Rats with hippocampal lesion had difficulty
  performing 2.
• Rats with hippocampa lesion perform similarly to
  rats without lesion when cue is visible.

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Other theories

• Olton et al. (1979)
• hippocampal lesion causes a deficit in holing on
  to information for short-term.
• Experiment
• a. Never to enter Arm 9
• b. Avoid revisiting an empty arm.
• Found - deficit was found on b and not a

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• Sutherland and Rudy (1991)
• hippocampal lesion causes a deficit in forming
  configural association.
• Respond light or tone but not when both are
  present.
• Lesioned animals could not learn this.

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Long term potentiation

• Some suspect that long term potentiation is
  responsible for associative learning.
• Increase in synaptic connections.
• When both pre- and post-synaptic neurons are
  simultaneously active.
• Last relatively long time.

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• Morris et al. (1986)
• blocking LTP in hippocampus is the same as
  lesioning hippocampus.
• Injected drug to block LTP
• Keith Rudy (1990)
• skeptical