PSYC 2330 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Stimulus Control, Classical Conditioning, Reinforcement
Document Summary
Principles of learning lecture 15 (from last week) Emotional value: how much you like or dislike something. Motivational value: how much you want it or not. The substance-dependent individual wants to stop (constant desire); profound dislike for the drugs, but the behaviour continues. Clear dissociation between what they say they don"t like & what they do. Experiment: dopamine involved in liking but not wanting. Broke the wanting system in the brain (made it go away); used a toxin to kill neurons in the brain in the vta that contains dopamine neurons (killed them). Following these lesions, the animals had lower dopamine levels; produced sever aphagia (starve themselves to death). If you test the facial reactions of the animals to sweet & bitter tastes, they produce the same reactions that they normally would. This means that they still like the food, they just do not want the food = motivationally blind; does not care.
