PSYA01H3 Lecture : Course Notes P3
Document Summary
Learning involves the acquisition of new knowledge, skills, or responses from experience that result in a relatively permanent change in the state of the learner. The emphasis will be primarily on stimulus-response mappings and how they are formed. There will be very little discussion of cognitive states or processes which contrasts quite strongly with the methods that are more popular today. Behaviorists argued that learning"s permanent change in experience could be demonstrated equally well in almost any organism: rats, dogs, pigeons, mice, pigs, or humans. Watson"s firebrand stance was fueled in large part by the work of a russian physiologist, ivan pavlov. Pavlov was awarded for his work on the salivation of dogs. Pavlov studied the digestive processes of laboratory animals by surgically implanting test tubes into the cheeks of dogs to measure their salivary responses to different kinds of foods. The occurrence of some novel stimulus in the environment (ucs) tends to lead to a startle response (ucr).
