375: Historical Approach Pt2

1. Introspection and Structuralism are pretty much the same thing
1. Response to Structuralism was Behaviorism
2. Behaviorism 
1. John Watson
1. Instead of breaking the mind down into its different parts behaviorists decide to break behavior down into its different parts
2. Classical Conditioning (allows you to quantify behavior)
1. Breakdown
1. Unconditioned Stimulus (US)
1. "Beer Babe"
2. Unconditioned Response (UR)
1. Your natural reaction to the US
3. Conditioned Stimulus (CS)
1. Beer
4. Conditioned Response (CR)
1. UR each time you see the CS
2. Invention of Classical Conditioning
1. Aristotle was the inventor
2. Pavlov brought it to behaviorism
3. B. F. Skinner
1. Believed that all behavior could be explained by operant conditioning
2. Operant Conditioning
1. Difference is that you have to do something in order to get the reward where in classical conditioning you don't have to do something
1. Example
1. Parenting: you need to be 100% consistent in your reward/punishment system
3. Skinner Box
1. reward through a little portal, response with lever, can give rewards through foot shocks, etc.
2. Designed a crib sized skinner box for his kid (probably just a myth)
4. Felt his most valuable contribution to psychology was figuring out how you reward behavior (reward ratio)
1. What is the best ratio to have?
1. Unpredictable and variable reward system
4. Overview of Changes
1. Inability to account for all animal behavior indicated something might be wrong
1. Can't condition something like sickness to sound.  It can only be conditioned to tastes.
2. Work from Ethology
1. Father of Modern Ethology = Konrad Lorenz
3. Critical Period: a time when the animal is able to learn a particular information rapidly and with little exposure; if the time window is missed, the animal has either difficulty picking it up or it is imposible
1. Example: accuracy on grammar test correlated with age of arrival for subjects who arrived before puberty but not after puberty
1. This indicated a sensitive period that begins to shut down in the early teens
2. Inability to go from animal models to human behavior indicated it was incomplete
3. Posing abstract constructs suggested as the what was needed to solve these problems
4. Inspiration from other fields to use abstract constructs
5. Chomsky 1959
1. Behaviorist account of language is wrong
2. Language is generative, meaning that virutally everything you say and hear is novel.  It can't be the case that you understand it b/c of reinforcement in the past, b/c you've never heard it before
3. E.g.: "colorless green ideas sleep furiously"
1. This is a sentence that Chomsky was never rewarded for but is still able to use
6. Abstract Constructs
1. A theoretical set of processes and representations (e.g., a rule for language, or a strategy in memory)
1. Why do people forget phone numbers after 30 seconds?
1. STM?
2. STM has representation and processes.   It's like a mini-theory
3. This idea drove behaviorist nuts, because it violated one of their tenets.  Which one?
1. They deal only with observables (can't see STM)
7. What Could Replace Behaviorism?
1. Cognitive Approach
3. The Cognitive Approach
1. We are going to take both observable input and observable output but we are also going to talk about the processing that happens between input and output