AP Psychology Unit 6 Study Guide
Taylor Dumitru
Unit 6: Learning Study Guide
1. Learning is a relatively permanent change in an organism’s behavior due to experience. Nature’s most important gift to us may be our adaptability—our capacity to learn new behaviors that enable us to cope with ever-changing experiences.
2. Pavlov explored the phenomenon we call classical conditioning, in which organisms learn to associate stimuli and thus anticipate events. This laid the foundation for John B. Watson’s behaviorism, which held that psychology should be an objective science that studied only observable behavior. Pavlov would repeatedly present a neutral stimulus (such as a tone) just before an unconditioned stimulus (US), such as food, which triggered the unconditioned response (UR) of salivation. After several repetitions, the tone alone (now the conditioned stimulus [CS]) began triggering a conditioned response (CR), salivation. Unconditioned means “unlearned”; conditioned means “learned.” Thus, a UR is an event that occurs naturally in response to some stimulus. A US is something that naturally and automatically triggers the unlearned response. A CS is an originally neutral stimulus that, through learning, comes to be associated with some unlearned response. A CR is the learned response to the originally neutral but now conditioned stimulus.
3. Responses are acquired—that is, initially learned—best when the CS is presented half a second before the US. This finding demonstrates how classical conditioning is biologically adaptive because it helps organisms prepare for good or bad events. Higher order conditioning occurs when the conditioned stimulus from one conditioning procedure is paired with a new neutral stimulus, creating a second, often weaker, conditioned stimulus. Extinction refers to the diminishing of a conditioned response when the conditioned stimulus occurs repeatedly without the unconditioned stimulus. Spontaneous recovery is the reappearance, after a pause, of an extinguished
Unit 6: Learning Study Guide
1. Learning is a relatively permanent change in an organism’s behavior due to experience. Nature’s most important gift to us may be our adaptability—our capacity to learn new behaviors that enable us to cope with ever-changing experiences.
2. Pavlov explored the phenomenon we call classical conditioning, in which organisms learn to associate stimuli and thus anticipate events. This laid the foundation for John B. Watson’s behaviorism, which held that psychology should be an objective science that studied only observable behavior. Pavlov would repeatedly present a neutral stimulus (such as a tone) just before an unconditioned stimulus (US), such as food, which triggered the unconditioned response (UR) of salivation. After several repetitions, the tone alone (now the conditioned stimulus [CS]) began triggering a conditioned response (CR), salivation. Unconditioned means “unlearned”; conditioned means “learned.” Thus, a UR is an event that occurs naturally in response to some stimulus. A US is something that naturally and automatically triggers the unlearned response. A CS is an originally neutral stimulus that, through learning, comes to be associated with some unlearned response. A CR is the learned response to the originally neutral but now conditioned stimulus.
3. Responses are acquired—that is, initially learned—best when the CS is presented half a second before the US. This finding demonstrates how classical conditioning is biologically adaptive because it helps organisms prepare for good or bad events. Higher order conditioning occurs when the conditioned stimulus from one conditioning procedure is paired with a new neutral stimulus, creating a second, often weaker, conditioned stimulus. Extinction refers to the diminishing of a conditioned response when the conditioned stimulus occurs repeatedly without the unconditioned stimulus. Spontaneous recovery is the reappearance, after a pause, of an extinguished