1.4 Further Concepts of Classical Conditioning and Operant Conditioning
Presented by Sevilay Dogan
To continue on from lesson 1.3, let’s have a look at some further concepts of Classical Conditioning and Operant Conditioning.
Professor John Pearce of Cardiff University in Wales was interested in the concept of learning in animals. Let’s take a look at one of his experiments which he conducted with pigeons:
Phase 1
He presented a pigeon with various different pictures, 30 of which were pictures of trees. He found that pigeons were able to learn that pecking at pictures of trees would bring them food and pecking at other pictures did not.
Phase 2
In the second phase of the experiment, the same pigeon was presented with a new set of images of trees and found that the pigeon again, was able to distinguish and recognise pictures of trees. So the pigeon had successfully formed the concept of a tree and was able to distinguish between tress vs ferns.
Phase 3
To further test the pigeons and their understanding of concepts, the pigeon was presented with pictures of Picasso and Monet and the pigeon again, was able to learn that only Picasso’s work would bring them food.
Conclusion
The experiment concluded that the pigeon could generalise to the concept of a tree and could successfully discriminate between a tree and a fern. They could also generalise to Picasso’s style of painting and to those that were similar but could also discriminate between different style of paintings so that’s pretty impressive.
Classic conditioning is broken down into four concepts: Generalisation, Discrimination, Extinction and Spontaneous Recovery.
See if you can match which example relates to which concept (don’t be concerned if you aren’t sure – have a guess, and we will provide an explanation of each concept after you have submitted your guess by clicking the “Finish Quiz” button):
