Guys, You Need to Watch The Office

         As we finished learning about consciousness, this week we turned to learning. Before learning about the way in which people learn, we first had to learn the psychological definition of learning. David Myers (who wrote our textbook) came up with a basic definition: learning is a relatively permanent change in an organism's behavior due to experience. Thomas Rocklin (I have no idea who he is) added on to this definition: learning is a relatively permanent change in an organism's behavior is a given situation brought about by his or her repeated experiences in that situation, provided that the behavior change cannot be explained on the basis of native response tendencies, maturation, or temporary states.

         Pretty much, learning is a temporary change in a behavior that isn't affected by natural growth or tendencies.

         Now that we've got that down, we turn to look at classical conditioning, the first method of learning. This method is mainly based off of Pavlov's studies and experiments. In one of his experiments, a dog was brought food and began to salivate. When a bell was paired with the food, the dog began to associate the bell with the food and eventually began to salivate only when the bell rang.

         This brings about the definition of classical conditioning: learning by associating two stimuli and anticipating events. Basically, an unconditioned stimulus (food) is paired with a neutral stimulus (bell), which brings about an unconditioned response (salivation). However, when the bell (now the conditioned stimulus) is not paired with the food, it still produces salivation (now a conditioned response).

          There is also higher-order conditioning, where after the bell becomes conditioned, when the it is paired with a light, the light also becomes a conditioned stimulus. This causes the dog to salivate at the food, the bell, and the light.

         While you are able to learn this way, you can also lose this association of two stimuli. Extinction occurs when you would show the bell for a long time without bringing out the food, therefore causing the dog to no longer respond to the bell. It has unlearned the association. However, spontaneous recovery could occur, where the next day, the dog would still respond, but it would not be as intense and it would not take as long to cause extinction.

         As we were learning this, I was reminded of an episode of The Office. If you do not watch this show, you are missing out on an important aspect of life. Seriously. Watch the show. Anyway, in this episode, titled "Phyllis' Wedding", Jim (one of the main characters) classically conditions Dwight (another main character) to crave a mint every time he hears the default Windows "unlock workstation" sound on Jim's computer. This is a prank (duh, and if you don't watch the show then you won't know why I said duh), and eventually Jim makes the sound on his computer and doesn't offer Dwight a mint. Either way, it's an episode worth watching.

Watch Jim's experiment here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nE8pFWP5QDM
YOU WON'T REGRET IT!!