Associative Learning And Conditioning Theory

Organisms survive and succeed because of their ability to learn and adapt to changing circumstances and new demands. As discussed in the chapters of the present volume, an appreciation of the mechanisms and principles of learning and conditioning is fundamental to any analysis of normal behavior as well as to an informed understanding of our well being (including examination of such issues as anxiety and fear, brain-immune system interactions, drug addiction and abuse, emotional learning, and social behavior) and mental health (for example, autism, depression, helplessness and schizophrenia). The twenty-three chapters in this volume, written by a distinguished collection of internationally renowned scholars, articulate the basic, yet sophisticated, way in which learning and conditioning processes influence our everyday behaviors, both normal and maladaptive, and help explain a variety of clinically important phenomena and disorders.

This book is designed to help students organize their thinking about psychology at a conceptual level. The focus on behaviour and empiricism has produced a text that is better organized, has fewer chapters, and is somewhat shorter than many of the leading books. The beginning of each section includes learning objectives; throughout the body of each section are key terms in bold followed by their definitions in italics; key takeaways, and exercises and critical thinking activities end each section.

Traditional theories of associative learning have found no place for the possibility that the way in which events are perceived might change as a result of experience. Evidence for the reality of perceptual learning has come from those studied by learning theorists. The work reviewed in this book shows that learned changes in perceptual organization can in fact be demonstrated, even in experiments using procedures (such as conditioning and simple discrimination learning) of the type on which associative theories have been based. These results come from procedures that have been the focus of detailed theoretical and empirical analysis; and from this analysis emerges an outline of the mechanisms responsible. Some of these are themselves associative; others require the addition of nonassociative mechanisms to the traditional theory. The result is an extended version of associative theory which, it is argued, will be relevant not only to the experimental procedures discussed in this book but to the entire range of instances of perceptual learning.

Recent innovations in the laboratory study of conditioning and learning in animals have prompted the author to reexamine such traditional topics as classical and instrumental conditioning, reward and punishment, avoidance learning, excitatory and inhibitory conditioning and discrimination learning.

Theories of associative learning have a long history in advancing the psychological account of behavior via cognitive representation. There are many components and variations of associative theory but at the core is the idea that links or connections between stimuli or responses describe important aspects of our psychological experience. This Frontiers Topic considers how variations in association formation can be used to account for differences between people, elaborating the differences between males and females, differences over the life span, understanding of psychopathologies or even across cultural contexts. A recent volume on the application of learning theory to clinical psychology is one example of this emerging application (e.g., Hazelgrove & Hogarth, 2012). The task for students of learning has been the development, often with mathematically defined explanations, of the parameters and operators that determine the formation and strengths of associations. The ultimate goal is to explain how the acquired representations influence future behavior. This approach has recently been influential in the field of neuroscience where one such learning operator, the error correction principle, has unified the understanding of the conditions which facilitate neuron activation with the computational goals of the brain with properties of learning algorithms (e.g., Rescorla & Wagner, 1972). In this Frontiers Research Topic, we are interested in a similar but currently developing aspect to learning theory, which is the application of the associative model to our understanding of individual differences, including psychopathology. In general, learning theories are monolithic, the same theory applies to the rat and the human, and within people the same algorithm is applied to all individuals. If so this might be thought to suggest that there is little that learning theory can tell us about the how males and females differ, how we change over time or why someone develops schizophrenia for instance. However, these theories have wide scope for developing our understanding of when learning occurs and when it is interfered with, along with a variety of methods of predicting these differences. We received contributions from researchers studying individual differences, including sex differences, age related changes and those using analog or clinical samples of personality and psychopathological disorders where the outcomes of the research bear directly on theories of associative learning. This Research Topic brings together researchers studying basic learning and conditioning processes but in which the basic emotional, attentional, pathological or more general physiological differences between groups of people are modeled using associative theory. This work involves varying stimulus properties and temporal relations or modeling the differences between groups.

A comprehensive, multidisciplinary review, Neural Plasticity and Memory: From Genes to Brain Imaging provides an in-depth, up-to-date analysis of the study of the neurobiology of memory. Leading specialists share their scientific experience in the field, covering a wide range of topics where molecular, genetic, behavioral, and brain imaging techniques have been used to investigate how cellular and brain circuits may be modified by experience. In each chapter, researchers present findings and explain their innovative methodologies. The book begins by introducing key issues and providing a historical overview of the field of memory consolidation. The following chapters review the putative genetic and molecular mechanisms of cell plasticity, elaborating on how experience could induce gene and protein expression and describing their role in synaptic plasticity underlying memory formation. They explore how putative modifications of brain circuits and synaptic elements through experience can become relatively permanent and hence improve brain function. Interdisciplinary reviews focus on how nerve cell circuitry, molecular expression, neurotransmitter release, and electrical activity are modified during the acquisition and consolidation of long-term memory. The book also covers receptor activation/deactivation by different neurotransmitters that enable the intracellular activation of second messengers during memory formation. It concludes with a summary of current research on the modulation and regulation that different neurotransmitters and stress hormones have on formation and consolidation of memory.

Although many professionals in psychology (including the sub-disciplines of human learning and memory, clinical practice related to psychopathology, neuroscience, educational psychology and many other areas) no longer receive training in learning and conditioning, the influence of this field remains strong. Therefore, many researchers and clinicians have little knowledge about basic learning theory and its current applications beyond their own specific research topic. The primary purpose of the present volume is to highlight ways in which basic learning principles, methodology, and phenomena underpin, and indeed guide, contemporary translational research. With contributions from a distinguished collection of internationally renowned scholars, this 23-chapter volume contains specific research issues but is also broad in scope, covering a variety of topics in which associative learning and conditioning theory apply, such as drug abuse and addiction, anxiety, fear and pain research, advertising, attribution processes, acquisition of likes and dislikes, social learning, psychoneuroimmunology, and psychopathology (e.g., autism, depression, helplessness and schizophrenia). This breadth is captured in the titles of the three major sections of the book: Applications to Clinical Pathology; Applications to Health and Addiction; Applications to Cognition, Social Interaction and Motivation. The critically important phenomena and methodology of learning and conditioning continue to have a profound influence on theory and clinical concerns related to the mechanisms of memory, cognition, education, and pathology of emotional and consummatory disorders. This volume is expected to have the unique quality of serving the interests of many researchers, educators and clinicians including, for example, neuroscientists, learning and conditioning researchers, psychopharmacologists, clinical psychopathologists, and practitioners in the medical field.

Over the past century, educational psychologists and researchers have posited many theories to explain how individuals learn, i.e. how they acquire, organize and deploy knowledge and skills. The 20th century can be considered the century of psychology on learning and related fields of interest (such as motivation, cognition, metacognition etc.) and it is fascinating to see the various mainstreams of learning, remembered and forgotten over the 20th century and note that basic assumptions of early theories survived several paradigm shifts of psychology and epistemology. Beyond folk psychology and its naïve theories of learning, psychological learning theories can be grouped into some basic categories, such as behaviorist learning theories, connectionist learning theories, cognitive learning theories, constructivist learning theories, and social learning theories. Learning theories are not limited to psychology and related fields of interest but rather we can find the topic of learning in various disciplines, such as philosophy and epistemology, education, information science, biology, and – as a result of the emergence of computer technologies – especially also in the field of computer sciences and artificial intelligence. As a consequence, machine learning struck a chord in the 1980s and became an important field of the learning sciences in general. As the learning sciences became more specialized and complex, the various fields of interest were widely spread and separated from each other; as a consequence, even presently, there is no comprehensive overview of the sciences of learning or the central theoretical concepts and vocabulary on which researchers rely. The Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning provides an up-to-date, broad and authoritative coverage of the specific terms mostly used in the sciences of learning and its related fields, including relevant areas of instruction, pedagogy, cognitive sciences, and especially machine learning and knowledge engineering. This modern compendium will be an indispensable source of information for scientists, educators, engineers, and technical staff active in all fields of learning. More specifically, the Encyclopedia provides fast access to the most relevant theoretical terms provides up-to-date, broad and authoritative coverage of the most important theories within the various fields of the learning sciences and adjacent sciences and communication technologies; supplies clear and precise explanations of the theoretical terms, cross-references to related entries and up-to-date references to important research and publications. The Encyclopedia also contains biographical entries of individuals who have substantially contributed to the sciences of learning; the entries are written by a distinguished panel of researchers in the various fields of the learning sciences.