The Simplest Learning Theory So Far

Edwin Ray Guthrie was a professor of psychology at the university of Washington from 1914-1956 till his retirement. He is known for his simple approach to theory. He believed that theories for Thorndike, Pavlov and Watson were unnecessarily complex and too subjective. His principles match with Aristotle’s law of association.

His Learning Theory-

1.       The unique point of Guthrie’s learning theory was: the law of contiguity-> which he states as follows (1952) “a combination of stimuli which has accompanied a movement will on its recurrence tend to be followed by that movement. Note that nothing is here said about “conformity waves” or reinforcement or pleasant effects” .In other word what is being noticed becomes a signal for what is being done.

2.       Guthrie said that learning between a stimulus and its response gains its ultimate strength only in 1 trial. In totally it can be explained that what was done last in the presence of a set of stimulus tends to be repeated when the same set of stimuli recurs. This is called the Recency principle.

3.       Movement-produced stimuli- according to Guthrie a stimulus gives rise to a very small psychological response which in turn acts as a stimulus for the next response. Hence the stimuli-response is an extremely broken down set which integrate to form a whole act. It is diagrammatically explained below:                                                                                                                                        External Stimulation (knocking at the door) -> overt response (looking at it) -> movement-produced stimuli -> overt response(raising up to walk) -> movement-produced stimuli -> overt response (walking to the door) -> movement produced stimuli-> overt response(opening it).

4.       Guthrie rejected the notion of practice or reinforcement as they appear after the response.

5.       He believed forgetting was due to passage of time.

6.       Now Guthrie believed that learning to do a particular work does not need practice or reinforcement but breaking of habits to acquire a new one. He explained habit as a response that is associated with a large number of stimuli. There are three ways of breaking habits: 1. Threshold method. 2. Fatigue method. 3. Incompatible response method

7.       Punishment- the effectiveness of punishment is determined by what it causes the punished organism to do.

8.       Experiment conducted- Guthrie along with Houston observed escape of cats from a puzzle box. They used a large number of cats and noted that each cat learned the escape route in its own particular way. Every time the cat escaped, next time the cat produced the same responses that were produced the last time. This was referred to stereotyped behavior then.

9.       Application- Guthrie’s advice is to always practice the exact behaviors that are going to be demanded of us in addition to the exact conditions.

10.   Criticism- according to Guthrie very little transfer of learning takes place which is not true.

ATTENTION PLEASE!

William James (1890): “everyone knows what attention is. It is the possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thoughts. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from something in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition called “distraction” in French and “zerstreuhiet” in German.”

This definition of attention given 124 years earlier might apparently seem to clearly and distinctly define attention. It was until cognitive revolution during 1950s that the definition started to seem incompetent to the aspects and approaches of attention. After which different psychologists started to work on attention experimentally and to define it. Solso defined it as, “ the concentration of mental effort on sensory or mental efforts”. Here, Solso does not forget the mental focusing on stimuli. Titchner was the first to start experiment on attention. He rather used the term “ attensity” to explain an attribute of sensory experience comparable to hue or loudness. He realized the importance when he says that the doctrine of attention is the nerve of the whole psychological system. Although many scientists have made effort to define attention, there has been a reluctancy in defining due to a bunch of reasons. Primary reason is that visual attention is different to auditory which is different from tactual or olfactory attention. Immense work has been done on the former two than the latter two. The other reasons are the conflict in nature of attention. Lets take a look on the nature of attention now.

Lets take an example, at a party I ask everyone to pay attention to the stage where a cake is about to be brought by the hostess. While you are looking at the stage you are expecting a cake, with our past experience we know what a cake looks like, how it tastes. Here. Our attention is space based as we are looking at the stage. Suddenly then a chandelier falls from the ceiling, now your attention is no more towards the stage but rather on the chandelier. This is object based attention. By the same example, we also learn two approaches of attention. When we were paying attention to the stage it was a top-down process, we had expectations to what we are going to attend. Whereas when the chandelier fell our attention was bottom-up as we were not expecting it and was rather sudden.(top-down and bottom-up processes will be discussed in the next post)

If we start thinking about the nature of attention then preliminarily we might be satisfied by thinking it as a resource. Attention is something that helps us focus on a few (often important) stimuli from among the myriad of stimuli that surrounds us at any given time. Attention is the gateway to higher cognitive processes. In his book, Perception and Communication, Broadbent said that attention is the result of a limited capacity information processing system. Another notable aspect of attention that also proves it being resource is that with practice less attention or mental effort is required to do the same act. I also believe that this nature of attention has evolutionary traces of human being. We must always be able enough to select important stimuli to attend to from the unwanted once. The top-down approach of attention would have helped our ancestors to detect unusual and primarily harmful stimuli and survive in the environment.

us versus them

“Man is a social animal” . Social acceptance, social cognitions, extravertisms, are among the many aspects we take into account while our social interactions. So, quite easily we know how important is mixing with people and thus forming groups quite inevitable. Having used the world “group” it might not have been too difficult to conceive it. Although a classic difination, provided by Sherif suggests:

Whenever individuals belonging to one group interact collectively or individually, with another group or its member in terms of their group identifications we have an instance of intergroup behavior.

    Though, defining the meaning of “group” more precisely is problematic. Therefore to avoid large scale social conflicts and other problems relating defining groups in more specific ways, Tajfel(1978) proposed that a group is essentially a set of people who feel that they are a group. Tajfel also proposed that there is continuum of behavior between acting purely in terms of self and purely in terms of group. This means that one can never act totally as a group member, forgetting his/her individuality and vice-versa.

Just like formation of groups is inevitable same is the formation of many groups holding some differences than the others and then interactions between such groups. According to the social schema, during intergroup interactions, social categorization is a very likely cognitive process to happen. Without this process of social categorization, intergroup behavior cannot occur. Central to this is the concept of stereotyping. Stereotypes are practiced to preconceptions that mark out certain objects a s familiar or strange, emphasizing the differences, so that the slightly familiar is seen as very familiar and the somewhat strange as sharply alien. Stereotype ca also be defined as a simplified and relatively fixed image of all members of a culture or group. Their generalizations about people that are based on limited, sometimes inaccurate but often easily available information and are characterized by no or minimal contact with members of the stereotyped groups and on second-hand information rather than first-hand experience.

However, a single statement or attitude about the group of people that does not recognize the complex multi-dimensional nature of individual human beings irrespective of race, religion, ethnicity, age, gender or nationality. Stereotypes can be positive, negative or mixed, but are usually unfair and misleading. In general, they reduce individuals to a rigid, inflexible image.

     Stereotypes matter because they have EFFECTS. Lyons and Kashima (2003) showed that, when accounts are passed from one person to another, the true information is at a risk of not conforming to the stereotyped expectations and hence gradually being dropped. In the same year they also proved that the emphasis on stereotypical information was strongest when the story teller and their audience shared the same stereotypes. Memories also reflect stereotypes (Bellaza and Bower,1981). Fiske concluded that there is a tendency to remember what matches the stereotypical expectations more in complex social settings, where due to some reasons people failed to focus on information which is not in line with the stereotype. What effects does stereotyping have on those who are stereotyped? The effect is more importantly called “stereotyped threat”. Steele (1997) suggested that when an individual is aware that they could be the target of an negative or demeaning stereotype, there performance may be impaired on tasks relevant to that stereotype. Simple focus on stereotyped beliefs about other groups may take matters to prejudice and discrimination.

The flowchart below gives a summary.

Individualsà GROUPà more than one groupà “us” versus “them”à our’s: familiar as very familiar; their’s: somewhat strange as alien (STEREOTYPING)à overestimation of intergroup differencesà PREJUDICE AND DISCRIMINATION

PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORIES BEHIND SCHIZOPHRENIA

Schizophrenia is a disease of the brain, therefore it is likely to parallel disease of other organs for example, myocardial infarctions diabetes, whose courses are affected by PSYCHOSOCIAL stress. Hence, it is mandatory to consider both psychosocial and biological factors affecting schizophrenia.

Sigmund Freud holds the “fixations” responsible for many disorders. Similarly he postulated that schizophrenia resulted from developmental fixations that occurred earlier than those culminating in the development of neuroses. These fixations produce defects in the ego development. Fixations occurs to the time when the ego was not yet or had just began to be established. We know that the ego regulates our superego and id and is the only window to realty, regulates the inner drives, such as sex and aggretion. When ego functioning is impaired, the schizophrenia patients are cut with reality and hence generate some positive symptoms of hallucinations and delusions. Thus, intrapsychic conflict arising from the early fixations and the ego defect, which may have resulted from poor early object relations, fuel the psychotic symptoms (Kaplan and Saddock,2009).

Another psychoanalyst Margerat Mahler, described that there are distortions in the reciprocal relationship between the infant and the mother. The child is unable to separate from and progress beyond the closeness and complete dependence that characterize the mother-child relationship in the oral phase of development. As a result, the person’s identity never becomes secure.

Paul Federn hypothesized that the dysfunctioning of ego allows the hostility and aggretion to distort the mother infant relationship, which leads to eventual personality disorganization and vulnerability to stress. The onset of symptoms during adolescence occur when teenagers need a strong ego to function independently, to separate from the parents, to identify tasks , to control increased internal drives and to cope with intense external stimulation.

Harry Stack Sullivan viewed schizophrenia as a disturbance in interpersonal relatedness. The patients massive anxiety creates a sense of unrelatedness that is transformed into parataxic distortions, which are usually, but not always persecutory. To Sullivan schizophrenia is a adoptive method used to avoid panic terror and disintegration of the sense of self. The source of pathological anxiety results from cumulative experiential traumas during development.

Psychoanalytic theory also postulated that the various symptoms of schizophrenia have symbolic meaning for individual patients. For example, fantasies of the world coming to an end may indicate a perception that a person’s internal world has broken down. Feelings of inferiority are replaced by delusions of grandeur and omnipotence. Hallucinations may be substitutes for a patient’s inability to deal with objective reality and may represent inner wishes or fears. Delusions, like hallucinations are regressive, resitutive attempts to create a new reality or to express hidden fears or impulses.

how much is growth different from development?

The terms "growth" and "development" are often used interchangeably .In reality ,they are different ,though they are inseparable ; neither takes place alone .Growth refers to quantitative changes increases in size and structure .While  talking about children, their growth is when they increase in size and structure and also physically larger. Likely the growth of brain results in greater capacity of learning for remembering and for reasoning. Which accounts for mental growth . Therefore we can safely say that growth is physical as well as mental.

Development, by contrast , refers to qualitative and quantitative  changes. It may be defined as a progressive series of orderly, coherent changes . Progressive signifies that the changes are directional, that they lead forward than backward. Orderly and coherently suggest that there is a definite relationship between the changes taking place and those that preceeded or will follow them. 

POSTPARTUM PSYCHOSIS

Postpartum psychosis is a unique form of bipolar disorder. It affects the mothers of newly born babies. The disorder may start showing its signs from 1^st to 4^th weeks of baby birth. The general symptoms are being restless, agitated, having mood swings, behaving different from usual (of any form), finding difficulty in sleeping or not wanting to sleep at all. The major symptoms of the disorder are feeling paranoid, suspicious and fearful and having delusions and hallucinations ( a woman felt her child was a rat and wanted to bite her). The change in behavior and mood are very frequent. They may change from hour to hour or from day to day. The changes are rapid. The patient may be unaware of them but for the partners, family, friends the symptoms are quite visible. Women who are victims to bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are very prone to postpartum psychosis. In general, genetic factors have been found to be responsible. Menstural problems and menstural depression may also play there part of converting into postpartum psychosis. The main cause of the disorder is reduced amount of the hormone, estrogen. This hormone is in its minimum level just after baby birth or delivery. The symptoms may be misinterpreted with common post-delivery disorders like “baby blues” or “postnatal depression”. However postpartum psychosis is hugely different than these. Like said earlier, the characteristic feature of postpartum psychosis is paranoid feeling, delusions and hallucinations which is neither the case in “baby blues” nor in “postnatal depressions”. Hallucinations, delusions may or may not be of destructive nature. For instance, a 37 year old women jumped in front of a train with her 6-months old baby. But these are extreme cases. Suffering mothers can be easily treated by counseling. However, postpartum episodes are a psychiatric emergency.

HOW DO WE SEE MOVING OBJECTS

Have you ever imagined how would it be if we couldn’t perceive moving objects. World would have been like stagnant frames. Fortunately, it is not so. We see the train moving, the insect crawling, and numerous other examples. The perception of motion requires the following phenomenon.

1.   The retinal location

2.   Luminance

3.   Presence of reference points in the field of vision

4.   Context and a few more.

We must be aware of the fact that sudden movement, even in the periphery of our vision, are effective in capturing attention. Although, the fact is true that the threshold of motion at the periphery has to be greater than in centre, to be perceived. Quite generally luminance or brightness is directly proportional to the perception of motion of the object. The concepts of reference points come in when talking about more than two objects. When one object is stationary and the other moving we perceive the speed of the object to be ten times more than when the stationary object here is termed as the reference point. The effects of context on the perception of motion are revealed in an experiment by Brown(1935), involving motion transposition effect. It is perceived that velocity of the target tends to be inversely proportional to the size of the framework surrounding it. For example, if we see an aeroplane by standing on the runway (smaller frame), we see it move faster but when it goes far into the sky (larger frame) , we perceive it to move slower than before.