<aside> 📙 Chapters:

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Chapter 1: Background and Rationale for the Study of Learning and Behavior

• This chapter focuses on contemporary studies of learning and behavior theory
• Learning is a biological process that facilities our survival and promotes our well-being
• Learning plays an important role in how organisms adapt to their environments
• We can learn new responses
• Learning improves how physiological systems operate to accomplish important biological functions like digestion and reproduction
• Learning can be involved in acquiring a new behavior, but learning can also consist of the decrease or loss of a previously performed response

Learning to withhold or inhibit responses is just as important as learning to make responses

• Some things we learn with expert training (calculus), but other things we learn through routine interactions with our social and physical environment
• The behaviorist tradition of psychology emphasizes analyzing behavior in terms of its antecedent stimuli and consequences
• Most of what we do occurs without conscious awareness
• Features of our environment gain the capacity to trigger our behavior whether we like it or not
  • Behavioral psychology
• How behavioral impulses are learned

Historical Antecedents

• Theoretical approaches to the study of learning have their roots in the philosophy of René Descartes
• Before Descartes, the view was that human behavior is entirely determined by conscious intent and free will
  • The actions of people were not thought to be automatic or determined by natural laws
  • Everything that one did was thought to be the result of his/her will or intent
• Descartes recognized that people did many things automatically in response to stimuli
• Dualism: a dualistic view of human behavior
  • Dualism says that there are 2 classes of human behavior:
    • Voluntary (controlled by the mind)
    • Involuntary (controlled by reflexes)
• Involuntary behavior: automatic reactions to external stimuli, mediated by a mechanism called reflex
  • Reflexive behavior
  • Stimuli detected → Nerves relay information to brain → Nerves send notion for action to muscles → Involuntary response created
  • Sensory input reflected in response output
  • Stimuli = cause of all involuntary output
    • Involuntary responses are produced by neural circuits that include the brain
  • Descartes says that the same nerves transmitted information from the sense organs to the brain and from the brain to the muscles