Classical Conditioning in the Classroom

Classical Conditioning

Ever wonder why you may reach for your phone when you hear someone else’s phone go off that happens to have the same ringtone as you? Or how cats are trained not to jump on furniture? Classical conditioning is the answer. Classical conditioning is the way in which behavior is taught through association.

How Conditioning Works

For example, a cat naturally doesn’t care about a couch and will climb on it all day if it wanted to. The couch in this case would be the Neutral Stimulus (NS) because it elicits no natural response from the cat. Anybody who knows anything about cats knows cats hate getting prayed with water. The spray bottle is the Unconditioned Stimulus (US) because it naturally elicits an Unconditioned Response (UR) which is running away. Now imagine if we begin to consistently spray the cat with water every time it jumps up on couch. Eventually, the cat will associate the couch with getting sprayed with water and won’t go on the couch anymore. The NS that the cat didn’t care about has now become the Conditioned Stimulus (CS) because we taught it to associate a harmless couch with the feeling of getting sprayed. This aversion to the couch out of fear is the Conditioned Response (CR) we were looking for.

Over time, the cat may Discriminate the couch with other pieces of furniture and refrain from jumping on those too. Consistency is key as well, however. After some time, the cat may quit responding to the association and this conditioning would experience Extinction. In this case, it’s important to condition again to elicit Spontaneous Recovery.

Conditioning for Educators

Can you identify what the NS, US, UR, CS, and CR is?

When I personally was a kid growing up in the classroom, my peers and I had so much energy and would constantly talk while the teacher was talking. My teacher found a way to safely condition us to stop talking at inappropriate times by turning off the lights and lecturing us. Every time our teacher would turn off the lights, she would explain how disrespectful we were being towards our fellow classmates and to us and that made us feel extremely embarrassed and quiet. After days of doing that, whenever we got too noisy, as soon as the lights got turned off, we all immediately stopped talking and then knew we were being disrespectful.

- - - - NS: The lights
      - US: Getting lectured
      - UR: Feeling embarrassed
      - CS: The lights
      - CR: Feeling embarrassed

Why this is Important

Classical conditioning can be an easy and non-invasive way to elicit or discourage a specific behavior from students. In my past experience, my teacher successfully gained control back of the noisy classroom until we understood that talking out of turn is disrespectful and we shouldn’t do that. Teachers everywhere should take advantage of such a great psychology technique to indirectly better their students!

Social Attachment and Parenting

Some Reflection…

When was the first time you were separated from your parents for an extended amount of time? Maybe you were staying at grandma’s house for the night or maybe it was your first day of preschool or kindergarten. Do you remember how you reacted or how your parents recall you reacted? Psychology tells us that how every human is born with an innate need for social interaction and attachment.

Infantile Attachment

As humans, we rely on bodily contact to form social connections at younger ages as opposed to forming connections with those who provide nourishment. Once we are born, we all seek attachment but unfortunately, sometimes that is not always the case. Recall to the questions I asked before and try to remember how you reacted when this connection with your parents was detached. While with almost every child there is distress upon separation, with most children, the return of their caregiver comforts them almost immediately. With children that have a more insecure attachment with their caregiver, they will continue to be in distress once reunited. Regardless, when children are neglected from making any connection whatsoever at a young age, they potentially may grow up withdrawn, frightened, or unable to develop speech.

How Parenting Impacts Development (Usually)

When growing up and developing these relationships with their caregivers, children may be parented in an authoritarian, permissive, and/or authoritative manner. This is when a parent may be very strict, submissive, or a mix between the two respectively. Commonly, when a child develops in an authoritarian environment, they potentially develop lower self-esteem. In a permissive household where their every need is provided, children may not develop enough self-reliance throughout their childhood. While this isn’t confirmed, consistently we see that in households that uphold authoritative parenting with a mix of both benefit the child the most by giving them more social competence.

Pavlov’s dogs and Behaviorism

In the 1920s, behaviorism became a popular form of psychology. It was the idea that external stimuli triggered mental events and that is how we learn. One very influential psychologist on this perspective was Ivan Pavlov. He created the experiment which is now known as “Pavlov’s dogs.” In this, he would train a dog using a bell. Each time he fed the dog he would notice the dog would salivate. He then introduced the bell in when the dog was being fed. He would place the food down, ring the bell and the dog would begin to salivate. Repetition was key, but over time the dog became accustomed to this bell sound and associated it with food. What Pavlov discovered was that if the dog expected that the sound of the bell was associated with mealtime, the dogs would salivate. He kept conducting this experiment over and over to ensure his data was accurate, and he kept getting the same results. By the end of the experiment, no food was necessary to get the dog to salivate, only the chime of the bell.

When we first got my two westies, everyone in the house made an agreement to train them to go outside. My stepmom had the idea of attaching a bell to the door, so the puppies could get used to hitting it when they needed to go outside. We started by walking them to the door, hitting the bell ourselves, then allowing them to go outside. We did this for a couple of months and then stopped walking them to the door. Because they were so used to the sound of the bell meaning they could go outside, they would walk to the sliding door themselves and hit the bell and wait patiently for someone to let them outside. They learned this behavior just as the dogs in Pavlov’s experiment did overtime and by removing the initial factor. In Pavlov’s experiment it was the food, in us at home version it was us walking the puppies to the door. The bells in both cases acted in the same manner and the outcome was similar. Pavlov believed that you could train anyone to do anything using this method and I do believe he is right. It is fairly simple, the idea is really just having that person associate a certain thing with a particular outcome, and over time it will begin to happen on its own.

Can You tell the Difference between when the Sympathetic vs Parasympathetic Nervous System is Working?

Have you ever stopped and thought about how our bodies and brain just know what to do in certain situations? Well you can thank your autonomic nervous system for playing a large role in allowing our body to work in the way it does. The autonomic nervous system is a control system that regulates many bodily functions like heart rate, digestion, respiratory rate, and pupillary action. There are two main components of the autonomic system called the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system controls homeostasis and the bodies rest and digest response. This means that it controls the body’s response while at rest. These neurological pathways are longer and slower. The sympathetic nervous system’s main purpose is to mobilize the body’s fight-or-flight response. This system prepares the body to react to stressful environmental factors. When the sympathetic nervous system is active it results in muscle contraction, increase in heart rate, and pupils to dilate. These two systems do not usually function at the same time. This is because when each system is in action it requires more blood for the organs it has control over. When scared the body will divert blood from the digestive tract to sympathetic nerve functions to be able to carry out muscle contractions or run.

You can probably recall moments that you remember you sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous system in action. I can recall a moment last week when my roommate scared me. I walked into my apartment very late at night and did not think she was there. It was very dark and quite as I walked into my room. Once I was in my room, I heard the floor boards creaking and movements in the other room. I got so scared that my palms turned sweaty and I could feel my heartbeat racing. I thought a burglar was in my home. She then called my name and I immediately felt relief. My heart stopped beating hard in my chest and I all my tense muscles immediately relaxed. When I was scared my sympathetic nervous system kicked in which resulted in sweating, increased heart rate, and muscle contraction. Once I realized I was no longer in danger my parasympathetic nervous system took control. This explained why I felt more relaxed and stopped sweating.

This is just one simple example of the parasympathetic vs sympathetic nervous system. If you pay attention to your body throughout your daily life and can probably be able to tell when your sympathetic vs parasympathetic system is working.

Bibliography

Low, P. (n.d.). Overview of the Autonomic Nervous System – Brain, Spinal Cord, and Nerve Disorders. Retrieved from https://www.merckmanuals.com/home/brain,-spinal-cord,-and-nerve-disorders/autonomic-nervous-system-disorders/overview-of-the-autonomic-nervous-system

Parasympathetic vs Sympathetic Nervous System. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.diffen.com/difference/Parasympathetic_nervous_system_vs_Sympathetic_nervous_system

Sympathetic vs. Parasympathetic. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.softschools.com/difference/sympathetic_vs_parasympathetic/143/

Pay Attention – You Can’t Afford to Miss This

First, a Test

In one of my lectures here at Penn State, a professor of mine gave the entire class a task that you can also try out for yourself!

- Take out your stopwatch app on your phone
- Time how long it takes you to count down from 10-1 and then immediately go up from a-j (10, 9, 8…h, i, j)
- Now alternate between each descending number and each sequential letter and time it (10, a, 9, b, 8, c…)
- Compare your two times

Well… How well did you do?

Just like most of my class and me, there’s a good chance you didn’t do as well as you did with the first sequence. As humans, it is almost impossible to multitask as shown here in this little experiment. Our minds work much better focused on one task rather than trying to divide our cognitive attention between two things simultaneously. While this may feel like just a drawback, psychophysics tells us that there are also several benefits from selective attention.

Attention and Psychophysics

Psychophysics focuses around how our minds psychologically experience different stimuli in our environment such as the brightness of a light or the volume of a sound. There is so much going on in our environment at every given moment that it is literally impossible to process it all. For example, think of everything your body is physically touching right now. It’s impossible to consciously focus on the chair you’re sitting in, every light shining around you, the shoes on your feet and so on. Our minds are adapted to put mental effort into important things while ignoring the things that are not. This is why you stop feeling your shoes after you initially put them on. Sensory adaptation ignores the stimuli that has been constantly there. However, this mental and natural ability to focus on the important stimuli showcases our selective attention.

Attention has several benefits and drawbacks in our every day life. As Dr. Harry Haladjian puts it, “we need not be conscious of this attentive processing for it to influence behavior — that’s why we can navigate effortlessly around our home” (Haladjian). This emphasizes that not all pieces of information need to be consciously focused on for our minds to be able to process them.

The Drawbacks of Selective Attention

Unfortunately, our attention isn’t always the most reliable it can be. Whenever our selective attention is extremely focused, we can experience what is called “change blindness”. In other words, when we are preoccupied with something and our attention is fully invested in one thing, we can fail to observe other huge changes in our environment. This is why it is much more dangerous for a new driver to talk and drive than it is for people who have had their licenses for longer. They are so focused on driving that trying to multitask and pay attention to both the road and their friend is almost impossible. For the experienced driver, while it is still dangerous, driving comes more natural and second-nature to them; thus, they can better hold a conversation and be alert for changes on the road.While being taught of this very topic, my psychology professor at Penn State presented to the class this video:

The whole lecture hall laughed at how average people could be so blind to such a drastic change in their environment. Little did we know, while we were so preoccupied focusing on the video, our professor went into the hallway and proceeded to change his dress shirt from white to black. Even though we have been watching him lecture for over 45 minutes, hardly anyone in the lecture hall of 300 noticed his shirt had completely changed once he resumed lecturing.

Our brains are wired to work smarter and not harder in order to get you the information you need every day. It’s up to you to consciously observe life and the little things around you.

Works Cited

777Skeptic. YouTube, 26 Aug. 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBPG_OBgTWg.

Haladjian, Harry Haroutioun, and Carlos Montemayor. “The Evolution of Conscious Attention.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 23 Feb. 2016, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-consciousness/201602/the-evolution-conscious-attention.

Blog Post 1: Peripheral Nervous System

A few summers ago, I started to get more into psychological thrillers and horror movies, despite the fact that I’ve always been very easily scared. Still, something about these types of movies is so interesting to me, so I began to see them in theaters.

I remember seeing a few that were kind of unnerving, like Split and Get Out, but none that really got me. It was when I saw the movie, The Quiet Place, that I was really caught off guard by the suspense and the action. So much so, that I experienced physical symptoms during the movie— and even after.

This connects to the nervous system, specifically the sympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is what controls many of your “fight or flight” responses. It causes involuntary reactions to “arousing” events by doing things like quickening your heart rate or dilating your pupils.

In my case, with the movie, my heart rate picked up and my teeth chattered completely involuntarily. The scary movie put me on edge, and my sympathetic nervous system responded by triggering these physical symptoms.

The counterpart of the sympathetic nervous system is the parasympathetic nervous system, which also triggers involuntary changes in your body, but in more of a calm way. For example, when the movie ended and my boyfriend squeezed my hand, signaling to me that everything is okay and that it was just a movie, my heart rate started to slow without me purposefully telling it to. I felt more at ease.

Both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are part of a greater nervous system: the Autonomic branch of the Peripheral Nervous System. The autonomic branch is what controls the involuntary, automatic actions that outside triggers may cause. This is different than the Somatic branch of the Peripheral nervous system, which is responsible for voluntary movements, like picking up a pencil.

I experienced the Somatic side of things when I covered my eyes with my hands during the movie or turned my head away.

While it’s reassuring to know that the sometimes overwhelming reactions my body has are perfectly logical, it’s safe to say that I probably won’t be watching a scary movie any time soon.

Blog #1 | PSY 100

Importance of “attention” in our lives.

Hey guys, my name is Sultan, and this is my first blog for Psychology class. I’m currently a rising sophomore at Penn State, double majoring in Psychology and Finance (not the typical mix, I know). I’m currently involved in the Psychology 100 course. So far, it has been a great experience and I love how the topics we learn in class can actually affect our real day-to-day lives. Our professor, Dr. Wede, does an amazing job by giving us real examples and showing videos to help us understand that this course is not only theoretical but practical, as well. Today in class we learned about Psychophysics. This fancy word just describes our relationship with the outside world and how we react to physical events. Furthermore, we talked about the Sensory Adaptation and how we are getting used to different things even if we hate them at the beginning. This led us to one of the most interesting topics in this course, which is Attention. The easiest way to understand this is to realize that the world contains more information that we can fully interpret or process, and, therefore, we need to focus on something specific, something that we are interested in. That’s where attention comes into play. Attention is a powerful force. It can make you experience an “inattentional blindness”, which is when you are failing to detect visible objects when your attention directed somewhere else. All of you probably had this problem when you lost something like your phone, but it was actually right in front of you or even in your hands. “When you are busy doing something else, you can fail to observe even really significant things”. This is how Selective Attention works, and by learning it you can understand how people “look” but don’t “see”. This is why it is really dangerous to drive and text at the same time, and you might even forget that you are driving a car at some point. But sometimes this might be pretty handy for us. Whenever you need to process information that is really important, Selective Attention will help you with that. Most of you have this friend that can do work without hearing any noises around, like loud music or people screaming. These kind of people can’t get easily distracted and it helps them a lot in their professional/school life. While others get distracted by every little thing and can never finish their work, because there is always something else you can do. I’m more like a second type of guy (it can take me the whole day just to finish one task). But after attending today’s class, I realized that our attention and vision are really inefficient, because we can be tricked so easily and there are so many different kind of illusions out there (literally just google “visual illusions” and you will be shocked). So, I thought that if we can trick it then we can improve it. I was right. There are so many different methods to improve your attention span, such as meditating (my favorite one), exercising, staying hydrated, etc. After that, I was shocked how easy it is to concentrate your attention on something for a long period of time. It helps me everyday now in all kind of tasks and it’s all started because of the lecture in my Psychology class. That’s why I believe that PSY100 is the best class in college. Thank you.