Author Archives: Evan Michael O'hara

Observational learning

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Imagine learning how to do everything that you know today by reading it from a book or listening to someone describe it. You would have to continuously reread passages and play back voices and ultimately take way too much time trying to do simple tasks like brush your teeth or play a sport. Luckily, we don’t have to go through difficult procedures to learn most common tasks because we use observational learning. Observational learning is learning how to do something by watching, remembering, and repeating a new action.

In class we learned about observational learning in the form of a bobo doll. Children would learn and copy what they had seen with the bobo doll, which was to hit, kick, and throw the doll all around. Even if they were not violent kids to begin with, they would copy the behavior of the people that they saw interact with it before them. This shows how powerful observational learning can be because it can influence people to act in certain ways based on only the knowledge of what they have seen previously.

When I was a child I had to use observational learning to figure out how to ride a bike, and it was the best way that I could’ve learned how to do it. Since I was little, there was no way I could have been able to learn the motion of how to move my legs and the pedals without watching someone else do it first. After seeing my siblings ride their bikes, I was able to mimic their motion and eventually learn how to ride a bike. The same idea goes for sports. When I was learning to play lacrosse as a kid, I started off not knowing how to even pass the ball. It is not something you can explain to someone because you have to be able to feel it and create the correct motion to complete a pass. I would play with my dad and just watch him and see how he moved to throw the ball and try to copy exactly what he did and eventually it worked out. If I was given the equipment and a wall without someone to copy I would never have learned how to make a pass.

Observational learning is the key to acquiring most of our basic skills and without it, every day tasks would be nearly impossible. Just try explaining something simple to a friend with only words and I can almost guarantee that they will mess up somewhere. It is an essential part to our learning capabilities.

Retrieval Problems

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Trying to remember information can be a tricky situation, mainly because of one issue that we like to call Retrieval Problems. Two categories that can split from Retrieval Problems are Proactive and Retroactive memory. Proactive memory is when something from the past is blocking a more recent event that you are trying to remember, and Retroactive memory is essentially the opposite, when a more recent event blocks a past event.

With proactive memory, we remember past events when we are trying to recall a more recent event. I had this happen to me recently when I was trying to think of which NFL Football team won the Super Bowl last year, the year before the recent Broncos win. I was almost positive that the Giants had won the Super Bowl in 2013 when it was actually the Ravens. The Giants had won the game the year before the Ravens, and that was the game that I was replacing the more recent game with. I had replaced the past super bowl winner with the more present super bowl winner.

The opposite situation happened when I was trying to think of the day that my friends came home for Winter Break. Two of my friends go to West Virginia University, and a couple of days after we got home for spring break we were comparing the time that our two different schools were off for break. I was convinced that they had way more time on break then we did, because I had the dates wrong. I thought that they had come home for winter break on the 7th of December, when they had actually gotten off on the 17th of December, but the 7th is when they got off for spring break more recently. I had replaced the past break day of the month with the new break day of the month.

Sometimes it helps to put several different heads together to make sure you don’t have any retrieval problems interfering with you. That helped for me when comparing school break dates with my friends and when talking about super bowl past winners. You never know when one of these retrieval issues is going to sneak up on you so it is always good to check!

How Behaviorism relates to our lives

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One theory in class that we have discussed and applies to my life is the idea of Behaviorism. This idea focuses on the behaviors of animals mainly, and shows that mental events can be triggered by some sort of stimuli and lead to a preferred behavior. There is usually some sort of reward or payment in turn for this action. An example of this was the video clip from “The Office” that we watched in class. In the video, every time Jim’s computer makes a certain noise, he offers Dwight a mint. This continues for a while and Dwight does not notice that there is a pattern going on. Eventually, Dwight gets to the point where he hears the noise from Jim’s computer and immediately sticks his hand out for a mint, even though he was not offered one. He was subconsciously trained to receive a mint when he heard that noise, without even realizing it.

A similar situation to this that is close to me is going on right now at my sister’s house. She is currently pregnant, and they have a 5 year old pitbull dog that has been with them for the past three years. The dog is very calm, which is not stereotypical for his breed, but just as a safety precaution my sister and brother in law are teaching him to stay out of the baby’s room, just to make sure that there is no chance of him accidentally harming the baby. To start, they would reprimand him when he tried to enter the room and give him a small treat when he sat down outside of it. After these actions continued for a couple weeks, he learned to stop at the door and either lay down or go somewhere else in the house when either my sister or her husband entered the baby’s room. The stimulus for the dog was seeing someone enter the room while he went up to the doorway, and the reaction was him realizing he shouldn’t go in and changing his behavior. He does not even try to go into the room anymore. Now when the baby comes, the dog will not be able to bother it because he will know not to enter the room.

What Dwight from The Office and my sister’s dog have in common is that they were both trained to do certain actions and expect certain rewards for performing an ideal behavior. Dwight would get a mint when he heard the noise, and the dog originally would get a treat when the parents went into the baby’s room. This idea was practiced and studied in the 1920’s and it can still apply today.