>> And to finish off the chapter, I want to look at some
of the different theories behind learning and memory.
So, first up is Pavlov and classical conditioning, and classical conditioning is
when you take a conditioned stimulus.
You associated it with something that has not yet been conditioned
to produce a conditioned response.
So, that probably doesn't make a lot of sense, but let's look at the example
of Pavlov and the salivating dogs.
So, the conditioned stimulus is food, right?
When I show dogs food, I get my conditioned response, which is they salivate.
Now every time I give dogs food, I'm going to pair that with a bell.
Before this happened, when they heard a bell, nothing happened, right?
But now every time I feed them, I'm going to ring a bell.
What's going to happen is that bell is now going to become attached to that food in their minds
and is going to create them to salivate.
So now you can actually remove the food from the equation, ring the bell, and the dogs salivates.
That is what classical conditioning is.
Another form of conditioning is operant conditioning.
The person we tend to think of when we talk about operant conditioning is Skinner.
And Skinner, basically said if a behavior is followed by a reinforcement,
something that makes it more likely to happen again, it's more likely to happen again.
And so, there's two ways you can look at reinforcement.
Positive is when you add something that they like, you know, that they want.
Or negative is when you take away something they don't like to make it more likely.
Both increase behavior.
On the flipside, you can also use punishment with operant conditioning.
Punishment is anything that is designed, in the behaviorist sense --
so, were not talking about parenting or teaching at this point.
Anything that decreases behavior.
So, if we want to decrease behavior with positive punishment,
we're going to put something bad.
We're going to make something bad happen afterwards,
so that they're less likely to happen.
Whereas negative punishment is to take away something they like.
So, removing privileges, for instance.
So, a lot of people use operant conditioning without realizing it.
When someone does something we like, we might give them a high-five or smile or say good job.
When someone does something we don't like, we might cut you know can't look away or, you know,
scowl or do things that make it less likely that behavior happens again.
Another big name is Watson, and Watson also used classical conditioning, and he really thought
that our fears and our emotional responses were conditioned.
And so, he really liked giving parenting advice, and what he is famous for is the condition
of little Albert, conditioning of little Albert.
And so, essentially can't he taught little Albert to be afraid of rats by pairing those
with things that were frightening, and he really did good job, and it's actually kind of sad.
And so, pretty soon, little Albert was afraid of the rat, because he was afraid
of the negative things that were going to happen when he saw the rat.
Watson also contributed greatly to advertising, because we discovered through his work
that when you pair something with something we like, we're more likely to buy it.
So, you can blame him for some of the advertisements that you see these days.
We also have Bandura and his social learning theory.
And so, if you've ever heard of the Bobo doll experiment, that would be Bandura,
and he didn't believe that learning happened through conditioning.
But he believed it happened by -- through modeling and imitation.
So, in the experiment, children either -- a group of children.
There were two groups of children.
One group saw an adult go into a room that had a bunch of different toys in it,
one of which was an inflatable Bobo doll, and they did aggressive acts towards the doll.
So, you can see the picture, there's a woman, and she is punching and throwing
and hitting and kicking the Bobo doll.
Then they put the children into the room to see what would happen, and they had a group
of children that did not see this video.
They put the children in the room, and not surprisingly to anybody that's been
around children probably, the children repeated the behaviors they saw the model.
So, if they saw the model beating on the Bobo doll, they engaged in the same behaviors.
The group that did not see that did not engage in those behaviors,
or at least not the same rate, and what I think was even more surprising about this study is
that not only did they repeat the behaviors they saw, they created new ways
to be aggressive toward the Bobo doll.
So, there's an image, and I don't see it being shown in any of those clips.
The little girl picks up a baby doll and starts
to use the baby doll to hit the Bobo doll inflatable.
So, there's a lot of importance to the models we set for children.
I think there were two more -- really, two more important things I wanted you to take away
from this part of the chapter, and one of those is that sometimes we learn through vicarious.
And vicarious reinforcement is when we see someone else benefit from something.
So, we try that behavior.
So, we don't always have to experience it directly, and I think the other part is
that it's not just the adults socializing the children.
Children also socialize their parents, right?
So, if you look at this picture of these two adults and this child,
they're both behaving differently because of the way that child is interacting with them, right?
So, there's this reciprocal determinism, and the very last thing I want to talk about is memory.
And so, this image of memory, I think, is really helpful,
because it kind of shows you the flow chart.
So, we take things in through our sensory memory.
They're processed.
They move into our short-term memory, which is just a matter of seconds, right?
We hold it in there for just a matter of seconds.
We encode it.
And if we don't process it, we can forget it, and is not stored further.
But if we do process it, and we remember it, then it moves into our long-term memory.
And long-term memory, we can hold things for an indefinite amount of time.
And some of the ways that we can move things from short-term
to long term are things like rehearsal.
Processing it, so thinking about it or actually using the information.
So, you can see the little rehearsal arrow there.
So that we kind of use the information, so that it goes into long-term memory.
And then there were some aspects of memory that the book also touched on.
So, explicit memory involves memory of facts, concepts, and events.
So, we have to consciously recall them.
So, we intentionally have to think about them to retrieve them,
and that's why they call explicit memory.
We also have episodic memory, which is remembering events,
specific moments, things that happened.
Often, we feel certain sensory experience with those memories,
something that we may have smelled or felt or seen.
We have the emotional reaction.
So, you know, remembering a childhood vacation would be an episodic memory, for instance.
In the last type of memory I want to touch on is implicit memory, and this is really
in contrast to that explicit memory.
And so, implicit memory is memory that we use without realizing it,
and we use it to complete actions, right?
So, we walk because our body remembers how to move our muscles to walk across the floor.
Those of you that drive, which seems most of you, we drive using implicit memory.
We don't have to consciously think about putting our foot on the accelerator and the gas pedal
and the steering wheel and all those things that we did have to learn at one point,
but now are part of our implicit memory.
They're automatically translated without us having to do it.
And that's all I have to share about cognitive development during the first two years.