What is the difference between a reflex and a learned behavior?

Reflexes are a motor or neural reaction to a specific stimulus in the environment. You tell Hodor to sit, and give him a treat when he does. In contrast, instincts are innate behaviors that are triggered by a broader range of events, such as aging and the change of seasons. Imagine you are teaching your dog, Hodor, to sit. They tend to be simpler than instincts, involve the activity of specific body parts and systems (e.g., the knee-jerk reflex and the contraction of the pupil in bright light), and involve more primitive centers of the central nervous system (e.g., the spinal cord and the medulla).

Over time these traditions tend to converge. Both reflexes and instincts help an organism adapt to its environment and do not have to be learned. Babies are born knowing how to suck on a nipple, whether artificial (from a bottle) or human. Salmon swim upstream to spawn, and spiders spin intricate webs. He learns that the consequence of sitting is that he gets a doggie biscuit ([link]). A reflex is a behavior that humans are born knowing how to do, such as sucking or blushing; these behaviors happen automatically in response to stimuli in the environment. Behaviorism was the school of thought in psychology that sought to measure only observable behaviors. Separate traditions of learning have taken shape within different fields of psychology, such as memory and cognition, so you will find that other chapters will round out your understanding of the topic. They are more complex patterns of behavior, involve movement of the organism as a whole (e.g., sexual activity and migration), and involve higher brain centers.

By watching his father, he can imitate the moves that bring success and avoid the moves that lead to failure. Infants suckle at their mother’s breast. For example, every healthy human baby has a sucking reflex, present at birth. Learning is often defined as a relatively lasting change in behavior that is the result of experience. 2. What is your personal definition of learning? How do they differ? Learned behaviors are not automatic; they occur as a result of practice or repeated experience in a situation. By the end of this section, you will be able to: Birds build nests and migrate as winter approaches. Observational learning extends the effective range of both classical and operant conditioning. Dogs shake water off wet fur. After repeated experiences, Hodor begins to associate the act of sitting with receiving a treat. How did you learn them? In contrast, learning is a change in behavior or knowledge that results from experience. We experience this process throughout our daily lives. In operant conditioning, organisms learn, again, to associate events—a behavior and its consequence (reinforcement or punishment).

Both classical and operant conditioning involve learning by association. What kinds of things have you learned through the process of classical conditioning? In contrast, learning is a change in behavior or knowledge that results from experience. Observational learning is just as it sounds: learning by observing others. For example, you might see a flash of lightning in the sky during a storm and then hear a loud boom of thunder. Learned behaviors are things that humans are not born knowing how to do, such as swimming and surfing. How might observation help Julian learn to surf, as opposed to learning by trial and error alone? Also, whereas classical conditioning involves an organism forming an association between an involuntary (reflexive) response and a stimulus, operant conditioning involves an organism forming an association between a voluntary behavior and a consequence. Learning to surf, as well as any complex learning process (e.g., learning about the discipline of psychology), involves a complex interaction of conscious and unconscious processes. Both classical and operant conditioning are forms of associative learning where associations are made between events that occur together. Learning has traditionally been studied in terms of its simplest components—the associations our minds automatically make between events. Learning, like reflexes and instincts, allows an organism to adapt to its environment. How are they alike?


When you think of learning, it might be easy to fall into the trap of only considering formal education that takes place during childhood and early adulthood, but learning is actually an ongoing process that takes place throughout all of life. These learning processes will be discussed in detail later in the chapter, but it is helpful to have a brief overview of each as you begin to explore how learning is understood from a psychological perspective. For example, in this chapter you will see how cognition has come to play a larger role in behaviorism, whose more extreme adherents once insisted that behaviors are triggered by the environment with no intervening thought. Compare and contrast classical and operant conditioning. What do these seemingly unrelated behaviors have in common? Associative learning occurs when an organism makes connections between stimuli or events that occur together in the environment. To get an idea of the extra effective range that observational learning brings, consider Ben and his son Julian from the introduction.
How do your ideas about learning compare with the definition of learning presented in this text? Both instincts and reflexes are innate behaviors that organisms are born with. They all are unlearned behaviors. http://cnx.org/contents/4abf04bf-93a0-45c3-9cbc-2cefd46e68cc@4.100:1/Psychology, Explain how learned behaviors are different from instincts and reflexes, Recognize and define three basic forms of learning—classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational learning.

1. A lot of learning among humans and other animals comes from observational learning. Founded by John B. Watson and outlined in his seminal 1913 paper Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It, the behaviorist standpoint held that psychology was an experimental and objective science and that internal mental processes should not be considered because they could not be directly observed and measured. Nobody teaches the baby to suck, just as no one teaches a sea turtle hatchling to move toward the ocean. Instincts and reflexes are innate behaviors—they occur naturally and do not involve learning. Can you think of something you have learned how to do after watching someone else? Operant conditioning? Researchers ask if one stimulus triggers a reflex, can we train a different stimulus to trigger that same reflex? There are three main types of learning: classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational learning. This dog has learned that certain behaviors result in receiving a treat. 3. You will see that associative learning is central to all three basic learning processes discussed in this chapter; classical conditioning tends to involve unconscious processes, operant conditioning tends to involve conscious processes, and observational learning adds social and cognitive layers to all the basic associative processes, both conscious and unconscious. In classical conditioning, the event that drives the behavior (the stimulus) comes before the behavior; in operant conditioning, the event that drives the behavior (the consequence) comes after the behavior. In operant conditioning, a response is associated with a consequence. 1.

All of the approaches covered in this chapter are part of a particular tradition in psychology, called behaviorism, which we discuss in the next section.

A pleasant consequence encourages more of that behavior in the future, whereas a punishment deters the behavior. Watson's work included the famous Little Albert experiment in which he conditioned a small …


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