Tag Info

I think part of the answer to your question is going to include the dopamine "reward" pathway in the basal ganglia. In particular, a leading theory of dopaminergic function is the predictive reward error or reinforcement learning hypothesis. In this theory, dopamine neurons signal expectations about the outcome of particular stimuli. Some key experiments ...

I think cognitive scientists would say that these views are compatible, insofar as cogsci admits results from behaviorism as valid results to be explained by understanding the cognitive constructs underlying them. Obviously (they would say) we have minds, our minds arise from physical processes in our brains, and as such have internal states that sometimes ...

The problem is that this doesn't fall under any of these conditioning definitions in behaviourism because the store isn't really trying to condition a response. They're just trying to get you to do one thing once. The behavioural techniques you mention are designed so that you get an organism to make a conditioned response spontaneously whenever the ...

For instance, the same behavior was also shown in orang-utan and dog. Already two years after the study by Skinner (1947) mentioned in the news article, Kellogg (1949) gave a review of some of the experimental results, but advocates a less anthropomorphic interpretation: Kellogg, W. N. (1949) 'Superstitious' behavior in animals. Psychological Review, Vol ...

In a two-alternative forced choice task with Mongolian Gerbils, Illango et al. (2010) compared the effectiveness of appetitive, aversive, and a combination of appetitive and aversive reinforcers. They conclude that the combination of appetitive and aversive reinforcers led to the highest speed of acquisition to maximum possible performance and delayed ...

For sake of covering all my bases, I'll begin with brief, simple definitions (that I'm sure you probably know, but can't say for others). Much of the material is heavily paraphrased or explained in references listed. Positive reinforcement is the process by which certain consequences of a response increase the probability that the response will recur. ...

Neurobiology is not my field of expertise, but this paper seems relevant: Kent C. Berridge, Chao-Yi Ho, Jocelyn M. Richard, Alexandra G. DiFeliceantonio (2010) The tempted brain eats: Pleasure and desire circuits in obesity and eating disorders. Brain Research, 1350, 43-64. What we eat, when and how much, all are influenced by brain reward mechanisms ...

First, the concept of optimality of a learning curve is not well defined. You can measure at least 3 different aspects of learning: Speed of learning Time before extinction Performance at peak Of course, there may be other measures as well, and any combination of such measure may also be a legitimate measure for certain uses. Conditioned Taste Aversion ...

First of all, asymmetries in apparently symmetric creatures (of which most are) are actually quite typical. However, in most cases of hand dominance, there is no population-wide hand dominance. In other words, the population is split 50/50 between left and right handers. In humans, however, a lack of hand dominance is often associated with cognitive ...

You wrote: For the purposes of this question I would assume that it's fairly common knowledge in psychology that people touch nose or cover the mouth when saying something part of them does not believe to be true. Avoid make assumptions like this. This is not common knowledge, and in fact it is not even true. Vrij et al. (2010) discuss the literature ...

I am pretty sure that you will not find a paper that tries to give purely behaviorist interpretations of decision field theory (or other similar models of decision making), because that would not make sense at all. As you noted in your initial question, decision field theory is a cognitive model, i.e., it tries to explain overt behavior in terms of ...

If you think of the stimulus being represented by a distributed set of features (Tanifuji et al., 2001), then I would not say it was a failure to discriminate. During the conditioned response training for Albert, all features were present as the stimuli. It wasn't that he couldn't discriminate the features, just that each of the features were trained as ...

I remembered that Disgust is one of the 6 major emotions and there is quite a lot written about it: The neural basis of disgust The scientific attempts to map specific emotions onto underlying neural substrates dates back to the first half of the 20th century. However, it was not until the mid-1990s when it was recognized that six basic ...