Traveling at godspeed over the hills and trails, I have refused my call, pushing my lazy sails into the blue flame. I want to crash here right now. The hourglass spills its sand if only to punish you for listening too long to one song.

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Learning!
Spring 2012
UConn Storrs Campus, GENT 131
TUE THU 3:30-4:45
Eric Lundquist

COURSE GRADES WILL APPEAR ON PEOPLESOFT LATER TODAY AS ANNOUNCED AT THE FINAL EXAM -- THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH ANYONE'S GRADE AND NO ONE'S NAME HAS BEEN LEFT OFF MY LIST!
Course grades will also appear here on this web page within a week, listing all grades including quiz 2, the extra point, and the final exam, with the calculations that resulted in your course grade. Please save all questions about grading till that anouncement appears here, since it will answer all your questions!

FINAL EXAM REVIEW INFO
REVIEW SESSION TUESDAY 5/1/12, 3:30-5:00 PM, GENT 131
FINAL EXAM IS THURSDAY 5/3/12, 1:00-3:00 PM, GENT 131
(makeup time for those who've arranged it: FRI 5/4, 3:00 PM, BOUS 136)

QUIZ 2 IS POSTED HERE (as a web page) and also HERE (as a PDF file for printing).

QUIZ 2 INFO
READ IMMEDIATELY!... how to submit a question; bubble sheets; planned online posting date; planned due date; etc.

EXAM 1 RESULTS
EXAM 1 REVIEW INFO
EXAM 1 IS THURSDAY 3/29/12, GENT 131, 3:30-4:45 PM
REVIEW SESSION TUESDAY 3/27/12, 6:30-7:30 PM, BOUS 160 (TIME AND ROOM SUBJECT TO CHANGE!)

QUIZ 1 RESULTS
QUIZ 1 REVIEW INFO

READING:

1. REQUIRED: Mazur, James E. (2006). Learning And Behavior (6th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. (ISBN: 0-13-193163-6)
2. REQUIRED: On-Line Readings and Reserve Readings (to be announced)
3. OPTIONAL: Some classic papers in the Psychology of Learning - Here's a collection of links to papers I'll refer to in class - and a few of them may appear among the required readings for the class. Also see Classics In The History Of Psychology, if you're looking for extra stuff to read.

CLASS SYLLABUS with outline of topics.

For those purchasing the older Fifth Edition of Mazur's text:
CLASS SYLLABUS for MAZUR FIFTH EDITION from Fall 2006.

Stellarium is a free program that will simulate a planetarium on your computer so that you will always know what stars you're looking at and when something interesting will be appearing. It's quite addictive.

Two short excerpts about James Gibson's Ecological Psychology: these are written by people who DON'T actually agree with Gibson and his ecological view, but who are describing him and his work fairly objectively. (While they're sort of skeptical, personally I'm not!) It's difficult to sum up the approach in brief; the linked passages are decent outsider views, but they're still incomplete and fail to appreciate some subtleties and philosophical implications. Ecological psychology is an approach to problems of perception and other aspects of psychology that is very different from conventional mainstream approaches. Instead of looking at the mind as a kind of computer involved in the processing of information (which is what mainstream psychology assumes), it is concerned with how animals and people can directly detect information in the environment which will be sufficient to guide their actions. The phrase "directly detect" is why the approach is often referred to as "direct perception"; it implies that the information doesn't need to be processed at all, which is controversial to say the least, and which certainly flies in the face of many centuries of epistemology. (At the end of the excerpt is an example of what a conventional "INdirect perception" approach looks like, for comparison.) The term "ecological" refers to a view of the animal and its environment as an integrated and co-evolving whole, as opposed to the conventional approach which seems to view the animal as an arbitrary observer placed into an arbitrary context. The ecological approach was developed by James Gibson over the whole course of his career, and today the University of Connecticut is the world leader in promoting and pursuing this approach. In particular the Psychology Department's Center For The Ecological Study Of Perception And Action (CESPA) is dedicated to advancing research and theory in ecological psychology.

• Some excerpts from a paper on the Ecological view of scientific laws: quite challenging and probably only of interest to the most devoted students, though parts of it may well be fairly accessible. I would draw your attention to the general point being made, that animals moving about in their environments are in fact an instance of motion that science needs to consider, and that traditional scientific laws are quite inadequate for describing that motion, regardless of how successful they may be at accounting for planetary orbits and planning space shuttle flights. This suggests that the laws we have at present are only applicable to the special simple case of inanimate motion, and accounting for biological and psychological phenomena will require a more sophisticated view of what counts as a scientific law. To simply say there is no lawfulness in such phenomena would be lazy; but to say that what we know as "the" laws of nature today are all that there can be, and that lawfulness consists of simple deterministic causes and effects such as apply to inanimate motion, would be equally lazy.

• An excerpt from Beyond The Brain by Louise Barrett in which she offers an overview of Gibson's perspective, for those who want to read more. It's a pretty accessible description of some subtle ideas, and the section headed "The Environment as Illusion" reviews why the mainstream approach was so unsatisfactory to Gibson. In addition, this excerpt describes Turing machines and how they are an inappropriate model for cognitive processes (unless radically reinterpreted as mentioned in this chapter), and it introduces some cutting edge concepts of dynamical systems theory as applicable to psychology, in terms an interested general reader could understand.

Spiders and turkeys and bears: some pictures from backyards (mine, my brother's). You're free to exclaim "oh my!" after reading the album title. Just something to look at if you're bored.

Here is a common, useful, and sort of generic definition of learning: learning - a relatively permanent change in behavior or in behavioral potentiality that results from experience: relatively - because although the change should last some time, it needn't last forever (e.g., forgetting and extinction are allowed) behavior - because any change due to learning must be observable in principle if it is to be studied scientifically, and behavior is observable potentiality - because an organism may not have occasion to exhibit its modified behavior unless the appropriate circumstances arise experience - because modifications of behavior due to developmental or physical causes (maturation, injury, fatigue, etc.) aren't considered "learning"

Some Introductory notes: three important dates in the history of psychology; four defintions of psychology; a timeline and four terms that are central to epistemology. (For the full version of the epistemology distinctions, see the Outline of Epstemology linked below.) Brief overview of psychology's history: A few pages from Bruce Goldstein's Cognitive Psychology textbook that provide a sketch of the history of psychology from its beginnings up through the Cognitive Revolution of the 1950's and 1960's, for those who would like a text reference to go along with the class discussion. For our purposes this excerpt really begins on p. 9, "The First Psychology Laboratories." The "imageless thought debate" is not mentioned explicitly but problems with introspection are summarized under "Watson Founds Behaviorism." (And not that it matters for this course, but in a History Of Psychology course it would be important to recognize that Wundt's own view of psychology was not Structuralism but something a bit more subtle called Voluntarism.)

Two commentaries on the continuing vitality of behaviorism despite rumors of its demise:

• Roddy Roediger's March 2004 commentary from the APS Observer, 17(3) re-examines the simplistic story about behaviorism's fate after the rise of cognitive psychology, shedding some important light. One nice point he makes is that Chomsky contributed a rationalist intellectual foundation to refuting Skinner's behaviorism, but mainly was arguing at cross-purposes with Skinner and maybe shouldn't be thought of as have fomented a revolution.

• Alferink, Larry (2005). Behaviorism Died Today, Again! The General Psychologist, 40(1) (Spring 2005), 7-9. This is a brief mention of some of the many ways, both scientific and practical, in which behaviorism is still thriving today, which should counter the cliché that it's a thing of the past.

Excerpt from Out Of Our Heads by Alva Noë: from an introductory chapter of a book by one of the few philosophers to question the seemingly fundamental notion that the mind is the product of the brain. It's important to understand that he doesn't promote any supernatural alternative, but rather argues that the basic concept needs to be reconsidered.

Crimson by Josip Novakovich is a moving and disturbing short story that features this intriguing passage -- an insight that is certainly knowledge of a sort, but not scientific knowledge: "Milan thought how strange it was that he should be held responsible for the past, three years ago, when he was conscripted and enslaved--when he wasn't even himself. 'We all have multiple personalities,' he said. 'One of us is the past, and another the future, and there's no present me. We are vacant right now--spaces through which the past and the future disagree.'" Knowledge comes in many varieties, and whether it's scientific, or poetic, or spiritual, or intuitive, or common-sense, etc., all of these are valid ways of knowing the world for different purposes and contexts. Science is not the be-all-and-end-all of knowledge, or the ultimate arbiter of what is real for all purposes, but is a specially constructed tool for uncovering certain kinds of facts about nature using certain agreed-upon types of evidence.

Here are a couple of ways to get things really wrong, in viewing the relationship between science and religion:

• Cognitive Psychologist Stephen Pinker argues in a commentary piece in Newsweek magazine that modern neuroscience has disproved the existence of the soul; responses from readers point out that no such scientific disproof is possible. Not stated explicitly is the fact that science is not the kind of inquiry that could ever be used to answer questions about the existence of souls or of God, and that deciding such questions is a matter of personal commitment that might then steer the type of inquiry you choose to pursue. See Lewontin's quote on materialism in science for a voice of reason.

• From a book on the "debate" over Intelligent Design: Intelligent Design is a euphemism for Biblical Creationism that atttempts to portray itself as science by supposing the "evidence" of the complexity of life leaves no possibility for its explanation in material terms, and that instead there must be a "designer" behind all of the complexity. That may sound like a plausible claim to some, but it's not a scientific one, since science only allows certain kinds of evidence and procedures to be used; science certainly doesn't throw up its hands and give up, and say "this is beyond us, so it all must have just been made by someone." If it all WAS made by someone, SCIENCE WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO DISCOVER THAT FACT, and will keep banging its head against the evidence FOREVER, in a noble failed attempt to stick to its principles. But the issue is far from settled, and probably never will be. In this excerpt, Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe (under "Conclusion") explicitly claims that science is not a game with arbitrary rules, when in fact that's exactly what it is -- well, not arbitrary rules, but rules nonetheless, which exclude the kind of conclusion Behe wants to force. Break those rules, and it's no longer science that you're doing. Then there are a few pages by noted philosopher of religion Alvin Plantinga, who tries to undermine those rules of science (what he calls science's "methodological naturalism" or commitment to non-supernatural explanation), so you can get a taste of the style of argument; notice the footnote that I think shows the bankruptcy of his point of view: #31, which essentially says the thing for scientists to do is to try to solve problems for a while, then give up and say "God did it." Again, even if it's true that "God did it," that's NOT SCIENCE!

• A reflection on changing the meaning of words like "science," or in this passage, the word "art." It's from the play Travesties by Tom Stoppard (author of things you've probably heard of like Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead and Shakespeare In Love and one spectacular thing you should check out, Arcadia, a mere hundred page play that could change how you look at the world). I should note that in this excerpt the character Carr's point of view is hardly the final word on the matter, though it is the reason I've posted this link.

Outline of epistemology for psychology: This web page highlights some differences between empiricist and rationalist approaches to psychology, and calls them Platonic and Aristotelian in character -- but be warned: they are not exactly what Plato or Aristotle would have claimed, they're just descriptions of the spirit of the two families of claims! Plato and Aristotle: discussed in brief, from another textbook; this excerpt pretty well reproduces the gist of the lecture on these two figures. Illustration of top-down processing: in reading the words "THE CAT" as printed in the link, bottom-up or purely stimulus-driven processing is not sufficient to decide whether the ambiguous letter is an A or an H in each word, since it could be either; instead the reader makes use of higher-level knowledge (of vocabulary and word spellings) which is normally the end product of the reading process, to resolve the ambiguous stimulus in each context through what is known as top-down or knowledge-driven processing (i.e., the knowledge that there is a word C-A-T in English, but no word C-H-T).

Some excerpts from Plato's Dialogues: They're very readable even in this classic translation from the 19th century. "Meno" features the slave boy demonstrating that he knows the Pythagorean Theorem (this version with illustrations may be easier to follow). Book VII of The Republic contains the famous Allegory Of The Cave.

David Hume on causation, from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) -- in case you want to see where questions about causality all began. (See also the famous conclusion.)

Three ways Hume was really influential in psychology were: Hume said simple ideas could be built up into complex ideas through some simple laws of association, instead of depending on the mind playing an active role with its unexplained homunculus abilities. PDP models of information processing are based on applying a few generic rules to a large collection of simple processing units instead of depending on a program that executes an explicit set of instructions. Hume said all knowledge could be reduced to either matters of fact or observation (synthetic statements) or matters of the relations among ideas (analytic statements), and anything else didn't count as knowledge at all. Logical positivism was the philosophy of science in the 20th century that took that as its starting point and said science was the model for all knowledge; it was the most influential philosophy underlying behaviorism, affecting the kinds of theories that were developed and favoring the neglect of any role for the mind. Hume said that cause and effect couldn't be perceived with the senses and were merely the result of observing repeated contiguity between successive events, along with the unjustifiable assumption that the future will be like the past; therefore the best attitude toward science would be to stick to cataloging the observations and their typical sequences without proposing any underlying causal explanations of why things happen. The most influential behaviorist, B.F. Skinner, adopted much the same attitude by arguing against complicated theorizing in terms of physiology or cognition or other unobservable variables, and instead just cataloging the observed relationships between stimuli, responses, and reinforcements and punishments.

Outline of Logical Positivism: This is a very brief sketch of the philosophy of science known as Logical Positivism, which was very influential in the development of psychology in the first half of the 20th century. It's mainly of interest for the concluding segment, an excerpt from the first English-language manifesto of logical positivism, in which Hume's influence is explicitly acknowledged.

Chomsky, Noam (1959). A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Language, 35(1), 26-58. The famous critique of the behaviorist approach is fairly difficult, but rewarding if you're interested.

• MacCorquodale, Kenneth (1970). On Chomsky's Review Of Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Journal Of The Experimental Analysis Of Behavior, 13(1), 83-99. This lesser known but fairly effective rebuttal of Chomsky's arguments shows how he missed the point of Skinner's book and chose instead to attack behaviorism in general; of course by 1970 this essay was a bit late to counter the perception that Chomsky had successfully demolished behaviorism, which of course he had not done.

Language Development: here are a couple of brief passages scanned from Erika Hoff's text that describe the Chomskyan view of language acquisition, for those who want something more than their notes to refer to. It also makes some of the same points about behaviorism and cognitivism as I made in class, and emphasizes that behaviorism fails as a theory of language. Note that connectionism / parallel distributed processing / neural network models are mentioned in passing as embodying both nativist and empiricist elements. We described them as a type of information processing model (or "computer"), and therefore rationalist. At the same time, they are inspired by arch-empiricist David Hume's view of simple ideas "thinking for themselves" through the application of a small set of rules, rather than the complicated sets of instructions in a familiar computer "program" that might be more in line with Descartes's thinking.

Excerpt from an interview with philosopher Daniel Dennett (from Jonathan Miller's collection titled States Of Mind) on the strategy of investigating the workings of the brain by probing the information processing capacities of the mind, rather than approaching it directly through neuroscience. Note that this difference in investigational strategies is also referred to as top-down vs. bottom-up in a different context.

Two excerpts from Stephen Pinker's book How The Mind Works in which the Computational Theory of Mind is nicely described. Note that at one point, Pinker claims this theory is different from "the despised computer metaphor," which he suggests is the idea that the brain is exactly like a digital computer. But no one actually thinks that, and when people "despise" the computer metaphor, it actually is Pinker's own view that they mean. Pinker just wants to make it seem that no one could possibly have any reasonable objection to what he's saying. This is typical of Pinker, and part of the reason many people (including me) sometimes can't stand him; another believer in the Computational Theory of Mind, the famous philosopher Jerry Fodor, found enough to disagree with in this book that he wrote his own book as a response, titled The Mind Doesn't Work That Way. These pages are an interesting read nonetheless.

The Venus Of Willendorf: for those who want to judge for themselves whether this artifact can be viewed as something analogous to a supernormal stimulus.

• A brief clip from "The Office" in which Dwight tries to haze Ryan at his cousin's farmhouse as an initation into the sales force, but annoys him and has to apologize.

Classical conditioning affects fertility in birds, according to a report described here in the popular media. The original research paper is here and apart from some technical stuff about the DNA work, it's pretty readable.

In school, we learned about "this scientist" who trained dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell... (my mouth tastes so bad all of a sudden... gaah...) Here's a possible alternate link (they get taken down often).

• A further comment about scientists
• This has nothing to do with anything

Summary of the inhibition / excitation model of extinction and spontaneous recovery, which is also mentioned on pp. 70-71 in Mazur.

Parallels between habituation and extinction, in particular comparing the a- and b-processes to the excitatory and inhibitory associations in terms of how they come about and how they work.

Comments on relationships and interpretations of some classical conditioning phenomena, outlining some concepts from lecture that are not explicitly addressed in the text. (The habituation and extinction comparison linked above is repeated at the beginning of this page.)

John Watson and Rosalie Rayner's original paper on Little Albert: Judge for yourself whether this paper is a well-controlled and judiciously interpreted study deserving of the attention it's gotten for the better part of a century. Is ONE subject enough? Are they doing classical or operant conditioning? Is Albert's crying really attributable uniquely to that rat and the noise associated with it?

• To help you decide, look at this video of Watson's skill at upsetting a child regardless of the stimulus being employed. I think this would make most babies cry under the best of circumstances!
• Consider this modern evaluation:
  "By itself the Albert study was not very convincing proof of the correctness of Watson's general view of personality and emotions. In addition to the study's reliance on only one subject, the experimental stimuli were insufficient to test for generalization effects, the observers' accounts were too subjective, and the technology did not exist to permit reliable assessment of emotional responses (see Sherman, 1927); there was insufficient follow-up and there was a confounding of instrumental and classical conditioning paradigms. These methodological flaws were also apparent to critical reviewers of the day (e.g., English, 1929; Valentine, 1930) and surely to Watson and Rayner themselves... [I]t seems time, finally, to place the Watson and Rayner data in the category of 'interesting but uninterpretable results.'"
  from Harris, B. (1979). Whatever happened to Little Albert? American Psychologist, 34, 151-160.
• Here is the 2009 paper in which Albert's identity and fate are reported, in pdf format and as a web page. And here is the 2012 paper that suggests the hydrocephalus condition that Albert / Douglas died of may have been present since birth, rendering him an inappropriate subject for this research in the first place.
• Some notes on the intrigue surrounding John Watson: This is the fairly amazing story of John Watson's life outside academia, based on biographies by David Cohen and Kerry Buckley. It won't be on the exams, but you'll want to read it.

Some common phobias and an extinction-based treatment

Tolerance and withdrawal for caffeine, described in this wikipedia article. This is purely about the pharmacological effects, and completely ignores the related conditioning effects mentioned in Mazur's text. But isn't it sort of disappointing to learn that after three weeks of coffee drinking, you're no longer getting any rush from caffeine, but are in effect just using it to maintain your normal functioning and avoid a "crash"?

Using taste aversion learning to save the wolves! (see also here)

Rescorla's (1966) experiment on contingencies in forward and backward conditioning of dogs - from a different textbook, in case you want a text description to supplement your notes. The other contingency experiment with rats is covered in your textbook, though Mazur only mentions the 40% and 20% shock groups, and not the 10% group. Makes the same point though.

PowerPoint slides as of the midterm exam: the last slide to be covered on the midterm is on Rescorla's contingency experiments (slide 29); As you know, there is not a slide corresponding to every concept we discussed, but at least you can see all the slides I actually did display in class, in case that's useful in reconciling your notes with the lecture.

OPTIONAL extended discussion of the Rescorla-Wagner model from Mazur's FIFTH edition. The main difference is that here he runs through some numerical examples which may make it easier to follow what's going on. In my opinion this material should not have been deleted for the 6th edition. (Anyone who has the FIFTH edition, you already have this so ignore this link!)

A comparison of classical and operant conditioning.

Web page on Guthrie's and Hull's learning theories: this summarizes everything you'd need to know about these two theorists, who are only barely mentioned in Mazur's textbook. For those who missed the class discussion, and those who may want to have a firmer reference for this material, here are two OPTIONAL chapters from an excellent older textbook by Robert Bolles, on Guthrie and on Hull. There is far more detail in each chapter than you are responsible for; if you do read them, you only need to read as much as will make the above web page notes understandable to you. Which is not to say you shouldn't read the rest of it for fun. How To Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off, a blog entry that is implicitly making use of Guthrie's principles of learning. A description of the vast number of micro-stimuli present in your environment at a given moment, taken totally out of context from Michael Pollan's The Botany Of Desire, from a segment in which he suggests that a useful function of a cannabinoid (THC-related) receptor in the nervous system might be to mute our awareness of all the irrelevant things in our world that might otherwise occupy our attention. Figure illustrating the Crespi-Zeaman effect from p.105 of the chapter on Hull posted above.

William James on "Habit", from his Principles of Psychology (1890). This link is for those curious enough to read it but too lazy to click through a series of links above to locate it. There are occasional untranslated French phrases and long quotations from other writers, as well as other archaisms that characterize intellectual writing of the time, but these add to the charm, I think. Today's reader might also detect a whiff of elitism, which on the one hand is not surprising from a Harvard professor then or now; and on the other, might be viewed not as enthusiastic approval of the class structure of society but more of a hardheaded acknowledgement that social class, for good or evil, did and still does play a role in the functioning of society. In case you lose interest in the opening comparisons of mental habits to the habits of physical matter, and the subsequent principles that govern habits, note that the most famous parts are about two-thirds of the way in, starting around the statement, "This brings us by a very natural transition to the ethical implications of the law of habit." (A few additional quotes from William James can be found at my link above called "Some Relevant Quotes.")

Tolman, Edward C. (1948). Cognitive maps in rats and men. Psychological Review, 55(4), 189-208. This is optional reading since Latent Learning is covered in Mazur on pp. 202-203. If you're interested though, this paper shows the range of his experiments and arguments. It's worth reading about experiments (1) "latent learning", (4) "hypotheses", and (5) "spatial orientation", at least. And the conclusion, which is nice.

Race a rat through this maze, by pausing the video on the maze overview and tracing through it on your own, and then hitting play to see if you can actually stay ahead of him when they show his whole run in the second half. I'm not saying it's hard, just that he's faster than you think - and the rat doesn't get the bird's eye view that you get either.

Web page on Skinner's learning theory A page from B.F. Skinner's paper "A Case History In Scientific Method" from 1956, illustrating consistency across species in cumulative records produced by similar reinforcement schedules. It's worth reading the text on these two pages, starting just below the diagram. (Don't worry about the specific schedules employed.) B.F. Skinner audio clip 1 B.F. Skinner audio clip 2 Squirrel Obstacle Course as an example of chaining: it's reasonable to assume the squirrel was first trained on the last step, and then each additional segment of the path was added in reverse order till they finally reached the beginning of the course. In that way, the nuts reinforced the jump from the platform, and through its proximity to the nuts the platform became a conditioned reinforcer for riding in the rocket. Then the rocket became a conditioned reinforcer for the step before that, all the way back to the beginning. End result: a chain of simple behaviors linked together into a complex sequence. How to teach a pet rat to retrieve and drop a ball: A video that illustrates the method of bringing the response closer and closer to a desired response that would never be produced spontaneously. It's debatable whether this is technically shaping since the trainer is not simply reinforcing the closer approximations, but actually making the rat perform them. Fun to watch though, good song too. Musical Canine Freestyle (a.k.a. Heelwork to Music in the UK): a completely preposterous example of both shaping (getting the animal to produce responses it wouldn't normally produce) and chaining (linking together a series of responses into a sequence). It will make you happy. Look at this report from 1999 (those of us with dogs know exactly what "at-home dog-dancing" refers to): The New York Times reported in November on the recent but growing competitive sport of "musical canine freestyle" (choreographed dancing with dogs), in which costumed owners and their matching-collared pooches move to tunes such as "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and "Get Happy." (Holding the dogs' paws, as in at-home dog-dancing, is forbidden.) The World Canine Freestyle Organization has a mailing list of 8000 aficionados. I Was Not A Lab Rat: Skinner's daughter, Deborah Skinner Buzan, is angry with idiots like Lauren Slater (author of the obnoxious Opening Skinner's Box - don't waste your time!) and others who persist in spreading rumors claiming that her father somehow mistreated her and set her on the road to insanity and suicide. Nice appreciation of the man and of the "Air Crib" he invented for her, which was NOT a "Skinner Box" in any way!

Clip from "The Big Bang Theory" in which Sheldon reinforces Penny for desirable behaviors, which is sort of funny though too oversimplified to work in real life. Notice that he says at one point that he could use "negative reinforcement" to "train [a] behavior out of her," when of course that would require punishment instead (negative reinforcement can only INCREASE the occurrence of a behavior, by definition).

Cats learn things through positive reinforcement like how to get out of a puzzle box and how to speak English, and also seem to learn through punishments that they bring on themselves.

Chomsky, Noam (1959). A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Language, 35(1), 26-58. The famous critique of the behaviorist approach is fairly difficult, but rewarding if you're interested.

• MacCorquodale, Kenneth (1970). On Chomsky's Review Of Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Journal Of The Experimental Analysis Of Behavior, 13(1), 83-99. This lesser known but fairly effective rebuttal of Chomsky's arguments shows how he missed the point of Skinner's book and chose instead to attack behaviorism in general; of course by 1970 this essay was a bit late to counter the perception that Chomsky had successfully demolished behaviorism, which of course he had not done.

Topics and page references for the final week's lectures, on the topics of biological constraints on operant conditioning, and on the contemporary account of reinforcement.

Breland, Keller & Breland, Marian (1961). The misbehavior of organisms. American Psychologist, 16, 681-684. (Here's a PDF version, and here's their earlier article that they refer to, in case you're interested.)

Moore And Stuttard's (1979) replication of Guthrie's puzzle box experiment : I'm just posting this because it's not in the Mazur text, so if you're looking for something to go with your notes, here it is. Notice that although this is a nice critique of Guthrie's stop-action principle interpretation, it doesn't have much bearing on Thorndike's original puzzle box experiment.

Interesting analysis of the case of Pavlov's cat by Eddie Izzard, world's greatest transvestite comedian.

Arthur Iberall's list of Behavior Modes Of Man will not be on the final, but you may find it interesting as a possible basis for how Response Deprivation Theory could be applied to humans. These are some characteristic behavior patterns that humans engage in, along with estimates of their frequencies at various time scales (and whether engaging in each behavior is influenced by social factors). Add to that an individual's personal behavioral repertoire - how much time per week does Noam spend watching TV? playing the piano? playing World Of Warcraft? etc. - and you start to be able to make predictions about how restricting some behaviors relative to others might make them reinforcing. The list gets quite speculative as it goes on, but it's something to think about.

PowerPoint slides on operant conditioning and after, including some slides covering Tolman's "Latent Learning" as well as Seligman's "Learned Helplessness" (not used in lecture but helpful).