UPI Study › Courses › Abnormal Psychology › Free lessons › Lesson 5.2 Free with a free account
Biological Factors That Limit Conditioned Learning
Abnormal Psychology · Chapter 5: Behavioral and Learning Models of AbnormalitySection 5.2 · lesson 20 of 9711 min · free with a free account
Free preview
Create a free account to keep watching
It takes a minute and costs nothing. Your free account unlocks all of Chapter 1 and 3 more lessons of Abnormal Psychology.
Lesson complete
Earn the 3 college credits for Abnormal Psychology
Enrolling adds a quiz after each lesson, the graded work and the official transcript. Recommended for credit by NCCRS.
Next lesson: Learning Through Observation, Modeling and Self-Efficacy →← Core Principles of the Behavioral ApproachNext lesson: Learning Through Observation, Modeling and Self-Efficacy →
In this lesson
Why not all associations are learned with equal ease.
- Explain why some associations form far more readily than others
- Describe preparedness and taste aversion, and what each demonstrated
- Explain instinctive drift and learned helplessness as constraints
- State what these constraints bound, and what they leave intact
Transcript
Everything said in the video, section by section (1,528 words). Read along, or search it.
Behavioral and Learning Models of Abnormality
Biological Factors That Limit Conditioned Learning
Chapter five so far has treated learning as a general-purpose machine. Pair anything with anything, and the same laws apply. This section is about where that turns out to be false. Some associations form in a single trial. Some barely form at all. And some trained behaviors decay no matter how well they are reinforced. One note before we start. This material is educational, and is not a basis for diagnosis. And the conclusion is a revised model, not a rejected one. And a warning. Learned helplessness is a model of a laboratory finding. It is never a statement that someone's depression is their own doing.
The Assumption
Equipotentiality, and Why It Failed
Equipotentiality is an assumption from early behaviorism. That any stimulus could be associated with any response. So the laws of learning are general, and the content does not matter. The assumption was reasonable, and it had a clear appeal. If learning follows the same rules regardless of species and content, then the principles of five point one are laws of behavior. Not facts about particular animals in particular situations. It did not survive. Across the middle of the twentieth century the findings piled up. The organism brings something to the arrangement. The response was not to abandon conditioning. It was to recognize that conditioning operates within biological structure.
Preparedness
Common Fears Do Not Track Common Dangers
Biological preparedness is a proposal about what organisms are ready to learn. Some form quickly and others slowly, because that readiness was itself shaped by selection. The observation offered in support is the distribution of common fears. Here is the argument. If phobias came purely from conditioning history, the objects people fear should track what has actually hurt them. They do not. Fears of heights, enclosed spaces, snakes, spiders, deep water, and blood are common. Fears of the objects causing most modern injury are comparatively rare. Vehicles. Electrical fittings. Staircases. Kitchen equipment. Many people with a severe fear of snakes have never encountered one outside a screen. The proposed explanation is that the common objects were recurrent ancestral dangers. And the objects of modern danger are too recent for any readiness to have developed.
Evidential Status
The Phenomenon and the Explanation Are Not Equally Secure
Now state the evidential status honestly, because two things here are not equally secure. The phenomenon is well documented. Fear responses to certain stimulus classes are acquired more readily. And they extinguish more slowly than responses to arbitrary stimuli. The evolutionary explanation for it is a different matter. It is plausible, and it is hard to test directly. The selection pressures involved are unobservable. And the account is constructed after the fact, to fit the pattern it explains. And alternatives exist. The feared objects may share perceptual features that attract attention. Cultural transmission may explain a good deal of the distribution. And modern dangers are usually met under conditions of control and familiarity. So the preparedness account is the best available, and it is not established.
The Continuum
Faster to Acquire, Harder to Extinguish
The proposal places associations along a continuum. At one end, contraprepared associations, which the organism is disposed against. Acquisition is very slow or does not occur, and what is learned is fragile. In the middle, unprepared associations. Arbitrary pairings with no evolutionary significance. They need repeated pairing, and they extinguish comparatively readily. At the far end, prepared associations, which the organism is disposed toward. Acquisition is fast, sometimes from a single experience, or from none at all. And extinction is slow, and often incomplete. Read those two properties together, because that is the clinically useful part. As you move toward prepared, acquisition gets faster and extinction gets harder at once. One caution on the picture. The positions are relative and the boundaries are not sharp.
Taste Aversion
Three Rules Broken at Once
Taste aversion learning is the clearest single violation of the standard parameters. It is a strong aversion to a taste that was followed by illness. First, one-trial acquisition: the association forms after a single pairing. Second, long delay. It forms even when hours separate the taste from the illness. Standard conditioning weakens dramatically once more than a few seconds intervene. Third, stimulus specificity. The aversion attaches to tastes and smells, not to sights or sounds present at the time. Tastes associate readily with illness, and poorly with other consequences. So the organism is not learning what was present. It is learning what could plausibly have been responsible.
Side By Side
The Content Changes How It Is Learned
Standard conditioning usually needs several pairings. Taste aversion often needs one. Standard conditioning tolerates seconds of delay. Taste aversion tolerates hours. In principle, any stimulus can associate with any consequence. In practice, tastes go with illness and poorly with anything else. That third row is the one that refutes equipotentiality directly. The others strain the assumption. This one contradicts it. Extinction is reliable in standard conditioning, and slow and persistent here. Which tells you that some learning is built to be difficult to undo. And the last row makes the widest point. Taste aversion varies with how a species finds food and which senses it uses. Learning mechanisms are adapted to a way of living. They are not general-purpose. An animal that needed several pairings to learn a food made it ill would be at a disadvantage.
Instinctive Drift
The Limit of Shaping
Instinctive drift is the third constraint, and it comes from commercial animal training. Species-typical behavior intrudes on a trained sequence and gradually displaces it. Despite the trained behavior continuing to be reinforced. Trainers found that sequences established by careful shaping deteriorated over weeks. Food-handling and foraging actions appeared mid-sequence, and displaced what had been trained. Here is the part that matters. The intruding behavior delayed reinforcement. Which is precisely what operant principles say should not happen. What it showed is the limit of shaping. Reinforcement is powerful, and it is not unlimited. It operates on an organism that already has a behavioral repertoire. The human parallel is loose and should be drawn cautiously. But the lesson holds. A program works with existing dispositions, not on a blank surface.
Helplessness
Uncontrollability, Not Unpleasantness
Learned helplessness is a reduction in attempts to escape or control. Following experience of aversive events that occurred regardless of what was done. The original finding came from animal research in the nineteen sixties. Animals exposed to unavoidable aversive stimulation were later tested differently. Escape was now straightforward and available. They failed to escape. Animals without that prior experience escaped readily. Now identify the critical variable, because this is where the finding is usually misread. It was not the aversive stimulation itself. It was its uncontrollability. The finding is about the relationship between responding and outcome, not about unpleasantness. The proposal was that the animals learned that responding and outcome were unrelated. And that this expectation carried into new situations where it no longer applied. The parallel to human depression was drawn quickly.
The Amendment
The Attributional Reformulation
The original account had an obvious problem. People exposed to uncontrollable adversity do not all become helpless. The attributional reformulation added a mediating step. What matters is not the uncontrollable event alone, but how the person explains it. Internal versus external. Is the cause in oneself, or in circumstances? Stable versus unstable. Is it expected to persist, or to change? Global versus specific. Does it affect everything, or only this area? Attributing a bad outcome to internal, stable, and global causes has the largest effect. The same event, attributed externally, unstably, and specifically, has much less. The generalization was drawn too quickly. The original work was an animal laboratory finding. Human depression involves mood, thought, sleep, and appetite, which that does not model. And later work on the animal finding may invert the original interpretation. It suggests passivity may be the default response, and that what is learned is control.
Bounded, Not Overturned
What Survives, and What Clinicians Should Expect
Many people with a well-defined fear report no aversive experience at all. Two other routes are recognized, and both are taught in five point three. The observational route: acquiring fear by seeing another person respond fearfully. The informational route: acquiring fear by being told something is dangerous. So direct conditioning explains some fears. It does not explain all of them. They bound it rather than overturn it, and that distinction matters. What is refuted is equipotentiality, and only equipotentiality. What survives entirely is the conditioning machinery of the previous section. The revised position is that learning history operates within biological structure. Which has direct clinical consequences. Prepared fears take longer to treat. Incomplete extinction is expected, not exceptional. And a person who recalls no frightening experience has given you no evidence against learning.
Composite Cases
Rita, 33, and Omar, 35
Two composite cases, presented together because the comparison is the point. Rita is thirty-three, with a severe fear of heights. She dates it to a school trip at about age eleven. She looked down from a viewing platform and felt acutely frightened. Nothing happened. Nobody fell. She was not hurt. The fear has been present for twenty-two years. Notice what is missing. On a strict conditioning account there is no unconditioned stimulus. Omar is thirty-five, afraid of a particular style of revolving door. One jammed with him inside it for several minutes, fourteen months ago. Omar's history is the stronger one on a conditioning account. And yet the model predicts that Omar's fear will respond faster to graded exposure. Because a revolving door is arbitrary, and a height is prepared. Strength of conditioning history does not predict treatment difficulty. Preparedness does.
About Abnormal Psychology at UPI Study
Abnormal Psychology (Psychology 180) is a self-paced online course of 97 video lessons in 25 chapters, from the main theoretical perspectives and clinical assessment to anxiety, mood, psychotic and personality disorders, treatment and the law. It carries a NCCRS credit recommendation for 3 semester credits.
Every lesson transcript is free on pages like this one, and the videos are free with a free UPI Study account. Enrolling adds a practice quiz after each lesson, the graded work and final exam that earn the credit, lifetime access, and an official transcript on completion. UPI Study has helped over 130,000 students with college credits. ACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities.
Enroll now → Course details Download the syllabus All Psychology and social science courses Every course with PRO →
Why take it here
Why students take Abnormal Psychology with UPI Study
Where the credit goes
Universities that work with NCCRS
Abnormal Psychology carries a NCCRS credit recommendation. These universities work with NCCRS; some are UPI Study's signed partners. ACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities.
Thomas Edison State UniversitySigned partner
University of the PeopleSigned partner
Charter Oak State CollegeSigned partner
Strayer UniversitySigned partner
Columbia Southern UniversitySigned partner
Indiana TechSigned partner
Penn StateWorks with NCCRS
Southern New Hampshire UniversityWorks with NCCRS
SUNYWorks with NCCRS
+many more cooperating universitiesFind my college →Find my college → Not listed? Ask Athena in the corner of this page, or book a 15-minute call.
FAQ
Questions students ask us
About Biological Factors That Limit Conditioned Learning
What is biological preparedness in learning?
Why is taste aversion learning different from ordinary classical conditioning?
What is learned helplessness?
What is instinctive drift?
About the Abnormal Psychology course
How many college credits is Abnormal Psychology?
How much does Abnormal Psychology cost and what is included?
Which universities accept UPI Study credits?
How long does Abnormal Psychology take?
How are the exams done?
How do my credits reach my college?
Ready for the full course? Earn 3 credits in Abnormal Psychology.
97 video lessons, a quiz after each one, and the graded work that earns the credit. Recommended for credit by NCCRS.
3 credits · NCCRSEnroll →