After reading this article you will learn about the implications of learning principles:- 1. Learning by Repetition or Practice 2. Successive Approximation 3. Bio-Feedback 4. Language Acquisition 5. Reinforcement 6. Shaping 6. Imprinting.
Man has always been interested in studying the behaviour of other creatures, animals and birds. This interest in animal behaviour has helped him to solve some of his problems. For example, research into the sexual behaviour of insects has produced new methods of pest control.
Studies conducted on the social behaviour patterns of domestic animals have led to an increase in the production of milk, meat and eggs. The migratory behaviour of birds and cockroaches provided indications of earthquakes and so on.
All the learning theories express themselves not through mere description and analysis of phenomena but through rigorous experimental evidence. In the same way their implications or all their applications in various fields are expressed through experimental evidence.
This is because the learning theorists strongly believe that to prove that some behaviour exists is to show it in concrete observable manner. Today they have a branch called behaviour modification which is based on such an idea. The first ones to seize and test learning principles on human beings were behaviour technologists working in educational institutions, clinics and industries.
It touched the peak of its popularity in these fields. The authors here have attempted a brief account of some of the important concepts of learning principles applied and found valuable in a variety of contexts natural to man as well as to robots (machine men) in the artificial world.
Learning by Repetition or Practice:
Practice is considered as a very important factor in acquiring any skill, particularly motor skills. One needs to adhere to this principle if one has to teach a child how to write alphabets or if one has to learn to type or to play a piano or speak a foreign language.
The statement ‘practice makes man perfect’ reflects this phenomenon. At the same time it has also been shown that repetition of a particular action can also be used as a strategy to prevent undesirable behaviour from persisting. This is sometimes referred to as the method of exhaustion.
The role of the process of conditioning in behaviour was brought out by an experiment conducted by Watson on a child named Albert. In this experiment Watson succeeded in establishing a strong fear in the child for his own pet rabbit. In Albert’s case a loud noise was presented along with the rabbit.
This experiment, though Watson did not report that he later removed the child’s fear, suggested possible ways by which fears can develop and how deconditioning of the fear responses can be made possible. It was Mary Cover Jones who took up this idea and applied it to three-year old Peter who was unnaturally afraid of rabbits.
The technique which she planned and employed was to place Peter among a group of young children who showed no fear while playing with a rabbit. Next, the feared object was placed at a distance and then brought gradually closer to Peter while he was involved in a pleasant activity, say eating. Soon, this approach became the forerunner of a very successful therapeutic technique – systematic deconditioning or systematic desensitization.
Suppose an individual is upset and is unnecessarily afraid of certain situations like closed rooms, high places or objects like leather goods (phobic neurosis) or becomes sad and lethargic as if he had suffered the loss of a loved person (depressive neurosis). Then the person is made to confront the feared stimulus.
The therapist (person who is treating the problematic person) makes the person relax. He devises, along with the patient, a graded series of the fearful stimuli. This series usually varies along the continuum of fearful stimuli i.e. from very frightening stimuli to a stimulus which elicits a little fear or anxiety.
The therapist now presents the least frightening stimulus while the patient relaxes with the help of certain exercises, so as to prevent the fear or anxiety from coming back. When this stimulus can be tolerated, the stimulus in the series which is rated as provoking fear a little more than the one which was presented previously will be presented and so on until the patient, quite happily, accepts the most frightening stimulus.
Flooding or Implosive Therapy:
In certain cases the procedure of gradual desensitization or deconditioning is not found successful. In such cases the procedure of flooding or implosion is used. This procedure involves a rationale opposite to the one involved in systematic desensitization.
For example, patients who are phobic to rats or snakes are suddenly made to touch live snakes or rats (which are harmless) rather than asking them to first imagine the objects of their phobias. It is the suddenness that is crucial to this method. Implied in this is certainly the possibility of one trial learning or unlearning. This technique has been found to be more effective than systematic desensitization if used with great caution.
Aversive Therapy:
Treatment based on the application of painful or punishing stimuli is called aversive therapy. For example, by using punishing stimuli like electric shock and drugs, a number of disorders like excessive alcohol consumption and drug addiction have been controlled.
Emetine hydrochloride which causes vomiting is injected intramuscularly after the patient consumes alcohol. Thus, by classical conditioning, the sight, smell and taste of alcohol is made to associate with nausea. This technique is also found to be very effective in the case of the not-so-young children who wet their beds at night. They are made to sleep on specially- designed cots which emit mild shock as soon as they wet the bed. This gradually leads to the unlearning of this habit.
Successive Approximation:
Operant conditioning is not limited to simple activities like being rewarded with grapefruit or tokens. It can be used to teach complex behaviour patterns, but each part of the sequence has to be learnt separately. In most instances the learner will not produce all the complex patterns of behaviour immediately.
For example, writing one’s name involves learning how to hold a pencil, how to form each letter, what letters make up his name and in what order, and so on. Learning complex patterns consists of integrating little bits of behaviour step-by-step into a complete response.
The procedure in teaching complex behaviour is to start by reinforcing partial responses, i.e. the smaller bits of behaviour that make up the whole response. Thus, step-by-step the complete response is shaped. This rewarding of each bit of behaviour that leads to the performance of the whole is called the method of successive approximation. We see this being demonstrated when mothers and teachers reward successively better pronunciation in their children’s speech.
Bio-Feedback:
In recent years operant conditioning principles have been used in developing a technique commonly known as bio-feedback. This has proved beneficial to people who suffer from a variety of disorders ranging from epilepsy to heart disorders and even obesity.
This emerged from the issue of whether involuntary responses, e.g. heart rate could be brought under voluntary control. Evidence shows that yogis, who practise meditation and yoga, apparently have control over such bodily processes as heart rate, respiration, etc.
This proves that involuntary responses like heart beat, breathing rate, etc. can be controlled. This technique has been successfully applied on people suffering from obesity, overeating, excessive smoking and drinking. Here the involuntary response, the overeating of preferred food, is controlled voluntarily in a programmed manner.
Language Acquisition:
According to Skinner language acquisition can be explained on the basis of operant conditioning principles. These principles provide guidelines as to how language acquisition can be facilitated and how language learning problems can be helped. Lutzker, Sherman Steven Long, Rasmussen and others have found that they can help mentally retarded and even normal children to acquire language skills.
In addition, there have been several successful attempts to teach other animals the rudiments of language, using imitation, shaping and reinforcement. David Premack taught a chimpanzee called Sarah, using reinforcement and shaping principles, to associate different plastic shapes with simple nouns and verbs.
Sarah put these shapes or symbols in a series of phrases or sentences to signal her desire to the experimenter as well as interpreting those ‘phrases’ constructed by the experimenter. Her success rate was 70-80 per cent which compares favorably with early language skills in children. Although Sarah’s vocabulary was limited she was able to make demands like, “give banana to Sarah” or to follow instructions such as, “put apple in pail”.
A successful programme was set up by Allen and Beatrice Gardner. They started with a chimpanzee named Washoe. When she was about a year old, they taught her a limited set of American sign language, a gesture language used by the deaf in America.
Washoe was brought up very much as a human child but in her presence, the Gardners and their fellow-workers only used the American sign language. Early training used a modified shaping procedure, in which Washoe’s hands and fingers were placed in the desired positions, but ultimately she learned by imitation. Washoe’s language acquisition showed similar characteristics to those found in children including babbling.
Further investigations in this area may give us valuable clues as to the nature and secrets of the seat of speech in human beings, evolution of language, etc. Thus, programmed learning is one of Skinner’s valuable contributions to science and mankind.
Skinner’s principles are applied in schools to increase the efficiency of teaching arithmetic, reading, spelling and other subjects using meticulously programmed devices in the belief that children learn much better this way than through the traditional form of teaching.
Reinforcement:
The principle of reinforcement when applied to mentally ill proved that they are capable of acquiring normal responses in the place of abnormal responses when appropriate environmental consequences or reinforcers are provided.
Ayllon and Azrein in their programme on patients at a psychiatric clinic, introduced a monetary system called token economy in which plastic tokens can be exchanged for primary reinforcers (like food, a chance to sit, watch television, being able to sit or talk to a preferred person) when a patient emitted desirable behaviour (like keeping oneself clean and well-groomed, making one’s own bed, doing small tasks like washing dishes, clothes, etc.).
It was found that the patients were not only less troublesome to the nurse but also showed an increased self-respect and many of their symptoms of mental ill-health were found to become weaker. This principle of token economy was applied to eliminate a wide range of problems like alcoholism, slow learning in schools and colleges and so on.
Hull’s concepts of drive reduction and incentive were borrowed by scientists investigating ‘motivational processes. According to them, a drive is invariably accompanied by tension and the organism constantly tries to aim at reducing this tension.
The response which reduces this tension gets reinforced. Drive or the condition of deprivation, is the prime mover of the organism. Educational, industrial and consumer psychologists are busy working on ways and means to create a condition of drive with well-planned reinforcers so that whatever man learns or performs should be most effective and should subsequently contribute to maximum output in terms of knowledge, production or sales.
Shaping:
One of the important concepts employed by Skinner is shaping. Essentially Skinner’s view holds that if a desired response is to be established first the organism must emit or produce that response. Subsequently through carefully worked out programme of positive reinforcement the response is reinforced, strengthened and established. But it so happens in some cases that organism does not emit or produce the desired response at all, thus ruling out the possibility of reinforcing what is to be done.
In such cases the response has to build up gradually in various stages. The response is learnt step by step and shaped. This process of shaping is accompanied by employing the principle of successive approximation. For example, if you want to teach your pet dog to raise his paw and shake hands, whenever you say shake hands, the dog may not produce this response at all initially but produce many other responses. But among the many responses produced by him some may be very close or near to the desired response.
Thus if the dog has to raise his paw, he must sit. One may thus find some responses which are approximations to the desired response. If one can identify and arrange successive approximate responses, then we can reinforce them step by step.
This is why the process is known as successive approximation. Thus in the above example, when your pet dog sits, this may be reinforcement. Subsequently, he may be reinforced only whenever he raises his paw and at the next stage only when he extends it.
The response is thus gradually built up. Shaping was found to be a very effective process in building up complicated responses in animals. Many of the tricks performed by animals in a circus are built up through the process of shaping.
The trainers of circus animals may not have heard of Skinner or ‘operant conditioning’ or schedules of reinforcement, but nevertheless have been practising the same. Shaping can be employed in teaching language, arithmetic, etc. and can be very useful in training children who are slow learners. In fact Skinner claimed that he can establish any complex behaviour employing the method of shaping. He claimed he can shape entire cultures.
Imprinting:
Imprinting is considered as a behavioural response which is acquired at a crucial period of development or rather during a very early stage of life. It is not reversible and cannot be unlearned in later life. This concept of learning opened up new avenues for the understanding of certain rigidities of behaviour in human beings. David Kuo, in his study of sexual behaviour, reared groups of dogs and monkeys separately.
He found that when these animals were restricted from experiencing normal heterosexual relations, they showed homosexual tendencies in behaviour. Later, when the restrictions were removed the animals refused to have heterosexual experiences.
This shows that learning, at times, at a particular time on stage can become deep-seated and rigid persisting for a long time. This suggests a valuable clue for understanding certain forms of maladjusted behaviour among human beings like homosexuality, habits like thumb sucking, twitching of the arm or shoulder, drug addiction and so on.
This area is still under exploration and we cannot make any definite and conclusive statement about it. But probably in a few decades, findings from this area may offer us some fascinating and valuable insights into human behaviour.
