perception of depth; perception of colour; visual perception; to perceive movement; to perceive form; we perceive those parts of the environment that interest us;
to be aware of the world around us; to be aware of noise; to be unaware of hunger; to be aware of the artificial conditions of the experiment; awareness of difficulties; awareness of danger;
to influence the results of the experiment; to influence the animal's behaviour; the influence of one's past experience on development; the influence of one's knowledge of the subject;
to inherit good sight; inherited qualities; inherited behaviour; to study the role of inheritance;
to affect one's perception; to affect one's hearing; to affect one's ability to understand the problem; to affect the course of the experiment;
the learning process; the scientific laws of learning; the physical basis for learning; instrumental learning;
to measure the distance; to measure the animal; to take the measurements of its brain; the psychometric methods are procedures for psychological measurements; measurement means the description of data in terms of numbers; the difficulties of psychological measurements have been very great.
II. Translate the following sentences from Russian into English using the active vocabulary
1. . 2. . 3. . 4. . 5. . 6. . 7. . 8. . 9. . 10. , . 11. . 12. , , . 13. . 14. . 15. .
III. Choose the right word from the box and insert it into one of the sentences given below
| experience, to be aware, relation, relationship, to determine, distorted, to contribute, to affect |
1. Many scientific disciplines... to the scientific understanding of behaviour. 2. We attempted to find out, from a psychological point of view,... between the two types of perceptions. 3. It is found out that psychological functions such as motivation, perception, intelligence and learning do not have simple... with chronological age. 4. Nowadays people... of the importance of social and psychological research. 5. Experiments show that the child's behaviour depends on his earlier.... 6. What we remember is often a seriously... version of what we originally experienced. 7. Many factors... productivity. 7. There is evidence that emotional factors can... perception.
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IV. Answer the following questions to the text
1. What is perception?
2. What factors may influence perception?
3. What does perception depend on?
4. Do our learning experiences help us to interpret our sensations?
5. How may the features of environment influence the total process of perception?
6. What causes perception to be incorrect?
LESSON IV
SIMPLE LEARNING
(to be continued)
Active vocabulary
1. according to, prep ,
2. account, v (for)
3. acquire, v ; ; to ~ knowledge ; acquired, adj (, ); acquisition, n
4. attempt, n , ; to make an ~ ; attempt, v , ;
5. complicated, adj ;
6. condition, v 1. ; 2. , , ; condition, n 1.; 2. , ; conditional, conditioned, adj ;conditioning, n 1. , ; 2. ; higher-order ~
7. define, v , () ; definition, n ,
8. digest, v 1. (); 2. , ; ; digestion, n 1. , ; 2. (, ..), ; digestive, adj
8. diminish, v , , (), ()
9. discover, v , ; discovery, n
10. eliminate, v 1. , ; 2. , , ; elimination, n 1. , ; 2. . , , ; event, n 1. , ; 2. ; 3.
12. evidence, n 1. , , ; 2.
13. habit, n ,
14. inborn, adj
15. occur, v , ; occurrence, n ,
16. perform, v , ; performance, n 1. , , ; 2. ,
17. present, v ; presentation, n
18. saliva, n ; salivate, v 1. ; 2. ; salivation, n 1. ; 2.
19. sequence, n ( ),
20. sign, n 1. ; 2. ; 3. , , ; signify, v ,
21. stimulus, n (pl. stimuli) , ; stimulate, v , ; stimulation, n , ,
22. strengthen, n ; (), ()
SIMPLE LEARNING
Learning may be defined as changes in behaviour as the result of past experience.
Psychologists have formulated a number of theories about how learning takes place and have performed a great deal of search with humans and animals in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the process.
One of the most important studies of learning, like many discoveries of science, was initiated almost by accident. At the beginning of this century a Russian physiologist named Ivan Pavlov was continuing his research on the reflex processes associated with digestion. While observing the behaviour of the dog on which he was working as a laboratory subject, he noticed that the flow of the saliva in the mouth occurred not only when food was placed in the dog's mouth, but even before, at the sight of the food. The dog's responses to the food in the mouth were considered automatic reflex responses that are inborn, but the response to the sight of food was a learned, or conditioned, response. Pavlov re-directed his efforts to explore this response. He found that the dogs could be taught to react in the same way (by salivating) not only to the sight of food but to the sound of a bell, the tickling of metronome, or even the rotating motion of a disk. Ringing the dinner bell or using any other signal that the dog associated with the food, would cause the animal to respond in almost the same way as if the food was placed directly into his mouth. He accounted for the learning process according to the following sequence of events:
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first: a stimulus applied, such as a bell being rung;
immediately after: meat placed in the dog's mouth;
reaction: the dog responded by salivating.
By repeating this sequence a number of times, the dog will now salivate when the bell alone was sounded. The sequence of signal food response became: signal response.
The food was called the unconditioned stimulus, as it was a stimulus that caused an automatic reflexive unconditioned response. The signal, which was the sight of the food or a bell, was called the conditioned response. The distinction was made between the natural (unconditioned) and learned response, as they were not exactly the same. The learned response seemed to be more complicated, as the dogs also acted with an air of expectancy and uncertainty whenever the signal alone was made. The signal response sequence for learning is called classical conditioning.
There is a widespread feeling that all learning is built up by the same process of association of such symbols or signs in close relationship with the things that they symbolize or signify. Added evidence for this view-in point is supplied by studies on higher-order conditioning. Second-order conditioning, for example, is accomplished in approximately the following manner. The animal or person is first conditioned to respond to a signal like a bell in the way described above. The original signal is now paired with another signal like a light. The training sequence is: light bell response
Again, after a suitable number of such combinations the subject will now respond to the light as he did to the bell. The habit of responding to the signal can be strengthened by only an occasional presentation of the food or unconditioned stimulus. Further higher-order associations can be made by pairing a word with the light, and so on. This is a gradual process of building up the learning of associations that link together many different signals or stimuli.
Just as in the original experiments the signals become associated with the food by their close association, that association can be extinguished by reversing the procedure. If the bell is sounded frequently and the food is never presented, the salivation response will gradually diminish and eventually stop.
After a while, however, the bell will be found still to cause the original conditioned response although it had seemed to be extinguished. Further bell without food pairings are necessary before the response is completely eliminated. The organism generally takes longer to unlearn the response than it did to learn it.
Many psychologists took up the study of this scheme of learning after 1904 when Pavlov was awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on the digestive processes (to be continued).
(L.S. Skurnik, F. George. Psychology for Everyman. Penguin Books 1972. P. 30 32)
Exercises
