The Handy Psychology Answer Book. Lisa J. Cohen

can be shaped to do a particular behavior, such as peck at a lever, by successively rewarding behavior that more closely approximates the desired behavior.

      How is classical conditioning related to drug addiction?

      Classical conditioning is central to the process of drug addiction. Addiction treatment often focuses on the management of craving. Craving, or the urge to use the problem drug, can be very strong and frequently leads to relapses in people striving for sobriety. Craving is triggered by cues, both external and internal, via the process of classical conditioning. In other words, the person encounters a reminder of drug use (such as drug paraphernalia or the bar where the person used to drink) and the association stimulates craving. This is basically the same conditioning process Pavlov noticed with his dogs. External cues include environmental factors (people, places, and things). Internal cues include emotions, thoughts or physical sensations that previously led to drug use.

      What is extinction?

      When the association starts to erode between the stimulus and the response (in classical conditioning) or between the behavior and the reinforcement (in operant conditioning), a behavior becomes extinguished. A behavior is extinguished when it is no longer performed. This can be a positive thing if the behavior was undesirable to begin with. It can also be negative if the behavior was valued. In general, the behavior should eventually extinguish if it is no longer accompanied by either the prior reinforcement or the unconditioned stimulus. If you stop paying people to go to work, they will probably stop going. If you stopped taking your dog for a walk after you put on your shoes, the dog will eventually stop barking and wagging his tail each time you put them on. The association between sneakers and walk will be extinguished.

      How do reinforcement conditions affect learning?

      Although the principles of conditioning are very simple, they are less simple in practice. A number of factors affect the effectiveness of conditioning. Timing is important, specifically the time separating the unconditioned and conditioned stimulus. If the sneakers go on too soon before the dog is walked, it will be hard to associate the shoes with the walk.

      Relatedly, the reinforcement should closely follow the behavior for the act to be connected with the consequence. This is why news of global warming has had so little effect until recently, although we’ve known about it for decades. The consequences were not immediate. This is also why it is so difficult to instill healthy habits in the young, when the consequences of their self-care will not be evident for decades. The schedule of reinforcement also affects learning. Should the behavior be reinforced every time it occurs? What kind of reinforcement makes a behavior most resistant to extinction?

      Why is intermittent reinforcement more resistant to extinction?

      Intermittent reinforcement, in which the behavior is only reinforced intermittently, best protects a behavior from extinction. If people do not expect the behavior to be reinforced every time it occurs, they will be less likely to stop the behavior when it is not reinforced. It will take longer for them to give up on the behavior. Further, when intermittent reinforcement is unpredictable, it is even more resistant to extinction.

      What problems with behaviorism started to show up even among the faithful?

      As the reign of behaviorism continued, the limits of the paradigm became more evident. Animals kept behaving in ways that could not be explained by behaviorist theory alone. For example, Skinner had thought that any animal could be taught any behavior with the appropriate reinforcement schedule. But this did not turn out to be the case. The same behavior was learned easily by some animals, with difficulty by others, and not at all by still others. Rats could easily learn to press a bar for food, while cats would do so only with difficulty. These findings suggest that the genetics of each animal species set the parameters of what could and could not be learned. There were limits to what could be taught.

      How did Tolman’s contributions mark the beginning of the end of the behaviorist era?

      Edward Chase Tolman (1886–1959) was a devoted behaviorist who studied maze-running behavior in rats (a favorite topic of behaviorist researchers). Despite his expectations, he repeatedly observed behavior in rats that he could not explain solely by stimulus-response connections. He noticed that rats in a maze would often stop, look around, and check out one path, then another before choosing a particular route. He could only explain this behavior (and many other similar behaviors he observed) by inferring some kind of mental process. The rat seemed to have a mental picture of the layout of the maze and that directed its behavior. In this way, Tolman introduced the mind into the behaviorist stronghold. Even rats running mazes evidenced mental processes, some form of thinking about the problem.

      Edward Chase Tolman introduced the concept of purposive behaviorism, which takes into account both a subject’s behavior and the goal of that behavior.

      How were mental processes evident even in rats running mazes?

      Tolman introduced the notions of expectancy, of mental maps, into behaviorism. Rats and other animals did not simply respond to the number of rewards for each behavior, automatically repeating the most frequently rewarded behavior. Some kind of thought process mediated between stimulus and response. More specifically, the rats appeared to develop a set of expectations about how events would play out based on their prior experiences. They then made decisions by matching their expectations against information from the new situation. This kind of mental map is essentially identical to Piaget’s concept of mental schemas and has become a critical concept in many areas of psychology, including cognitive, developmental, and clinical psychology.

      What was the Cognitive Revolution?

      In the 1950s and 1960s several lines of development converged to create the explosive shift in academic psychology known as the cognitive revolution. Research in various other fields of study, such as anthropology, linguistics, and computer science, had been moving toward the scientific study of mental processes. Within psychology, studies of memory, perception, personality traits, and other mental phenomena continued to gain ground.

      Even orthodox behaviorists were stumbling onto mental processes. As these lines of development came together, the mind once again became a worthy object of study. The black box model of psychology was rejected and cognition, or thought processes per se, became the object of intense interest. Major contributors included Ulric Neisser, Howard Kendler, and George and Jean Mandler. With the renewed interested in cognitive processes, there was also a resurgence of an earlier movement that had started in Europe but migrated to the United States after World War II, namely Gestalt psychology.

      GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY

      What is the basic concept of Gestalt psychology?

      Gestalt psychology, which started in the early twentieth century, provided an important counterpoint to the academic psychology of its time, specifically Watson’s behaviorism and Wundt’s structuralism. Its full impact, however, would not be felt until many decades after its birth. Gestalt psychology originated in 1910 with Max Wertheimer’s study of the perception of motion.

      The core idea behind Gestalt psychology is that the mind actively organizes information into a coherent whole or a gestalt. In other words, the mind is not a passive recipient of sensory stimuli but an active organizer of information. Furthermore, knowledge does not come from a collection of isolated bits of information. Rather the mind creates a whole out of the relationships between separate parts. Gestalt psychology is a holistic theory.

      What is a gestalt?

      A gestalt refers to a perceptual whole. The gestalt is created