Stephen van Vlack
Sookmyung Women`s University
Graduate School of TESOL
Human Learning and Cognition
Spring 2006
Week 3 Answers - Terry, Chapter 2 & Lamb, Chapters 2 and 3
1. What is an orienting response and why is this important?
An orienting response is a reflex or a reaction to a particular stimulus. It can take the form of a particular and observable behavior like a blink or a startle in response to, for example, a bus driving by too close or it can be something that is less perceivable such as a advanced heart rate or breathing. An orienting response in which a person or animate object reacts to seek out the source of a stimulus, and as such is often though of as being evolutionary in general because it is this response which may keep a person or animal alive in a dangerous situation. So, for example, if a person hears a huge boom they will turn in the direction of the noise to try to ascertain what might have caused it. This is an important place for us to start our discussion of learning because really in orienting response is the most basic type of learning. It is also important for us to realize that we are at this point well with in behaviorist territory. It should not be hard to see how an orienting response really relates to behavior and subconscious behavior at that. What will I defined by looking at this is that while there is to a certain extent some control that we can exhibit over orienting responses, for the most part and subconscious and really quite automatic.
2. What is habituation? Give your own example.
Habituation is a process by which the orienting response to a certain stimulus will gradually diminish and possibly disappear over a period of time. Of course this type of reaction depends on the stimulus. In order for the orienting response to diminish the stimulus needs to be a rather innocuous one. Following this habituation is seen as a very basic type of learning in which a person or animate object comes to know something about a stimulus. In the case of an innocuous stimulus the creature learns that the stimulus is not harmful and they therefore are able to ignore it without endangering themselves. If it turns out that the stimulus is not harmful then the orienting repose becomes a conditioned response as the creature learns what they need to do to save themselves. A simple example of a habituation would be a certain smell. At first the smell might grab your attention, but the more you smell the same thing the more you will simply cease to notice it provided, of course, the smell does not harm you or mean danger is present. Of course it would also depend on the strength of the smell.
As important to remember that there is an opposite reaction to a stimulus other than habituation. If a stimulus turns out to be somewhat dangerous or important (worthy of our attention) then the creature experience system list might actually become sensitized to the stimulus. Sensitization is when one becomes even more acutely aware of a particular stimulus and the reaction to the stimulus will increase over time. Looking at are above example related to smell, if the smell is not so bad then certainly people will habituate to it over time, but if the smell is in fact really bad then we might expect a sensitization as opposed to a habituation which ultimately causes someone to flee.
Based on what we now know about the brain we can say that habituation is more like suppression while sensitization is more like activation. It is also possible to see how habituation would be an absolutely necessary type of process. Thinking about cognitive system of attention we can see that it is certainly not possible to focus equal attention on everything. Simply put, it is necessary for people to ignore certain things. It is by ignoring certain things that we actually have the energy and the possibility to focus attention on other things.
3. How is habituation studied and what are some different ways of explaining habituation?
Habituation is studied as simply as possible. The basic idea is that habituation is the simplest kind of learning, which means by studying habituation we can try to determine the basic tenets of learning and as such it should be easier to control. This means that researchers try to study habituation in as controlled an environment as possible. Simple tests and highly controlled laboratory experiments with often very simple organisms like sea worms are conducted to try to glean the most basic facts about learning. In such experiments control is the most important factor. What is also interesting about habituation is that it seems to be similar in all animal species. That is, if an animal has a central nervous system, then this central nervous system will show signs of habituation. In this respect we can say that habituation is a universal and is therefore quite valid for study.
There are two basic ways of explaining habituation. They are learning and nonlearning. We can also refer to these as cognitive and physiological explanations. The learning or cognitive explanation was discussed above and should be fairly clear. Nonlearning or physiological explanations include theories about sensory adaption or fatigue. In a situation in which a stimulus is constant, it has been argued, the sensory will simply cease to notice the stimulus over time because they adapt to it. This explanation, as we discuss in more detail and later date can also be linked the basic idea that cognitive processing moves from controlled to automatic and that while the former requires a large amount of noticing the latter does not. Sensory adaption has been used to explain why people cease to notice an incessant noise or smell over a range of time. In a similar, but different, vein sensory fatigue is when the sensors are overloaded and therefore temporarily weaken, such as you might experience if you stick your hand in a fire. At some point the nerve endings in your hand are going to be burned away and damaged and as a result you will feel less pain. As a result of damage or fatigue the response system is weakened and something resembling habituation is seen to occur. It is a sensory fatigue situation which is said to occur in the habituation of people to things like spicy food. Evidence from experiments where dishabituators are used, however, invalidate both of these explanations. When a dishabituator is introduced into a habituation experiment, the sensors are clearly able to pick it up and focus attention on the new stimulus so long as the new stimulus (dishabituator) is sufficiently different from the habituated stimulus. Therefore, such nonlearning explanations are not able to fully explain habituation.
A physiological-based theory of habituation contains the idea of a dual processors in habituation. Studies have shown that there seem to be two types of neurons in the spinal column, one for suppression (H neurons) and the other for arousal (S neurons). Such a proposal follows closely in the wake of experiments which revealed that an opposite effect to habituation, sensitization, also occurs in response to certain stimulus. In sensitization the stimulus causes a stronger reaction each time it is presented. What seems to determine whether the H or the S neurons are activated is the intensity of the stimulus. Neutral or less intense stimulus will activate H neurons and a habituation will result. Highly intense stimulus will cause S neurons to be activated and sensitization will result.
Cognitive theories of habituation invoke differences in the proposed workings of short-term and long-term memory to explain why habituation effects seem to diminish over a time interval. An enduring habituation of an orienting response will necessarily be the result of the stimulus having entered the long-term memory. For this to happen the organism will have to have been exposed to the stimulus several times in short intervals. The basic idea is that if the intervals between stimulus exposure are too great there will be no residual information held in the short-term memory and he stimulus will not be recognized and if the stimulus is not recognized there can be no habituation. An interesting aspect of these cognitive explanations is the inclusion of context in the model. Following this, the context in which the stimulus has and does occur must also play an important role in the habituation process. In studies where a stimulus always occurred in a particular context an orienting response occurs in the context even when the stimulus itself is not present. This shows that organisms use context to actually expect a certain stimulus and react whether the stimulus occurs of not.
4. How does frequency affect stimulus?
As mentioned briefly above, frequency is necessary for knowledge of a stimulus to be encoded in long-term memory. Thus frequency allows an organism to learn things about a stimulus. It is interesting to note that frequency effects in this type of habituation are actually quite similar to what we observe in basic memory testing. The time space between the exposures has an effect on habituation just as it does on memory encoding. This would tell us that habituation, whether we are consciously aware of it or not, is really a cognitive type of learning. It is also interesting to note that relearning of a habituation after a period of absence also just as it does in memory.
5. What are some other effects of stimulus. List and explain using your own examples.
Familiarity with a certain stimulus has been shown to cause changes in the affective relationship the organism has for the stimulus. Basically this means that organisms have a strong tendency to prefer the things they are familiar with and tend to shun or possibly even dislike things they are not familiar with. This preference for familiar stimulus encourages the organism to seek out that stimulus when possible and as a result they will have much more exposure and be able to process and integrate more contextual information about that stimulus, thus allowing for perceptual learning.
Perceptual learning is linked to what we discussed above in that once we have learned some basic information about a stimulus it is easier to learn more peripheral things about it. The fact that we are drawn to this stimulus gives us opportunities to learn perceptually. It is important to try to link perceptual learning with categories. It is from this perceptual learning that we create categories and as these categories which then end up organizing our cognitive systems.
Latent inhibition is the opposite of perceptual learning. It basically says that once an organism has habituated a certain stimulus they will learn less about that stimulus because they simply do not care about it. This is in accordance with what we know about the nature of habituation. It seems then that there is a fine line between getting perceptual learning or latent inhibition to occur. As teachers we need to make sure that we are on the right side of this contest and may be the best way of ensuring is, as we mentioned in class, to try to change the context in which the stimulus is found. Changing contexts will increase a learner`s interest in a familiar stimulus.
Priming is a phenomenon by which exposure to a stimulus will prime the stimulus for easier activation and processing later. This makes orienting to a certain stimulus easier in relation to time. It is important to note that priming is very much time sensitive and that if more exposure to the stimulus it does not immediately follow the priming then priming effects will dissipate, and quickly. We will be talking much more about priming later because it is an extremely important for us inside the brain.
6. How do speech and writing differ and which one do we need to focus on more?
As most of us should know at this point there are major differences between speech and writing and for us as investigators into the cognitive processes underlying language this difference must be acknowledged. Some researchers would go so far as to say that they each have their own systems which while similar are actually also quite different. Lamb (1999) shows us some simple examples of this in relation to pronunciation and morphological alteration. Written forms tend to be fixed and as a result over time do not correspond exactly to their supposed spoken counterparts. Also, although modern linguistics has drawn attention to the primacy of speaking, much of what we refer to as grammar (traditional grammar) is based almost entirely on writing. For this reason you as teachers need to be more aware of speaking and be quite critical of what you have learned.
It is important for us to remember that as a cognitive system writing is indeed interesting and certainly worthy of study, but speaking is primary. Speaking not only comes first but it seems to come much more easily than writing, which as we have stated on other courses is really an abstraction from speaking.
7. What are some of the different kinds of words proposed and how do they differ?
The basic argument that Lamb is trying to put forth is that there are many different systems with then what we call language and that each of them not only works differently but that they do not always match. Lamb does not mention this specifically but one of the defining natures of linguistic use is that it is highly variable. This brings us back to the argument that he put forth in the previous week, namely that the linguistic units which we observe outside the brain can not be the same as the ones that are inside the brain. One of the basic reasons for acknowledging this fact and for understanding its truth and the simplicity of its truth is that every language use, every linguistic unit is actually different. Analytic models of linguistics deal with this problem (and this is a serious problem for any theory of language) by postulating (proposing) that there is an abstract level of language which is the same for everyone. Thus, all speakers of English have this same abstract representations other language regardless of what they actually say. In the cognitive model this is not seen as being true. In the cognitive model researchers argue that the things that come out of our mouths come directly from our cognitive system and are not from some abstract model but a real surface level model. Lamb tries to show how this argument works by giving us different levels related to words showing us how they might not match each other. He argues that there are four different types of words and that each type can be slightly different than the other even for the same word.
Phonological word
The phonological word is basically the sound structure of the word.
weIks əp
Graphemic word
The graphemic word is the actual written representation of that word.
wakes up
Grammatical word
The grammatical word relates to the morphological structure of the word.
wakes-s up
Lexical word
The lexical word relates to the meaning structure of the word.
wakes up
In the analytic approach to language all of these things, even the spelling according to Chomsky and Halle (1968), need to be connected in one big system of universal grammar (UG). Lamb argues that this is not the case. He sees each of these different levels as being separate. He argues that they have to be separate because they don`t necessarily match each other even the best of conditions. Looking the above example we can see first and foremost that there are not clear correspondences between the phonological word and the graphemic word (What is theat `e` for?). This becomes specifically compelling when we realize that the phonological word can vary dramatically not only across different speakers but within one speaker. Now, if we look at the grammatical word we actually have three different morphemes here which corresponds not very well to the lexical word which is composed of only one unit. Looking at those we need to acknowledge that there is no one system where all these words are actually the same thing. In reality they are different things, but they are linked to each other. That is Lamb`s explanation of how this linguistic information can actually be stored in the brain. The information is stored separately but is linked
8. What are some of the subsystems that are involved in language?
Subsystems in language can thought of in levels based on the size of the units that are dealt with. Looking at major or stratic systems we have things like phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. At the smaller tactic level we have things like phonton, phoneme, syllable, phrase, clause, sentence etc...... There really is no need to go into all this in great detail. The most important thing is that language is composed of many different subsystems and that while the subsystems are connected and do affect each other they do not necessarily controlled by the same system. They are separate.
9. How are linguistic units realized?
Realization has to do with how the different levels of a units representation interact with each other. Lamb uses this idea of realization to try to show us, in greater detail than we saw above, that these levels do indeed not really correspond neatly to each other all the time and therefore must be separate. The basic idea is that a linguistic unit, as we saw above, exists on different levels and that each of these levels has its own different concerns and ways of functioning. For a word to be realized entirely in an analytic system of linguistics then it must be equally relies on all levels at the same time. That is, the levels almost relate to each other and be generated from each other. Any changes in the form from one level to the next is what comprises the linguistic system. That is the standard analytical approach which as we now know Lamb does not agree with. His idea is that a linguistic unit is realized separately on each different level. That`s the basic idea.
10. What are realization discrepancies and at what levels do they exist?
The idea behind realization discrepancies is that the different levels of a linguistic unit`s representation do not always match up very well. This again is the argument that Lamb is giving us for why he believes that all these different levels need to be separate. He gives us many examples from standard analytical linguistics (shown below) which clearly show how these levels need to be separate because they don`t match.
Alternation
Portmanteau realization
Reduplication
Zero realization
Empty realization
Neutralization