Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Human Learning and Cognition

Spring 2006

Week 5 Answers - Terry, Chapter 4 & Lamb, Chapters 6 and 7

1. What is instrumental learning and how does it differ from classical conditioning?

Instrumental learning is learning in which a stimulus, response, and the consequences of the action derived from the first two are associated. This is a based on the simple and necessary extension of what we observed in classical conditioning to the real world of consequences and rewards. In instrumental learning the outcome of the newly acquired behavior (response) is evaluated against a series (possibly) of needs-based criteria. In this way the consequences have some effect on the association between the first two elements in the triumvirate (stimulus - response). While this new dimension brings behavior theory closer to the real world of cause and effect relationships (trial and error learning) it also adds a further dimension of complications and differing variables to the behavior-based model.

The beauty of instrumental learning, and one of the main differences between the instrumental learning and classical conditioning, is that of control. In instrumental learning because the consequences are taken into consideration the organism is able to control actions consciously. This means that once someone has made two types of associations which are necessary in instrumental learning they will actually seek out situations and engage the world in order to receive a consequence which they would like. This means that they need to plan. In classical conditioning, on the other hand, the organism is really just a passive sponge-like creature which observes what happens in the world and manages to associate things which happened to co-occur. There is no volition or planning, just a response.

2. What is positive reinforcement and how does it work?

Positive reinforcement is exactly what he name implies. It occurs when the consequence of the response is perceived as being beneficial to the organism, either from a physical or psychological point of view. Such a beneficial consequence has the result of getting the organism to repeat the response with more vigor and frequency. This, in effect, is the circular definition of positive reinforcement, it is seen as being positive because it has a positive effect on the instances and types of occurrences of the response.

3. What are some different theories of reinforcement?

To try to break down the idea of positive reinforcement and make it a little easier to understand we can try to identify some different aspects of positive reinforcement. They are:

Drive reduction

Incentive motivation

Brain stimulation

Drive reduction is basically all about how much the organism really wants or needs the consequence to occur. This is called drive. Drives are often thought of as physically determined, such as thirst, hunger, or sex but for humans and maybe some other animals there are also psychological drives, such as the need to be with people or to be praised. According to this, if you are thirsty you will feel a drive to satiate that thirst. The more thirsty you are, and this of course is dependent on how long you are restricted from receiving water as a consequence, the stronger your drive will be. The stronger your drive will be the stronger the response will be. If you are not thirsty at all your drive will be less than if you are and if have just drank a lot of water your drive will be non-existent.

Incentive motivation is when the actual consequence is reinforced even more by the action itself. The consequence awakens a realization about the world which is positive. This provides incentive and the incentive impels the organism to engage in behavior which will lead to the consequence they now desire. In brain stimulation the explanation is physical but one that revolves around the brain. In order to understand this we have to realize that the brain is linked in a very fundamental way to the rest of the body. As we should know by now, the brain is effectively controlled by the transmission of a wide variety of different chemicals these chemicals are used to enhance brain production in addition to suppressing brain reactions and other reactions in the brain. Chemicals are released in the brain based on what occurs in the rest of the body. So, if a person eats chocolate for example the composition of the chocolate as it reacts and to and is absorbed by the body is going to release certain chemicals in the brain. This happens when we eat certain food and it also happens when certain other things happen in our body, such as difficult physical exercise, fear, and many other purely body reactions. It can be safely assumed that in a particular consequence to a response the body is going to react in some way, either by getting something to eat as was demonstrated in a lot of these laboratory experiments or by reacting positively to certain stimulus inherent in the consequence. In either case the body is going to react. This reaction is going to stimulate the brain in a certain way. We know that the brain itself as an organ has its own cravings and is able to become used to certain things. In this way we can see how brain stimulation becomes a certain type of drive. If the brain is used to having certain chemical secreted as a result of the consequence then it will want this to happen. This to a large extent is the underlying formation of addiction. And interestingly because the brain is somehow affected by changes in body the brain can actually become addicted to very strange things basely because of chemical secretions as a result of these body changes. Interesting!

4. How aware are organisms in instrumental learning?

Based on several studies, one of which included a linguistic production test, it seems that contrary to what was claimed in classical conditioning the organism needs to be consciously aware of the effect of the consequence in order to learn instrumentally. As was stated above, in instrumental learning because of reinforcement factors the actual organism becomes deeply involved in the process and actually controls the process. In order for this control to happen there must be a certain level of awareness in the entire process. Now, it could be argued that with enough repetition the process and the awareness of the process might actually become more automatic. We know this is basically have the brain works, that repeated processes become basically automatic and to a large extent subconscious. This, however, would take time and a large degree of conscious control. It would also need to occur in a specific type of situation.

5. What is response learning?

The basic idea in response learning is that the stimulus is cut out and response exists unto itself and without a stimulus. In effect, what basically happens in response learning is that the consequence becomes the stimulus to a large extent. For psychologists response learning is quite important because it allows them to shape responses and in doing so they can actually alter people's behavior particularly when there are problems which need to be fixed in behavior. For us, however, response learning is interesting because it ties in to language itself. Certainly in the real world when people use language they don't have to wait for a particular linguistic stimulus in order to start talking. If this were to be the case that nothing would ever get done because nobody would actually talk first. So, for us to develop a theory of language learning that is based on basic learning concepts of neuronal firing helped by behaviorist models then response learning becomes quite important. Again, the bottom line in response learning is that people will actually respond without a stimulus. So, for language this would mean people actually start speaking without having to wait for some sort of linguistic stimulus. People do this because they think they know what the consequence of their speech is going to be. This is, therefore extremely, basic and is extremely important for us.

6. What is learned in instrumental conditioning?

As was mentioned above, what is learned is the connection between not only the stimulus and the response as we saw in classical conditioning but both of them with the consequence. This is demonstrated by changes in behavior relative to the type and strength of the consequence. What it really interesting here is that this three-way connection can be broken. Thus, the stimulus might not be important all the time for response to occur. Likewise people can respond without being assured of a particular consequence, so the consequence will eventually be cut off from the whole scheme. By advocating this three-way type of connection or association, but one which is also flexible, we can allow for a tremendous amount of variation in behavior based on simple learning. This is the type of thing which is necessary for us if we're really going to use this to describe how language might be learned and actually works in the real world.

7. What are some of the main applications of these ideas for us as language teachers?

Reward

Punishment

Motivation

There are many applications of these ideas in instrumental learning which we can apply to the language classroom. Most of these applications relate to the idea of motivation or to put it into more behaviorist terms drive and incentive. We can regulate drive and incentive by carefully trying to regulate punishment and reward. Based on some of the ideas presented here it would seem that a certain amount of reward is necessary in order to give people drive, but at the same time we don't want this drive to become satiated through an overuse of rewards. When the drive does become satiated than people stop working so hard. That is the problem when we provide too much of what is, in our familiar terminology, extrinsic motivation. Therefore it's important to know when and how to reward and when and how to punish. The danger of punishment is the people begin to associate the punishment with the response and will therefore avoid responding in all possible cases and I think we see things like this actually happen in the English language classroom in Korea. The evaluation system is a system of punishment not a system of reward and people do associate punishment with responses, in large part because their responses are never quite good enough. What this means for us is that we need to reward but not for reward's sake. We need to reward honestly and fairly and when it's applicable. Punishment should be dished out the same way. There should be no irrelevant patterns of punishment or reward.

An underlying presumption of this idea is that the students are actually responding. This mean to the students actually have to perform in some sort of way. We can only get an idea of consequences or form associations with consequences when we actually respond. This would seem to indicate that language classrooms must involve a lot more real language use for the students. If language classrooms do not involve actual performance, that is responses, by the students then none of these ideas are going to work.

As we move further and further into these behaviors series is important remember how they might actually be linked to language use and eventually language learning. We are interested in language is a specific type of behavior. This will involve language as being in its primary sense; a type of behavior. Of course, for this behavior to actually occur there has to be some underlying knowledge and language is a very complex system of knowledge. This is what we're trying to work towards. The things we study this week about instrumental learning are quite important because now we not only can explain to how patterns of sounds, morphemes, words might actually enter the brain but now we can actually begin to talk a little bit about behavior. In instrumental learning what people actually learn is to associate consequences with either stimulus or responses or both. Knowing these consequences allows people to self direct behavior. This means that language, for our considerations in this course, has now moved out of the realm of the brain and into the realm of real behavior. People can begin conversations and engage in conversations based on somebody's very simple ideas here. The fact, mentioned above, that this three-way association between stimulus response in consequence can be broken in certain places allows people to extend the simple generalization into many different areas, thus allowing language to actually occur as a type of behavior. This is very interesting in importance step for us in our quest to try to determine how language is actually learned.

8. How can we bring syntax into the model that was proposed last week? (L6)

The basic idea behind integrating syntax is that we need more connections. We need connections creating constituents as neural networks. Once this is done, and I think this is an easy step, then we need to try to undertake the much harder task of trying to sequence both the constituents and even the elements in the constituents. Lamb goes about creating a model with different types of nodes running in different directions to show is that it can be done, but also claims that this is probably not how it is done by the brain.

Sequencing of units in language is generally prey to two major forces. These are, regular patterns which have been encountered so often they simply and automatically reoccur and meaning, which allows people to alter those regular patterns. Still, though any system of meaning needs to connect to a cognitive system of concepts. We will see how this might work later on.

9. What are the four basic properties of a mental model of the world? (L7)

Lamb posits four properties of mental models. It is important to realize that these might just be innate cognitive abilities. These are properties nd processes that we are born with.

Analysis and Catalysis

This is the ability to break input (sensory or otherwise) down into units and also build these units up into bigger units. It should not be hard to understand how this be very important in being able to not only build systems or models as Lamb is talking about what, for us, to learn. In the real world boundaries between different actions and/or concepts do not necessarily exist. In order to understand these different actions or identify specific concepts we need to be able to first break the world into units. We do this through analysis. Even language is a simple example does not really exist with the same types of boundaries you might think. There are very few clear boundaries between one sound and another or between one sentence or another. All these different sounds tend to flow together. It is really not until the onset of literacy skills that people even begin to analyze language the way we might analyze language. Once we`ve analyzed the world enough then we need to be able to build it back up again - this is catalysis - but we don`t put it back together in exactly the same way that it occurred in the world in the first place. This is the beauty and the bane of human intelligence.

Introjective Models

The idea of introjection, contrary to the claims of Lamb are in fact used by everybody. The basic idea of introjection is, as I see it, the first step in projection. It revolves around the fact that people, first, create models of the world internally. These models come from introjecting certain aspects of systems from the outside world internally, thereby creating internal systems which may approximate but do not match actual external systems. This internal model, built out of a process of introjection, forms the bases of our belief systems and is then projected onto the outside world again through action. Interesting.

Descriptive Process

It would seem to be that maybe humans have an innate need to describe things and create systems based on describing. We need to realize, first though, that description is really just taking things that co-occur and linking them. By linking a group of elements/concepts together we hope to create some sort of meaning. It should also be noted that as with everything else, many of these descriptions - linkages are faulty. Co-occurrences are not always meaningful, even if they occur frequently. By linking things together, however, we do create meaning and this is actually a very good example of how a connection is model might actually work in the brain since a connection is model is really just a series of billions and billions of links. Amazing though may seem we can build a tremendous array accomplished meanings out of these links. Surprisingly, this all starts with simple descriptive process.

Metaphorical Models

Another way that people make sense of the world is through metaphor. Metaphors often link unrelated concepts so that they come to share properties. It is in this way that people make sense of novel phenomenon. Once these metaphors become widespread, and this of course occurs through language. People who share the same language not only understand them but actually use them as part of their thought processes. It is really at the level of metaphorical models that we can really see how language and thought are combined.

10. How do top-down and bottom-up models differ? (L7)

This question is phrased as a kind of trap. We are not necessarily concerned with the way that top-down and bottom-up models differ (this really isn`t very interesting or meaningful) as much as we are forced to admit that they may not actually the separate processes. As you should already know from previous discussions in previous courses it should be clear that both function simultaneously. Even when you are listening to someone you`re not simply using bottom-up processing because you have information about the context, what was previously said, visual cues, and a vast array of other information which derives a top down system. This is where the PDP model really shows its value. We can have activation spreading top and from the bottom and whichever one gets their fastest is the winner. This is how the brain works. The only time were going to get one over the other is probably in a very own naturalistic laboratory experiment, many of which we will actually see described in Terry (2006).