Learning Principles

Module 3

Why did any of this catch on?

• As noted earlier, there was a push among many psychologists to create a discipline that was empirically driven. In part, this was a response to "soft" science that was being performed by other scientists attempting to explain human behavior and the human mind. Behaviorism allowed many new laboratory experiments to be performed.

  

  One important laboratory finding was that the magnitude of the CR is generally slightly less than the magnitude of the UR. In practical terms, this means that a dog will salivate more when presented with an unconditioned stimulus (meat powder), than when presented with a conditioned stimulus (ringing bell).

  

  Another important finding was that the latency period had an important effect on the strength of a response and its resistance to extinction.

  Additional research focused on resistance to extinction, stimulus generalization, and inhibition.
   

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