Got a new syllabus today. Basically, everything got pushed back two weeks. Midterm next week. Self-observation due the week after. Got a individual assignment due tomorrow for Strategy; need to knuckle down in there. Already rocky enough in that class.
Some additional discussion of classical conditioning.
Talk about acquired taste aversion. Essentially a particular special case of classical conditioning. If you get nauseous, you tend to associate that nausea with whatever you ate last, even if it was hours previous. If you had a multi-food meal last, there’s a distinct tendency to associate the sickness with the most novel of the foods or the food you like the least. It’s interesting because it only requires one exposure to form strongly, and the sickness can come up to six hours after the stimulus and still be effective.
In general, nausea cannot be trained. You can’t train a person to become nauseous when you ring a bell. There are exceptions when a person has some particular nausea trigger besides food. For instance, some people become nauseous when they see blood. That could possibly be trained, by creating an association with blood.
Acquired taste aversion is more effective if you catch a subject early. A kid forced to smoke until he gets sick may develop an acquired taste aversion strong enough to prevent future smoking. A habitual smoker forced to do the same thing will not develop nearly as strong an aversion, and it won’t stay.
Classical conditioning in general works across phylogenetic lines. Planaria can be conditioned. Humans can be conditioned. Birds can be conditioned.
Moving on to operant conditioning.
In operant conditioning, the behavior causes the reinforcement. This is in direct contrast to classical conditioning, where the stimulus causes the behavior.