Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

R E C A P / E V A L U A T E / R E T H I N K
R E C A P 
What is learning?
• Learning is a relatively permanent change in behavior 
resulting from experience. (p. 175) 
How do we learn to form associations between stimuli and 
responses?
• One major form of learning is classical conditioning, 
which occurs when a neutral stimulus—one that normally 
brings about no relevant response—is repeatedly paired 
with a stimulus (called an unconditioned stimulus) that 
brings about a natural, untrained response. (p. 176)
• Conditioning occurs when the neutral stimulus is repeat-
edly presented just before the unconditioned stimulus. 
After repeated pairings, the neutral stimulus elicits the 
same response that the unconditioned stimulus brings 
about. When this occurs, the neutral stimulus has be-
come a conditioned stimulus, and the response a condi-
tioned response. (p. 176)
• Learning is not always permanent. Extinction occurs 
when a previously learned response decreases in fre-
quency and eventually disappears. (p. 179)
• Stimulus generalization is the tendency for a conditioned 
response to follow a stimulus that is similar to, but not 
the same as, the original conditioned stimulus. The con-
verse phenomenon, stimulus discrimination, occurs 
when an organism learns to distinguish between stimuli. 
(p. 180)
E VA LU AT E
1.
involves changes brought about by experi-
ence, whereas maturation describes changes resulting 
from biological development.
2.
is the name of the scientist responsible for dis-
covering the learning phenomenon known as 
conditioning, whereby an organism learns a response to a 
stimulus to which it normally would not respond. 
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