In this video I explain two examples of aversive conditioning; John Watson’s “Little Albert” study pairing presentation of a rat with a loud noise, and John Garcia and Robert Koelling’s work on learned taste aversions in rats. Taste aversions demonstrate our biological preparedness for some learning, which allows us to learn certain types of associations more easily than others.

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“Little Albert” study footage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMnhyGozLyE

Video Transcript:
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review.

In this video we’re going to look at a few more examples related to classical conditioning. We’ll start with a famous study known as the “Little Albert” experiment. Now technically this isn’t an experiment and the child involved was not named Albert but anyway, that’s not too important.

This was a study conducted by John B. Watson and his graduate student assistant Rosalie Rayner in 1920. So what Watson and Rayner did was they took this 9 month-old orphan, little Albert here, here’s Albert sitting on the ground here and they presented him with a number of stimuli including a white rat.

These stimuli were fairly neutral, Albert didn’t show a strong response to them but then they decided to pair the white rat with an unconditioned stimulus, in this case, the unconditioned stimulus was a metal rod that was hit by a hammer.

This made this loud clanging noise and that caused an unconditioned response in that Albert showed some distress to hearing this loud noise.

So Watson and Rayner did this repeatedly. They would present the white rat, bang the bar and make this loud noise. They did this over and over until acquisition occurred; until when little Albert was presented with the white rat, he showed distress.

This is an example of what’s called aversive conditioning. They were able to condition a negative emotional response to a particular stimulus. Now Albert showed this response not only to the white rat but to similar stimuli. So he showed distress when presented with a rabbit and also with a mask that Watson wore. It was Santa mask that had a fluffy white beard.

I’ll put a link in the video description box and you can see some of the original footage from the study and you’ll probably agree that the Santa mask is incredibly creepy and I can’t blame Albert for being upset when presented with it.

But this demonstrates this aversive conditioning and it also shows stimulus generalization. Now there’s a number of ethical problems with this study and the most important of these is that after the acquisition had occurred that was the end of the study. In other words, they didn’t try to undo this negative emotional response that they had created in little Albert. After he started showing fear to this rat, that was the end of the study and little Albert went back to his orphanage and Watson and Rayner presumably continued their love affair, for which Watson would lose his job the same year.

The important point is that they didn’t try to undo this negative change. Now it’s probably not a big deal, we don’t think that little Albert would’ve been scarred for life by this because he’d probably have future exposure to white rats and nothing bad would happen there wouldn’t be this loud noise, so extinction would probably occur over time.

But still, the ethical principles of psychology suggest that we should undo any changes that we cause in a participant during a study. If we make them upset, we have to try to do something to try to remove that later and Watson and Rayner did not do this.

Now Watson was an example of an extreme view of the nurture side of this nature nurture debate. I’ve said in a previous video we shouldn’t think of it as a debate, it’s really an interaction but at the time it was thought more strictly of is it nature, is it nurture? You sort of have to be one or the other and Watson was definitely on the side of nurture.

He thought that learning and experience and environment were the most important, in fact the only factors for one’s development. This is often summarized with a quote from Watson in his book “Behaviorism”, he’s the one who introduced this term behaviorism, this quote where he describes bringing up children to be anything that he would want.

He says “give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and yes even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations ,and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.”

So this a very extreme view of environment is everything, it’s all about learning, it’s all about experience. Now of course, if we adopt a view this extreme, there’s bound to be examples that don’t fit with this. That’s what we’re going to see next.

We’re going to see another example of aversive conditioning but this shows that it’s not just about learning, there’s also a biological role, there’s a predisposition for certain types of learning, we’re prepared to learn certain things and not others. Certain associations will be learned more easily.

Ok so this comes from work by John Garcia and Robert Koelling. Like so many great findings in psychology, we see that they didn’t initially set out to study this, just like Pavlov didn’t set out to study associative learning he was studying and he sort of stumbled upon this interesting finding, the same occurred with Garcia and Koelling because Garcia and Koelling were studying the effects of radiation on rats.

So they were taking rats and exposing them to radiation and seeing what happened. One of the things that happened was strange, what happened was the rats refused to drink water from the plastic containers in their cages.

They were being exposed to radiation and after this they wouldn’t drink the water anymore. Garcia and Koelling couldn’t figure out what was going on and then they realized that the plastic containers were giving the water a certain flavor, a plastic flavor, and the rats were associating this with the illness that the radiation was causing.

The radiation was making rats experience nausea and as a result the rats thought “it must be this water that I’m drinking that’s making me ill. I drink this water that tastes a little weird and then I’m really sick a few hours later, must be the water”.

So Garcia and Koelling then set out to study this in more detail. One of the things that they did was they tried a number of different combinations of stimuli and responses. They found, for instance, that they could get a noise to be associated with an electric shock. So play a noise, then shock the rat, play a noise, shock the rat and the rat will show a negative emotional response to the noise. No big surprise there.

They found that they could do things like give the rat some flavored water and then cause nausea by exposing the rat to radiation and the rat would learn to associate the water with the nausea. This all made sense but they found they couldn’t flip these pairs, they couldn’t get the rat to associate noise with nausea.

It just seemed that the rat knew “water is capable of making me sick but noises don’t cause this.” So they couldn’t get this to happen, they’d play a noise and then try to make the rat sick later but this association didn’t seem to be learned nearly as easily as this flavored water causing nausea.

OK so this is calling a learned taste aversion. This sort of bends the rules of classical conditioning a little bit, there’s certain parts of this that don’t really make sense with what we’ve learned about classical conditioning so far.

Because in the case of Pavlov’s dogs, you ring the bell and you present food. The dog learns this association. In the case of taste aversion, when you have a particular food that you decide you don’t want to eat anymore, it often happens because you get sick, but you get sick many hours after you eat the food. It’s not the case that you eat something and immediately start vomiting. You eat it and then 4 hours you’re vomiting, you somehow are still able to associate that with the food that you ate several hours ago.

That’s what was happening with these rats. The nausea wasn’t immediate after the radiation. It happened much later. So this kind of shows, in the case of Pavlov’s dogs if you rang the bell and then 4 hours later you presented food to the dog, the dog’s not going to learn this association. But in the case of food and illness, we are able to learn this despite a very long delay between the stimulus and the response.

Another thing that’s a bit different about this is that it can occur after a single exposure. If you’ve eaten a particular food, let’s say it’s the first time you’ve tried some new food and then you got sick, even if the illness was not caused by the food, maybe it was unrelated, but you got sick a few hours later, you might no longer want to eat that food. We didn’t have to pair it over and over again.

We had to ring the bell and present food over and over again to get the dogs to learn that association, but in the case of taste aversion, we can learn it after a single exposure. This also differs from the rules of classical conditioning that we learned in the previous videos.

Now if you’ve ever read the book “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess or you’ve seen the film directed by Stanley Kubrick you might remember this scene where Alex, the main character who’s a violent criminal, he’s given this therapy to supposedly cure him of his violent tendencies and he’s strapped into a chair and his eyes are held open and he’s forced to watch violent films and before he does this they give him a drug that’s going to make him very sick.

So he’s watching the violent films and he’s vomiting, watching the films and vomiting, the idea was that he would associate violence with this sickness and therefore he would avoid violence. But we can already see that according to this aversive conditioning and learned taste aversion here that this probably wouldn’t work. What would probably happen is that Alex would associated his illness with whatever food he had eaten earlier that day.

Whatever they were feeding him at this institution, he would come to hate that particular food but he probably wouldn’t associate his illness with the things that he was looking at on screen, just like the rats couldn’t learn to associate their illness with some noise that they heard.

This shows that we have a biological preparedness for certain types of learning. We are prepared to learn certain types of associations rather than other ones. So we can learn them, in the case of taste, we can learn quickly, after a single exposure and we can learn them even though there’s a long gap between the presentation of the stimulus and the response later. We’ll come back to this idea of biological influences on learning later when we’re talking about operant conditioning.

OK so that’s aversive conditioning and learned taste aversions, and little Albert. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more.

Thanks for watching!