Week 6 · Readings & resources

Week 6 — Readings & Resources

Introduction to Psychology Free sample edition

Your primary reading is Chapter 6 (in this module). Everything below is the optional, go-deeper layer — pick what helps, skip the rest.

How to use this page

This page has 10 items (4 readings and 6 videos). Allow 61–73 minutes for everything. Each group points back to the matching chapter section and class-session segment, so use the full menu when you want more practice, or take the quick path below.

Every video here has captions: turn them on with the CC button in the player. The chapter covers the same ideas in text.

Pick-one quick path (19–21 min total)

① Which stimulus is which? Pairing, fading, and coming back

Chapter 6, Section “Learn by pairing: classical conditioning” · Session 1, Segment 1, “Classical conditioning” · Remember: the UCS triggers a response with no learning, and a once-neutral stimulus paired with it becomes the CS.

Pavlov’s Classical Conditioning — Sprouts — a short animated walk through Pavlov's dogs and the four labels; pause after each stimulus appears and name it before the narrator does. (video, 5 min) (captions: creator)
Extinction, Spontaneous Recovery, and Generalization in Conditioning — The Psychology Brief — a compact review of how a learned link fades, returns after a rest, and spreads to similar stimuli, with discrimination as the narrowing step. (video, 5 min) (captions: automatic)
Classical Conditioning — Simply Psychology — read the three stages of conditioning, the Pavlov's dogs and fear-response examples, and the principles from the neutral stimulus through discrimination; skip higher-order conditioning and the later research sections, and keep the chapter's definitions where the wording differs. (reading, 10–15 min)

② Is it reinforcement or punishment? Consequences and schedules

Chapter 6, Section “Sort the four consequences, and keep negative reinforcement apart from punishment” · Session 1, Segment 3, “The four consequences” · Remember: up or down tells you reinforcement or punishment, and added or removed tells you positive or negative.

How to Train a Brain: Crash Course Psychology #11 — CrashCourse — a fast tour from Pavlov to Skinner, with positive and negative reinforcement and the schedules of reinforcement; use it while working through the Week-6 module overview. (video, 12 min) (captions: creator)
Skinner’s Operant Conditioning: Rewards & Punishments — Sprouts — an animated summary of reinforcement and punishment; for every example, ask whether something was added or removed and whether the behavior went up or down. (video, 4 min) (captions: creator)
Reinforcement Schedules (4 Types Explained) — Social Science Explainer — a short explainer on fixed and variable, ratio and interval schedules; it also mentions continuous reinforcement, which this course does not test. (video, 4 min) (captions: automatic)
How Do You Train a Zebra? — Smithsonian's National Zoo — an animal keeper describes training a zebra with positive reinforcement, a reward that makes a chosen behavior more frequent; notice that the keepers first pair a clicker's sound with treats, a classical-conditioning step, before using the sound to mark the behavior they reward. This builds on Week 4's work on how humans sense and perceive the world: every stimulus and consequence here first has to be sensed. (reading, 6–9 min)

③ Can you learn without a reward? Watching a model

Chapter 6, Section “Learn by watching: observational learning” · Session 2, Segment 6, “Observational learning” · Remember: a child can learn a behavior by watching a model, with no reward of their own.

The Bobo Beatdown: Crash Course Psychology #12 — CrashCourse — Bandura's Bobo doll study and observational learning; the parts on latent learning and mirror neurons go beyond this course and are optional. (video, 10 min) (captions: creator)
Bandura and Bobo — Association for Psychological Science — a short article on the 1961 study and why it moved psychology beyond rewards and punishments; read it with the chapter's independent and dependent variables in mind. (reading, 3–5 min)

Optional one-stop reference (free online reference)

What Regulations Protect Research Participants? — Office for Human Research Protections — the federal office that oversees the rules protecting research volunteers explains review by an institutional review board (IRB) and informed consent; set it beside this week's Little Albert discussion to see the protections today's rules require before a study with people begins. (reading, 2–4 min)

Heads-up (links rot): these point to outside sites that occasionally move or rename pages. If a link ever fails, tell your instructor and use the reference above in the meantime.

Provenance: Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com