44.04.01 Педагогическое образование

37.04.01 Психология

ЗАДАНИЕ. Прочитайте текст. Выполните послетекстовые задания.

Text. Observational Learning: Learning Through Imitation

Operant conditioning is learning in which a voluntary response is strengthened or weakened, depending on its favorable or unfavorable consequences. When we say that a response has been strengthened or weakened, we mean that it has been made more or less likely to recur regularly. Unlike classical conditioning, in which the original behaviors are the natural, biological responses to the presence of a stimulus such as food, water, or pain, operant conditioning applies to voluntary responses, which an organism performs deliberately to produce a desirable outcome. The term operant emphasizes this point: The organism operates on its environment to produce a desirable result. Operant conditioning is at work when we learn that toiling industriously can bring about a raise or that studying hard results in good grades.

On a 1991 hot summer day in Parma, Italy, a lab monkey awaited its researchers’ return from lunch. The researchers had implanted wires next to its motor cortex, in a frontal lobe brain region that enabled the monkey to plan and enact movements. When the monkey moved a peanut into its mouth, for example, the monitoring device would buzz. That day, as one of the researchers reentered the lab, ice cream cone in hand, the monkey stared at him. As the student raised the cone to lick it, the monkey’s monitor again buzzed – as if the motionless monkey had itself moved (Blakeslee, 2006; Iacoboni, 2008).

Having earlier observed the same weird result when the monkey watched humans or other monkeys move peanuts to their mouths, the flabbergasted researchers, led by Giacomo Rizzolatti (2002, 2006), eventually surmised that they had stumbled onto a previously unknown type of neuron: mirror neurons, whose activity provides a neural basis for imitation and observational learning. When a monkey grasps, holds, or tears something, these neurons fire. And they likewise fire when the monkey observes another doing so. When one monkey sees, these neurons mirror what another monkey does.

It’s not just monkey business. Imitation shapes even very young humans’ behavior. Shortly after birth, a baby may imitate an adult who sticks out his tongue. By 8 to 16 months, infants imitate various novel gestures (Jones, 2007). By age 12 months, they begin looking where an adult is looking (Brooks & Meltzoff, 2005). And by age 14 months, children imitate acts modeled on TV (Meltzoff, 1988; Meltzoff & Moore, 1989, 1997). Children see, children do.

For most of us, however, our mirror neurons make emotions contagious. We grasp others’ states of mind – often feeling what they feel – by mental simulation. We find it harder to frown when viewing a smile than when viewing a frown (Dimberg et al., 2000, 2002). We find ourselves yawning after observing another’s yawn, laughing when others laugh. When watching movies, a scorpion crawling up someone’s leg makes us tighten up; observing a passionate kiss, we may notice our own lips puckering.

Seeing a loved one’s pain, our faces mirror their emotion. So do our brains. The pain imagined by an empathic romantic partner has triggered some of the same brain activity experienced by the loved one actually having the pain (Singer et al., 2004). Even fiction reading may trigger such activity, as we mentally simulate the experiences described (Mar & Oatley, 2008). Our brain’s mirror neurons underlie our intensely social nature.

Retrieved from Psychology (9-th ed.) by David G. Myers, NY : Worth Publishers, 2010, P. 319.

Послетекстовые задания.

1. Give adequate Russian equivalents of the italicized worlds in the text.

2. Find 10 words with suffixes. Give their Russian equivalents.

3. Translate the sentences of the bold type into Russian.

4. Make up a summary of the text in three-four sentences in English.

5. Add more ideas to the list. Write down your everyday examples of operant conditioning on the paper in English.

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