Journal Entry 1

 After our discussion of Pavlov's theory of classical conditioning in class, I couldn't help but think of my favorite game of all time, Bioshock. Bioshock is an incredible game made by 2K Games and it is set in the greatest game environment ever created.  An underwater city called Rapture.  The game is set around the 1960’s, but the population of Rapture has been underwater since the 1920’s, and in typical video game fashion, they have caught a virus that turns them into psychopathic killers. So, as you can probably guess, there are creepy, crawly, scary as all hell enemies that would love to do nothing more than shoot or slice your head off your shoulders.  One of these baddies in particular scared the life out of me.  It was a heavily armored mini boss named Big Brother.  Big Brother’s main weapon is a giant drill that he has as a hand, and can kill you with two precise hits. Facing him is terrifying, but he is always accompanied by a creepy little girl that sucks a strand of a substance called “Eco” out of dead bodies around the map called little sister.  This reminded me of Classical Conditioning because when you are in the presence of the Big Brother, you would always hear little sister say “Come play Mr. Bubbles” or “Pretty Funny aren't they Mr. Bubbles”! Talk about creepy.  Every time I heard that little voice my heart would pump at max levels.  To this day, even if I hear one of my friends say “Mr. Bubbles” my senses get a little heightened.

I mean COME ON!! YOU DO NOT WANT TO PLAY AROUND WITH THIS DUDE.  AND THAT CREEPY GIRL! No thank you...

This is a trailer for Bioshock 2, but it is the same Little Sister, and she is still the same level of scary. 

With this conditioning there was also some generalization going on.  Generalization happens when a controlled stimulus is changed to something similar and the same conditioned response occurs.  In this particular case, the controlled stimulus was the sound of that creepy high pitched satanic voice of the little sister.  And the controlled response was me having to change pants, or being frightened if you will.  Throughout this game, the splicers that try to kill you always are mumbling to themselves before you engage them in combat.  Even when I hear the splicers mumbling it reminds me of the Little Sister, so I instantly get scared again.  These two stimuli are very similar because they both talk in a creepy voice, and this game will tell you that if you ever hear talking, something bad is about to happen.  The screams and the gun fire doesn't frighten me, but the talking does.  The absence of fright when I hear screams or gun shots can be classified as discrimination.  With discrimination, the tendency of me to respond to a very limited range of stimuli or only to the actual stimuli itself.  The different stimuli would be the screams and gun shots.  This doesn't affect me, but the controlled stimulus of the screaming will always scare me.  There will never be a spontaneous recovery either.  That is when after a period of extinction of the controlled stimuli, the controlled response temporarily reappears in response to the controlled stimuli.  There will never me an extinction of this conditioned response.

Reference: Hergenhahn, B.R., & Olson, M. H. (2005). An introduction to theories of learning. Seventh Edition. Pearson: Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River: New Jersey.