Chapter 6: Learning

This chapter was the death of me...I thought it made sense when I first started reading it..but then everything started combining together and I didn't know what term meant what or what example was for what condition. Classical Conditioning and Pavlov's Discoveries with the salivating dogs were easy to follow with the diagram in the book explaining UCS, UCR, CR, and CS. Then they throw at you acquisition, extinction, spontaneous recovery, stimulus generalization, and stimulus discrimination..like what?? None of those terms make any sense to me especially when they use them again in operant conditioning..are they the same terms or do they have different definitions? I liked reading about the story of Little Albert because I didn't know that fear could be shaped by classical conditioning. The Skinner boxes interested me because they were so much more advanced then the cat boxes made by Thorndike. Under the applications of Operant Conditioning I was confused about the differences between shaping, fading, and chaining. It says that fading is decreasing the frequency of our reinforcement and chaining is a technique in which they link a number of interrelated behaviors to form a longer series. Does that connect to fading or shaping? I dont understand this chapter at all. Someone help me "learn". ;)