Classical Conditioning

Excerpt

Learning is the process through which individuals acquire new knowledge, behaviors, attitudes, and ideas. Humans must be sensitive to both meaningful and coincidental relationships between events in the environment to survive. This learning process happens through both unconscious and conscious pathways. Classical conditioning, also known as associative learning, is an unconscious process where an automatic, conditioned response becomes associated with a specific stimulus. Although Edwin Twitmyer published findings on classical conditioning a year before Ivan Pavlov, the most recognized work in the field is attributed to Pavlov (a Russian physiologist born in the mid-1800s). Pavlov's significant contributions to classical conditioning have led to the term "Pavlovian conditioning" being used to describe it.

The discovery of classical conditioning was accidental. While researching the digestion of dogs, Pavlov observed that the dogs' physical responses to food gradually changed. Initially, the dogs only salivated when the food was directly presented. However, he later noticed that the dogs began to salivate slightly before the food arrived in response to sounds consistently associated with feeding, such as the sound of the food cart. To test his theory, Pavlov conducted an experiment where he rang a bell shortly before presenting food to the dogs. Initially, the dogs did not salivate in response to the bell. However, as they learned to associate the sound of the bell with the arrival of food, they began to salivate at the sound alone.

An unconditioned stimulus is something that naturally triggers an automatic response. In Pavlov's experiment, the food acted as the unconditioned stimulus. The unconditioned response is the automatic reaction to that stimulus, which in this case was the dogs salivating in response to the food.

A neutral stimulus initially elicits no response. Pavlov introduced the ringing of the bell as a neutral stimulus. Over time, a neutral stimulus can become a conditioned stimulus, which eventually triggers a conditioned response. In Pavlov's experiment, the ringing of the bell became the conditioned stimulus, and salivation was the conditioned response. Essentially, the neutral stimulus transforms into the conditioned stimulus. While the unconditioned and conditioned responses are the same physiological reaction—salivation—the difference lies in the stimulus that elicits them. In Pavlov's experiments, salivation was the response. The unconditioned response, triggered by food, was salivation, while the bell triggered the conditioned response.