Learning — Psychology STD 11 Humanities — Question

Classical conditioning:

• Classical conditioning is a type of learning in which an organism learns to associate stimuli.
• The concept was developed by Ivan Pavlov.
• The main feature is that the originally neutral conditioned stimulus (CS), through repeated pairing with the unconditioned stimulus (US) acquires the response originally given to the US.

Classical conditioning gets its name from the fact that it is the kind of learning situation that existed in the early "classical" experiment of Ivan P. Pavlov. This famous Russian physiologist began to establish many of the basic principles of this form of conditioning, that is why classical conditioning is also known as respondent conditioning or Pavlovian Conditioning.

e.g. Pavlov designed an experiment to understand this process in detail. He experimented on dogs.

e.g. Pavlov designed an apparatus that, could measure how much a dog's mouth salivated or water in response to food or other things in its environment. At the beginning of his experiment, Pavlov noted that no saliva flowed when he rang a bell.

• He trained the dog by sounding the bell and shortly afterward, presenting food. After the sound of the bell had been paired with food a few times, he tested the effects of the training by measuring the amount of saliva that flowed when he rang the bell and did not present the food.
• He found that some saliva was produced in response to the bell alone. He than resumed the pairing.
• Paired presentation of bell and food took place few more times and then tested again with the bell alone.
• As pairing continued the amount of saliva on tests with the bell alone increased (up to a point).
• Thus after training, the dog's mouth watered/salivated whenever the bell was sounded.
• This is what was learned is the conditioned response.