Classical Conditioning
A form of learning in which reflex responses are associated with the new stimuli. At the beginning of the twentieth century, something happened in the lab of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov that brought him lasting fame. The event now seems so trivial that a lesser man might have ignored it: Pavlov’s subjects drooled at him. Actually, Pavlov was studying digestion. To observe salivation, he placed meat powder or some tidbit on a dog’s tongue. After doing this many times, Pavlov noticed that his dogs were salivating before the food reached their mouths. Later, the dogs even began to salivate when they saw Pavlov enter the room. Was this misplaced affection? Pavlov knew better. Salivation is a normal reflex. For the animals to salivate at the mere sight of food, some type of learning had to have occurred, Pavlov called it conditioning. Because of its importance in psychology’s history, it is now called classical conditioning known as Pavlovian conditioning or respondent conditioning.
Ivan Pavlov
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (26 September [14 September] 1849 – 27 February 1936) was a Soviet and Russian physiologist known primarily for his work in classical conditioning. From his childhood days, Pavlov demonstrated intellectual curiosity along with an unusual energy which he referred to as “the instinct for research”. Inspired by the progressive ideas which Dmitry Pisarev, a Russian literary critic of the 1860s, and Ivan Sechenov, the father of Russian physiology, were spreading, Pavlov abandoned his religious career and devoted his life to science. In 1870, he enrolled in the physics and mathematics department at the University of Saint Petersburg to study natural science. Pavlov carried out experiments on the digestive glands, as well as investigated the gastric function of dogs, and eventually won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1904, becoming the first Russian Nobel laureate.
Basic Components
- Unconditioned stimulus – any stimulus that has the ability to elicit a response without previous training.
- Conditioned stimulus – refers to a stimulus which initially does not elicit the response under study but comes to do so by being paired with the unconditioned stimulus.
- Unconditioned response – is the original response to an unconditioned stimulus.
- conditioned response– a learned response elicited by a conditioned stimulus.
Laws of Classical Conditioning
- Law of excitation or acquisition – applies when a previously neutral stimulus acquires the property of eliciting the conditioned response.
- Law of internal inhibition – the conditioned response will not occur if the conditioned stimulus is not simultaneously presented with unconditioned stimulus.
- Law of external inhibition – excitatory or inhibitory processes in conditioning can occur when new and distracting stimuli are presented and then removed.
- Law of extinction – unlearning, when conditioned response is no longer elicited by the conditioned stimulus
- Spontaneous recovery – A conditioned response, which does not appear for some time re-occurs without further conditioning.
- Generalization – conditioned response occurs not just to conditioned stimulus during training but to similar stimuli too.
- Discrimination – discrimination is the ability to differentiate between a conditioned stimulus and other stimuli that have not been paired with an unconditioned stimulus.
- Higher order conditioning – the process by which a conditioned stimulus may become an unconditioned stimulus.
Process of learning
- Acquisition – adoption of behavior / bell for food
- Generalization – generalization of behavior / different types of sound
- Distinction/Discrimination – discrimination of behavior / response on only one type of sound
- Extinction – extinction of behavior in response / no response
- Spontaneous Recovery – Re formulation of old behavior / learning same behavior at minimal time.
Understanding the learning curve
