Classical Conditioning: Ivan Pavlov

Pavlov made a small cut on the inside of the dogs’ mouth and attached a tube that connected to a container for the collection and measurement of saliva. One day he noticed that there was saliva starting to collect in the container when the dog heard the assistant coming to feed him. The dog had already been conditioned to the sound of the footsteps as a conditioned stimulus. And although completely by accident Pavlov had just proved his classical conditioning theory. He had made a discovery, now was his chance to research it, and he did so in his lab of his own design.

Classical Conditioning Today The relationship between saliva and a bell root back to one of the most studied and well known cases of learning. Ivan Pavlov was a Russian doctor that focused in the study of digestion in the early 1900s. Because he specialized in the breakdown of food, gastric secretion and saliva were major components of his research. A lot of his experiments included dogs, which Pavlov noticed salivated whenever meat powder was present. As time continued, he began to recognize that different stimulus also got the dogs to drool, but in different amounts.

Ivan Pavlov was an influential physiologist, who accidently discovered what’s known as classical conditioning. (King, 2016) When he was conducting an experiment on a dog, in an effort to learn about the digestive system, he noticed that the dog would salivate when meat powder was placed in his mouth. Eventually he noticed that the dog would start to salivate, even when the meat powder was absent. He discovered that all of the stimuli that caused the dog to salivate had a connection to the meat powder. Curious as to why this occurred, he observed the dog’s behavior, and noticed that the dog’s behavior was both learned and unlearned.

After repeating this process a couple of times he ran into what he called a problem, the dog would salivate at just the site of the food, and eventually the dish the food came in and even the sound of footsteps walking towards him. Pavlov, trying to get around this problem tried to sneak up on the dog, but to no avail. Later Pavlov realized he stumbled upon a form of learning now known as classical conditioning, and devoted the rest of his life to studying it. To study his new, so called “problem” he had to have a system set up in which he would feed the dog. Often he used a dry meat powder, this powder would automatically cause the dog to salivate.

These signals can also mean another human or dog has terrorized your pet, which needs to be corrected immediately. o Check for signs of needing to use the bathroom. Dogs will walk around sniffing different furniture and the floor for a good p... ... middle of paper ... ..., reward your dog as much as possible every time he or she steps into the crate. It will teach your dog that being inside the crate is a reward, not a punishment. o It is not necessary to close or lock the crate until it is time to leave the dog unsupervised.

Classical Conditioning was a phenomenon that a man named Ivan Pavlov explored in the twentieth-century. His work laid the foundation for many other psychologists such as John Watson. Pavlov’s idea came when he seized on an incidental observation. He noticed putting food in a dogs mouth caused salvation. However, the dog not only salivated to the food it began to also salivate to mere sight of the food, or the food dish.

Russian life scientist Ivan Pavlov was the primary to explain conditioning. In conditioning, additionally referred to as “respondent learning” or “Pavlovian conditioning,” a topic involves reply to a neutral information as he would to a different, nonneutral information by learning to associate the 2 stimuli. Pavlov’s contribution to learning began with his study of dogs. Not astonishingly, his dogs drooled anytime he gave them food. Then he detected that if he plumbed a tone anytime he fed them, the dogs soon began to drool at the sound of the tone, even though no food followed it.

John Watson followed up Pavlov with an experiment known as “Little Albert” that would test whether or not classical conditioning could be applied to humans (C). The combination of the two experiments left behind a set of principles and methods that allow us to apply classical conditioning to studies today. In Pavlov’s study of digestion in dogs, he began to recognize that the lab dogs would salivate before being given their food. He was curious about his observation and began to pursue further investigation. Paying closer attention, Pavlov noticed that the dogs would begin salivating when the research assistants entered the lab to feed the dogs (A).

He noticed that his dogs behaviors were changing. At first they would salivate with just the food. The more he worked with them, the more their behavior changed until he noticed that they would salivate whenever he or his assistant would come in the room with or without food. He then began experiments with neutral stimuli such as bells and whistles. The dogs would associate food with the bells.

The bell in the experiment, Pavlov called the neutral stimulus (NS). The bell had absolutely no effect on the dogs until they had been conditioned to respond in association to its sound. Once the dogs were conditioned to the sound of the bell, the bell became known as the conditioned stimulus (CS). After being conditioned to its sound, the saliva that the dogs produced in response, he called this the conditioned response (CR). With this experiment, Ivan Pavlov was able to describe a non-conscious, instinctual type of learning.