Comparing is Caring It would seem barbaric to eat your dog for dinner since dogs are widely considered to be man’s best friend. But what do dogs have that pigs don’t? What are the distinct differences between a dog and a pig that makes us humans put the pig on the dinner table and not the dog? This essay seeks to discuss pigs and dogs’ ability to learn a new behavior via the process of association and their ability to navigate using visual cues like colors. Most animals have instinctive reactions to certain situations, but studies on animal intellect show that some animals possess the ability to learn. In Ivan Pavlov's classic experiments on dogs, Pavlov struck a bell every time before the researchers fed the dogs. This was repeated several times until the dogs learnt to associate the sound of the bell with food and responded by salivating in anticipation without any food presented (Ramnero 63). In an experiment led by Dr. Catherine Douglas of Newcastle University’s School of Agriculture, a group of pigs were played a note from an instrument and given a treat, while the rest of the p...
The study by Watson and Rayner was to further the research of Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov was a Russian physiologist whose most famous experiments involved that of animals, specifically the unconditioned and conditioned reflexes of canines, in reference to salivation and conditioned emotional response. Pavlov demonstrated that if a bell was rang each time a dog was fed; ultimately the animal would befall conditioned to salivate at just the sound of the bell, even where food is was no longer present (The Salivation reflex). Watson and Rayner set out to further the research of conditioned stimulus response, with little Albert. ‘These authors without adequate experimental evidence advanced the view that this range was increased by means of conditioned reflex factors.’ (B.Watson, R Rayner , 1920).
Watson. During Pavlov’s experiment to determine the role salvia had in the digestive process of dogs, lead to his discovery of psychic reflexes. After pairing the meat powder with a bell, Pavlov realized that his dogs were salivating after hearing/seeing the bell even without the presence of the meat powder. In Pavlov’s experiment, the meat powder is an unconditioned stimuli and the salivating is the unconditioned response. Eventually, the bell becomes a conditioned stimuli that brings about salivation (a conditioned
Skinner argues that ‘learning is accelerated by reinforcement: a stimulus that increases the probability of a response’ called ‘operant conditioning’ and it is not reliant on what triggered the response but...
We have all heard of Pavlov's Dogs, the experiment where the dogs "drooled" at the sounding of a bell. But, do we know of the details of this infamous experiment? What do we know of the man, beyond that he could ring bells? It is my intention, in this brief dissertation, to shed more light on his life and his experiments.
Watson, J. (1903). Animal education: An Experimental Study On The Psychical Development Of The White Rat, Correlated With The Growth Of Its Nervous System. Chicago: The University of Chicago.
Thorndike, E. L. (1898). Animal intelligence: An experimental study of the associative processes in animals. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 2(4), i-109.
In 1965, the psychologist Martin Seligman conducted the Learned Helplessness Experiment. It all started when Martin and his colleagues were researching about classical conditioning, the process by which an animal or human associates one thing with another. The experiment consisted on Seligman ringing a bell and a dog, wearing an electrified harness, getting a shock. First, Seligman would ring a bell and the dog, which the experiment was focused on, would get a light shock. After several times of ringing the bell and getting the shock, the dog reacted to the shock before it happened, when he heard the bell started to ring. It seemed as he had already been shocked.
In 1928, Pavlov noticed that dogs salivated when they heard a bell ring in anticipation of food. This sparked his interest in conditioning, he then produced a theory by pairing a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus to produce a conditioned response, and this was a huge breakthrough for psychology as it helped explain why some behaviours are learned. It could be argued that this is significant as it explains why we learn stimuli that is bi...
Humans are genetically predisposed to behave a certain way, and certain genes can “trigger” certain behaviors. Many studies have been conducted on animals, which can be considered in the debate about human behavior because animals have molecules that are also present in humans (Robinson 2004; Bettelheim 1998). For example, in one study, a gene that is responsible for preparing a mother mouse to care for her young – by triggering maternal instincts and behavior – was inactivated in pregnant mice, which resulted in three out of four pups dying from neglect. When the surviving pups were put into the care of foster mothers with the activated genes, 85% of them survived (Bettelheim 1998). This is significant because the absence of one gene affected mouse behavior in an observable way, which shows that genes affect behavior. Another study transplanted Japanese quail brain cells that control quail sounds and head movement into chicken embryos. As a result, the chickens did not...
Pavlov’s theory is known has classical conditioning ‘He is remembered for the salivating dogs which illustrates very usefully the central behaviourist idea that behaviour can be predicted, measured and controlled, and that learning a matter of stimulus and response (Wallace 2007:97).’
This essay will first explore what classical conditioning is by using Ivan Pavlov’s famous experiment with dogs to explain how it works. It will then go on to describe how classical conditioning led to more research by Edward L. Thorndike and B.F. Skinner in the study of instrumental behaviour (Gleitman et al. 2011). It will also mention briefly what similarities can be found between operant and classical conditioning before explaining in detail what operant conditioning is (Skinner’s experiment with the operant
For many decades, psychologists tried to explain the relationship between the way one acts and how the brain learns. Was conscious thinking the part of the process of deciding the actions taken? Or was it just an incumbency to our brain? To answer these questions, Ivan Pavlov conducted a study on dogs in 1897. Firstly, he brought food to his dogs and his dogs salivated as a reflex. Afterwards, he rang a
The strength of classical conditioning is that it can help to explain all aspects of human behavior. Any of behavior can broke down into stimulus-response association, so that according to the classical conditioning, conditioned stimulus will lead conditioned response to occur, then the scientist can observe and determine the behavior (McLeod, 2014). In the case of Pavlovian conditioning, he found that when the conditioned stimulus (bell) was paired with an unconditioned stimulus (food) was presented to the dog, it would start to salivate. After a number of repeated this procedures, Pavlov tried to ring his bell by its own...
Pavlov’s classical conditioning is a learning process in which a substantial stimulus is connected with a common one; therefore, the significance of the common stimuli is heightened (Berger, 2011, 40). There are two necessary parts of classical conditioning which pertain to the first core concept of the nature-nurture development. The first deals with biology. Pavlov...
Learning through operant conditioning allows a conditioned behaviour to increase or decrease in the presence of reinforcement or punishment. However, this process can be affected by instinctive behaviours that would disrupt the conditioned behaviour. According to a study conducted by Breland and Breland (1961) they tried to condition a raccoon to pick up coins and drop them into a container. The raccoon however spent time rubbing the coins together and rubbing the coin on the inside of the container before finally dropping it in and receiving its food reinforcement. Even after conditioning, the raccoon’s need to rub the coins together became worse as he spent more and more time just rubbing the coins. This is known as instinctive drift where the raccoon’s instinctive behaviours limited its ability to perform the conditioned response. Therefore the raccoon failed to learn due to its innate tendencies that acted as a biological constraint and operant conditioning failed in teaching the raccoon through reinforcement.