Research Paper On Classical Conditioning

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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 on 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. Some of these were as simple as a person walking into the room or the door opening and closing, signaling that food was coming. To understand more about the digestive phenomenon, It also has to be involuntary. The unconditioned stimulus (US) has no prior learning involved, but still yields a reaction. It is followed by an unconditioned response (UR) that is inevitably produced from the original stimulus. The conditioned stimulus (CS) is a previously neutral stimulus that eventually causes a response after being associated with the unconditioned stimulus. Finally, the conditioned response (CR) is the learned response to the conditioned stimulus once there is a connection between the conditioned and unconditioned stimulus (King, 2014). In Pavlov’s experiment, the food was the unconditioned stimulus with salivation as the unconditioned response. Over time, the dogs made the connection with the bell, which became conditioned stimulus. The saliva then became the conditioned response. Although this happened in the early twentieth centuary, is Pavlov’s dog experiment still relevant to today’s He found food is a prime illustration of it. Through several senses, specifically taste and odor, food is a major stimulus. Imagine if one tried a new food, and then went to the mall. Hours later, they became violently ill. The person eating the food would then never want to ingest that again, thinking that it will make them nauseated again. This is a form of taste aversion. Even though the food may not be related to the sickness, the person connected it to getting ill. In this case, the flavor becomes the CS and the aversion is the CR; the sickness and food were the unconditioned stimulus and response, respectively (Domjan,

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