Ivan Pavlov's Classical Conditioning And The Effects Of Classical Conditioning

Whenever the bell rings in any school in any nation you are guaranteed to see students and teachers file into the hallway. This automatic response comes from something that has been around for a long time called classical conditioning. Classical conditioning was discovered and researched by Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist. His famous experiment with his dog is known to nearly everyone who has had a middle school or higher education. He fed his dog in a pattern, every time he fed his dog he rang a bell. Eventually the dog associated the bell with food and would begin to salivate just on hearing the bell. Thetis the original experiment proving classical conditioning. What is conditioned stimulus? A neutral stimulus that, after repeated pairings

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. His laboratory was in St. Petersburg, Russia more than a century ago. He was extremely meticulous about nothing getting in and influencing his test subjects at all. The windows were covered in extra thick sheets of glass; each room had double steel doors which sealed hermetically when closed; and the steel girders which supported the floors were embedded in sand. A deep moat filled with straw encircled the building. Thus vibration, noise, temperature extremes, odors, even drafts were eliminated. Nothing could influence the animals except the conditioning stimulus to which they were

Other than being cruel to animals he would have started to disassemble the conditioning of the dog. When the dog can hear the bell ring and not salivate that is called extinction. Extinction is by definition “the weakening and often eventually disappearance of a learned response.” In classical conditioning the conditioned response is weakened by repeated presentation of the conditioned response without the unconditioned stimulus (World of Psychology pg168) Meaning that Pavlov’s dogs would stop salivating after a while of only hearing the bell and not receiving any food. Just because the conditioned response leaves the dog it’s not gone forever. Pavlov discovered that if he brought the dog home for a while and let it rest then brought it back to the lab the conditioned response would reappear. He named this spontaneous recovery. Although it did come back without actual food to back up ringing the bell the conditioned response disappeared in less time than the before. The next thing that Pavlov wondered about classical conditioning is it generalized or specific? Meaning will the dog salivate to any bell now or just the one in C-tone? This is called