CHAPTER 6 LEARNING CLASSICAL CONDITIONING

INTRODUCTION Learning is achieved through experience. Anything we are not born knowing how to do is the result of learning. For ex: babies do not learn to cry, but people need experience to learn how to walk, how to speak the languages of their parents and communities, and how to read. Sometimes we learn to do things by trying them ourselves, at other times, we learn by watching others or reading books, this lesson explores several types of learning and the processess involved in each type.

CLASSICAL CONDITIONING Have you ever listen to the radio and heard a song that was popular a few years ago, maybe a song that you really liked then? Did you feel a rush of sensations that you used to feel back then? If so, this reaction was a result of associations between the song and the events of the time in your life when the song was popular. In other words the song served as a stimulus. A stimulus is something that produces a reaction, or a response, from a person or an animal. In this case, the response consisted of the feelings brought about by hearing the song.

Here is a simple experiment that also demostrates associations. Think of a food you really like, such as lasagna or enchiladas. Is your mouth watering? If it is, you are experiencing the results of conditioning, or learning. Conditioning works through different stimuli. CLASSICAL CONDITIONING Is a simple form of learning in which one stimulus (in this case the thought of food) calls for the response (your mouth watering), that is usually called forth by another stimulus (the actual food). This occurs when the two stimuli have been associated with each other.

IVAN PAVLOV RINGS A BELL Some of the earliest findings about classical conditioning resulted from research similar to your own experiences in thinking of food. However the early research was with dogs not people. Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov ( ) discovered that dogs learn too, to associate one thing with another when food is involved.

PAVLOV´S RESEARCH Pavlov used an apparatus to measure the amount of saliva produced when a dog ate. The flow of saliva occurred naturally whenever food was placed in the dog’s mouth, as salivation is an involuntary,reflex response.

Dog was restrained in a harness. Meat powder was placed directly on the dog’s tongue or in the bowl. A tube was surgically attached to the dog’s cheek near one of the salivary glands and a fistula was made so that the saliva drained straight out into a measuring device. Further on, more sophisticated measuring devices were used to measure the speed of saliva flow

Pavlov discovered that the dogs did not always wait until they had recieved meat to start salivating, for ex: they salivated in response to the sound of food trays. The dogs would also salivate when one of Pavlov´s assistants entered the laboratory. Why? Because the dogs learned from experience that these events meant that food was coming. Pavlov decided to study this, if dogs could salivate in response to any stimulus that signaled meat. The stimulus Pavlov chose was the ringing of a bell. He trapped the dogs into harnesses and rang a bell. Then about half a second after the bell rang, meat powder was placed on the dog´s tongues, as expected the dogs salivated in response to the meat powder, he repeated this process several times.

After several pairings of the meat and the bell, Pavlov changed the procedure: he sounded the bell but did not follow the bell with the meat. Yet the dogs salivated anyway, they had learned to salivate in response to the bell alone. The dogs´ salivation in response to the bell demonstrates classical conditioning. Terms that are important in understanding classical conditioning include: unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned response and conditioned stimulus.

The meat in Pavlov´s research was an example of an unconditioned stimulus (US), this is a stimulus that causes a response that is automatic, not learned. That automatic response, in turn, is called an unconditioned response (UR). Salivation in response to the meat was an unconditioned response. In other words the dogs did not learn to salivate in response to the meat, they do it naturally, by instinct, because of their biology. The dogs´ salivation in response to the bell was a conditioned stimulus. A Conditioned Response (CR) is a learned response to a stimulus that was previously neutral or meaningless.

In Pavlov´s research, the bell was a nuetral stimulus, before Pavlov associated it with the meat. Through repeated association with meat, however, the bell bacame a learned stimulus, or a conditioned Stimulus (CS) for the response of salivation.