 |
Shopping Cart 
Checkout
|
 |
 |
|
|
Home : Other Subjects : Psychology Study Guides : 101 : Learning and Conditioning : Classical Conditioning
|
|
Classical Conditioning
Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov was the first to
describe classical conditioning. In classical conditioning, also
called “respondent conditioning” or “Pavlovian conditioning,” a subject comes to
respond to a neutral stimulus as he would to another, nonneutral stimulus by
learning to associate the two stimuli.
Pavlov’s contribution to learning began with his study of dogs. Not
surprisingly, his dogs drooled every time he gave them food. Then he noticed that if
he sounded a tone every time he fed them, the dogs soon started to drool at the
sound of the tone, even if no food followed it. The dogs had come to associate the
tone, a neutral stimulus, with food, a nonneutral stimulus.
Conditioned and Unconditioned Stimuli and Responses
Psychologists use several terms to talk about classical
conditioning. In Pavlov’s experiment, salivation was the unconditioned
response, which is a response that occurs naturally. Food was the unconditioned stimulus, the stimulus that naturally evoked
salivation. The tone was the conditioned stimulus, the stimulus
that the dogs learned to associate with food. The conditioned
response to the tone was salivation. The conditioned response is
usually the same as, or similar to, the unconditioned response.
Acquisition of Conditioned Responses
Subjects acquire a conditioned response when a conditioned stimulus is
paired with an unconditioned stimulus. Conditioning works best if the
conditioned stimulus appears just before the unconditioned stimulus and both
stimuli end at about the same time. In the above example, Professor Smith’s
conditioning will work best if she displays the revolver right before firing and
puts it away after shooting.
Extinction
After Adam has been conditioned to cringe at the sight of the revolver,
Professor Smith comes into the next class and pulls out the revolver again. He
cringes, but she doesn’t shoot. If she pulls it out again and again on several
occasions without shooting, Adam will soon stop cringing when she pulls it out.
This process called extinction is the gradual weakening and
disappearance of a conditioned response. Extinction happens when the conditioned
stimulus appears repeatedly without the unconditioned stimulus.
Spontaneous Recovery
Suppose that by the end of the second class, Adam has
completely stopped cringing when Professor Smith pulls out the
revolver. His conditioned response has been extinguished. However, if
Professor Smith comes into class later in the semester and pulls out
the revolver again, Adam may still cringe, though maybe a
little less than before. This is called spontaneous
recovery. Spontaneous recovery is the reappearance of an
extinguished conditioned response when the conditioned stimulus returns
after a period of absence.
Stimulus Generalization
Now suppose Professor Smith conditions Adam again to respond to the
revolver as she did in the first class. Soon he cringes every time she
pulls out the revolver. While Adam is in this conditioned state, the
professor pulls out a cell phone. Adam is likely to cringe at that too
because of stimulus generalization—the tendency to
respond to a new stimulus as if it were the original conditioned stimulus.
Stimulus generalization happens most often when the new stimulus resembles the
original conditioned stimulus.
Stimulus Discrimination
Suppose Professor Smith used a gray revolver to
condition Adam. Once Adam is conditioned, if she pulls out a brown
revolver, he’ll initially cringe at that, too. But suppose Professor
Smith never shoots when she pulls out the brown revolver and always
shoots when she pulls out the gray one. Soon, Adam will cringe only at the gray revolver. He is showing stimulus discrimination—the tendency to lack a
conditioned response to a new stimulus that resembles the original
conditioned stimulus.
Higher-Order Conditioning
Now suppose that after Adam has been conditioned to cringe at the sight of
the revolver, Professor Smith comes to class one day and pulls out the revolver
while yelling, “Fire!” She does this many times. Each time, Adam cringes because
he is conditioned to respond to the revolver. If she then yells, “Fire!” without
pulling out the revolver, Adam will still cringe due to higher-order
conditioning—the process by which a neutral stimulus comes to act as
a conditioned stimulus by being paired with another stimulus that already evokes
a conditioned response.
|
|
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
©2006 SparkNotes LLC, All Rights Reserved.