The phrases often describe situations where someone responds to a stimulus like they’ve been trained to do so.
However, Pavlov’s famous experiments had a major impact on our understanding of how learning takes place.
The discovery also helped develop the school of behavioral psychology.
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Salivation, he noted, is a reflexive process.
It occurs automatically in response to a specific stimulus and is not under conscious control.
However, Pavlov noted that the dogs would often begin salivating in the absence of food and smell.
He quickly realized that this salivary response was not due to an automatic, physiological process.
Pavlov then focused on investigating exactly how these conditioned responses are learned or acquired.
In a series of experiments, he set out to provoke a conditioned response to a previously neutral stimulus.
He opted to use food as theunconditioned stimulus, or the stimulus that evokes a response naturally and automatically.
The sound of a metronome was chosen to be the neutral stimulus.
After several conditioning trials, Pavlov noted that the dogs began to salivate after hearing the metronome.
Gradually, the person will form a neutral response to the object.
In fact, taste aversions generally occur after just a single pairing.
Ranchers have found ways to put this form of classical conditioning to good use to protect their herds.
In one example, mutton was injected with a drug that produces severe nausea.
After eating the poisoned meat, coyotes then avoided sheep herds rather than attack them.
The goal is to help induce a condition aversion to alcohol.
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Akpan B.Classical and operant conditioningIvan Pavlov; Burrhus Skinner.
In: Akpan B, Kennedy TJ, eds.Science Education in Theory and Practice.
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