Pavlov's Theory Of 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 in 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, …show more content…

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, 2004). In Pavlov’s experiment, the food was the unconditioned stimulus with salivation as the unconditioned response. After time, the dogs made the connection with the bell, which became conditioned stimulus. The saliva then became the conditioned response. A main feature about classical conditioning is that is involuntary. Is Pavlov’s dog experiment still relevant to today’s time? Over a century later, “Pavloian learning” is still applicable to modern society. However, there is more to classical conditioning than measuring digestive enzymes. Due to the fact that classical conditioning is an automatic response to the human body, one does not always recognize that he or she has learned. Some forms of this learning are innate, while others are from

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