Pavlov Therory

A commonly heard word within psychology is “conditioning”, where does it come from and what does it mean? Conditioning is simply a form of learning, specifically learning through association. Conditioning is used in many experiments as I will discuss later. Classical conditioning was stumbled upon by accident by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. After he earned his medical degree in 1882 he spent many years studying the digestive system of many animals. By the year 1904 Pavlov had won the Nobel Prize for all of his research in that field.

While studying the digestive system he had a dog strapped down with a harness, and fed it different types of food. While doing this he had a tube that was surgically put into their cheeks to measure the amount of saliva the dog had released. After repeating this process a couple of times he ran into what he called a problem, the dog would salivate at just the site of the food, and eventually the dish the food came in and even the sound of footsteps walking towards him. Pavlov, trying to get around this problem tried to sneak up on the dog, but to no avail. Later Pavlov realized he stumbled upon a form of learning now known as classical conditioning, and devoted the rest of his life to studying it.

To study his new, so called “problem” he had to have a system set up in which he would feed the dog. Often he used a dry meat powder, this powder would automatically cause the dog to salivate. The automatic response to food is known as the unconditioned response, it is known as this because the response does not have to be taught, hence the term unconditioned. The food in this example is known as the unconditioned stimulus, what stimulated the salivation was the food. After Pavlov took notice of all of this he wanted to see if the dog can be conditioned (trained) to respond to an unnatural stimulus, unnatural, being one that would not have an automatic reaction to the stimulus. To examine this Pavlov rang a bell prior to giving the dog the unconditioned stimulus (food). After numerous repetitions of this order the dog began to salivate to a bell alone without any food in front of it. This, the bell is known as a conditioned stimulus because it would not ordinarily warrant such a response. The salivation to the conditioned stimulus is known as a conditioned response. Later the stimulus was changed from a bell to many other sounds, colors and changes in light to which the dog also responded this is know as generalization as I will discuss later.

There are a few principles of learning which can take place, they are acquisition, extinction, generalization, and discrimination. Acquisition is the term used for learning. This means that the animal does not learn within seconds, it takes a couple of pairings for it to learn to associate them as a singe event. To achieve acquisition to the maximum potential the food should come within one second of the bell or other stimulus.

Another principle of conditioning is extinction. This is when the stimulus is not followed by a response, would the dog continue to salivate if a bell is rung but no food was put in front of him? The answer is no it would not, because it would have now re-learned to have no response simply because no response is known to that stimulus. One understanding within extinction is that it is not gone forever, meaning that if at a later time the dog was returned to the harness and had the bell rung with food given immediately after, it would then relearn to respond to only the bell within much less time than the first session. This bounce back effect is known as spontaneous recovery.

The third principle of conditioning is generalization. Generalization is when