What is Classical Conditioning?
Classical conditioning is one of the categories in psychology that learning falls into.
In psychology learning is one of the many topics that is studied and experimented on. How do we learn? Why do we learn the way we do? These are some of the questions that psychologist go through to figure why we put our attention into the things we do. And one of the categories that these psychologist use is called classical conditioning.
Classical conditioning was discovered by Ivan Pavlov. But this was actually an accidental discovery. Pavlov was originally studying salvation in dogs when he then realized that the dogs would salivate because of the sound of a bell. That is when he realized that he has discovered something very interesting and focused his studies on that instead and came up with four different compartments.
The first part in his discovery was the unconditioned stimulus. In his experiments the unconditioned stimulus was the dog food. Then there was the unconditioned response which was the salvation to the dog food. The unconditioned stimulusis an object that leads to a normal reaction or response and the unconditioned response is that normal reaction or response. The next two are the conditioned stimulus and response. The conditioned stimulus is something paired with the unconditioned stimulus, in this experiment the conditioned response is the bell the dogs hear which is paired with the dog food. And the conditioned response is the desired response wanted to happen from the stimulus.
In the Pavlov’s experiment he pairs both stimulus, he does this by ringing the bell before he gives the dogs food this way the dogs begin to learn that every time the bell is rung then that means food is coming. While doing this for sometime he then sees that his experiment was a success. After sometime he seen that every time the bell is rung the dogs would begin to salivate even if there is no food present. This showed his experiment was a success. His four components are used in many learning experiments that involve classical conditioning. Ivan Pavlov experiment was a success and became known as Pavlov’s Dogs.
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