Collab Topic:- Conditioning Behaviours prepared by Manohar Behaviour Therapist.
This mode of learning was demonstrated by the experiments of Ivan Pavlov, who decided to research conditioning after discovering during separate gastric tests that his dog subjects began to salivate not only when meat powder was presented to them, but more significantly, when the person feeding them came into proximity with them. The dogs had been inadvertently trained through classical conditioning to associate the person feeding them with the food itself, and reacted in a similar way (salivation) to the feeders. This is known as a stimulus-response (SR), when salivation becomes a responsive action to the stimulus of the person feeding the dogs:
At the start of the experiments:
The Unconditioned/Neutral Stimulus (US/NS) is the person arriving to feed the dogs before the salivation as a result of their presence had began.
The Unconditioned Response (UR) was for the dogs not to salivate.
By the end of the experiments, when the unconditioned stimulus and responses had been conditioned:
The Conditioned Stimulus (CS) becomes the person arriving to feed the dogs, which stimulates the Conditioned Response:
The Conditioned Response (CR) becomes salivation (normally a reflex action to aid digestion when feeding is going to begin) at the sight of the person.
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