Then Pavlov began to notice that the dogs began to salivate when he saw an empty plate, or when he saw the experimenter; the dogs even salivated at the sound of the foot steps from the experimenter as they were about to enter the room. Noticing these responses from the dogs, Pavlov decided to test his discovery of condition reflexes. In his experiments testing conditioned reflexes, before the experimenters would enter the room to feed the dogs Pavlov would have a light turned on or have a bell rung. At first the dogs had a neutral reaction to the light or bell because the dogs have not associated those stimuli with being feed. After many trials of pairing, with the light or the bell, with the food, eventually the dogs began to associate being feed with the stimuli if the light or the bell.
P1 Explain the principal psychological perspectives. Behaviourist approach Your behaviour is learned as the individual is the product of there environment because they are born a blank slate. this theory is part of the extreme nature, nurture debate because theorists believe that individuals where nurtured to become what they are and learn there behaviour for example skills and values through their environment another example of behaviourism is that when the phone rings we know that someone is on the other end, we weren't born knowing that. To make this scientific there needs to be observable behaviour that can be measured. where behaviourism is concerned there many different types of conditioning such as classical conditioning which is the stimulus and response theory this backs up the idea that behaviour is taught which Ivan Pavlov demonstrated in different experiments.
Learning is through operant, classical or instrumental conditioning. Behaviourists view instrumental and operant conditioning as having a slight difference on the constructs they observe for each of these. Cognitivists view learning as through classical conditioning, operant (instrumental) conditioning or observational learning. Ivan Pavlov a Russian psychologist studied classical conditioning, which is a valid means of learning to both groups. In his classic studies Pavlov rang a bell each time before giving his dogs food and eventually the dogs were conditioned to salivate when they heard the bell in expectancy of food.
He studied the salivation in dogs and concluded that a neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus to a dog and make it salivate, when it is paired with food. For example, when giving food to a dog, it starts salivating. When making a tone with a bell everytime before giving food to the dog, the salivation starts with the bell-ringing. The final part of this experiment is the observation of salivation, only at the bell-ringing, even when no food follows. This is in principle a learning effect.
Classical conditioning is a theory of learning founded by Ivan Pavlov, It is a way of learning through past association, he accidentally stumbled upon this theory as he was studying the digestive system of the dog and then applied it to human psychology. It involves an unconditioned stimulus and an unconditioned response. He tested his theory with a dog, food being the stimulant (UCS) and salivation being the response (UCR) and a bell as a neutral entity to which there was no response until combined with the food. The final test in the his theory is to reintroduce the the bell without food (UCS) and which this time causes the salivation (UCR). This reveals the dogs mind is remembering the past association with the bell and the food.
Pavlov concluded that the dogs demonstrated classical condition, whereby the bell was a neutral stimulus and by itself could not produce a response such as salivating (Coon, Mitterer, Talbot & Vanchella, 2010). The food acted as an unconditioned stimulus, which could produce an unconditioned response (salivation of the dog). However, after presenting the unconditioned stimulus together with the neutral stimulus, the dog learned to associate the two. As a result, ringing of the bell could make the dog to salivate. He called this conditioned response (Myers, 2008).
While taking accurate measurements from the dog about how much it was salivating; Pavlov noticed that the dog would salivate at the sight of food as well as tasting it. Due to this; he carried out an experiment which sought to discover whether he could connect the dogs response to food to a neutral stimulus. To do this Pavlov presented the dog with a neutral stimulus, in this case a bell which Pavlov rung and to which the dog did not salivate to; he then presented the dog with both the ringing bell and a bowl of food, the unconditioned stimulus, this is repeated until the dog connects the ringing
Pavlov used dogs to further prove his theory. He decided to use the tone of the bell (CS) and paired it with food (US) which caused the dogs to salivate (UR). After repeatedly pairing the bell with food, the bell alone caused the dogs to salivate (CR). The dogs orienting response – also referred to as the orienting reflex – to the tone of the bell is that they perk up their ears and turns its sensors to where the sound is coming from. After repeated presentation of the bell, the dogs then got used to the tone of the bell and ignores it because the stimulus is of no consequence, a process he refers to as habituation.
This observation lead Pavlov on to the belief that the dog learnt that at the sight of a stimulus it meant food, therefore it had “learnt” Dogs would normally salivate at the smell of food this is known as “unconditioned reflex” continuing with his experiments he found that by using other stimulus in this case a bell he could condition the dog to salivate on its sound even to the extent of the dog salivating at the sound of the bell though there was no food, “Classical Conditioning”. The bell known as the “unconditioned stimulus” and the dog salivating to its sound lead Pavlov on to label this response; “condition response”. Out of Pavlov theory grew the understanding
There will also be more organic or biological processes looked at such as cognitive processes. Behaviourism is a strands of theory generally derived by two people Pavlov and his earlier writings on conditioned reflexes and Skinner who’s work consisted of operant conditioning (Hogg, A. Vaughan, C:2005 p21). One of Pavlov’s most famous theories is the experiment dogs involving their saliva production around the time of feeding, this is conditioning at it’s most basic level, as it involves dogs not humans results can have their limitations. However, he found that the dogs started to produce saliva at feeding time, which he called an unconditioned response. But, he also noticed that when the person who usually fed them was present they started to produce saliva.