The theory of classical conditioning was introduced near the turn of the nineteenth century (1900) by Russian scientist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov. Pavlov’s experiment was originally intended to study the physiology of salivation, however it turned out that his experiments led him to the discovery of conditioned reflexes. Pavlov’s experiments involved measuring stomach secretions in dogs as they were introduced to food, meat, meat powder, etc. As Pavlov progressed through his experiments he noticed that the dogs had began to salivate upon seeing the food. 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.
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.
This Behavioural Model classifies three different learning processes: classical conditioning - learning through association, operant conditioning - learning through reinforcement and the social learning theory - learning through observing and imitating others. Behaviour that is learnt through any of these three processes can be either maladaptive or adaptive. Classical conditioning is a basic form of learning which involves associating conditioned and unconditioned stimuli by pairing them together. Pavlov first demonstrated the use of classical conditioning in 1927 with the example of a dog’s salivation reflex. 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.
Classical and Operant Conditioning Name Institution Date Classical and Operant Conditioning One of the ways human beings learn is by association. For instance, if an individual associate a given sound with a frightening outcome, hearing the sound might always trigger fear. It is also evident that when people repeat behaviors in a given context, the behaviors become part of the context (Myers, 2008). This aspect of associating behaviors with events has been explored in great depth in the classical and operant condition. In classical conditioning, Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), conducted an experiment on the eating habits of dogs.
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.
Behaviourism as a science accounts for behaviour in terms of observable acts. It focuses on a basic kind of learning called conditioning, which involves associations between environmental stimuli and responses, sometimes called stimulus-response (“S-R”) psychology. To explain human behaviour two types of conditioning are used: classical and operational conditioning. The classical conditioning has been described by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) as an outcome of experiments with dogs. 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.
This short essay hopes to show how the theory behind the CBT model of counselling plays its part in the evolution of the struggle to understand the human psyche. At the beginning of the twentieth century behaviour therapy started to evolve which derived ...from the theories of human learning... p171 (1) Experiments were carried out on animals rather than humans for research. A Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) ibid. whose interest at that time was the digestive system of dogs, had developed through his research and what is now known as “Classical Conditioning” “that dogs would salivate at the sight of food”. 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”.
Classical conditioning occurs when a new stimulus becomes capable of evoking a given response when that new stimulus is presented together with a stimulus that already evokes that response. How this occurred with Pavlov’s dogs is that when Pavlov or his assistants (dressed in white coats), would place food in front of the dogs, they would start salivating. What started to happen was that the dogs would begin to
Ivan Pavlov, a Russian Physiologist and Nobel Prize winner (in recognition of his work on the Physiology of Digestion) discovered classical conditioning, which paved way to better understand the process of learning. Pavlov discovered that organisms respond to certain stimulus through an innate reflex but the response can also be conditioned as well. The Classical conditioning paradigm involves pairing a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus (US) which usually produces an unconditioned response (UR). After repeatedly pairing the neutral stimulus with US, neutral stimulus will become a conditioned stimulus (CS) which will then elicit a conditioned response (CR). Pavlov used dogs to further prove his theory.
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.