Examples Of Sign Stimumus

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Describe at least three sign stimuli involved in the control of human behaviour. Illustrate your answer with examples from research literature. Willpower, brains and courage often have little to do with a person’s ability to alter its behaviour. To influence the behavior of a person is related to learning, this is one reason why research on learning has been heaviliy influenced by behaviourism. 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. 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. The contrary is the so-called extinction. If no food follows the bell-ringing for several times, the dog learns not to respond any longer with salivation. The unconditioned stimulus becoming a conditioned stimulus can be used to control human behaviour in the advertisement area. The background music of an advertisement, which is thought to be neutral (unconditioned) can influence the person to buy an article. This has been proved by an experiment with American
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