Pavlovian Conditioning Essay

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Pavlovian Conditioning DATE: 1890's forward TYPE OF PSYCHOLOGY: Learning FIELDS OF STUDY: Pavlovian conditioning Pavlovian conditioning is a basic process of learning that relates especially to reflexes and emotional behavior. Interest in this form of learning has been long-standing and continues to the present day. Pavlovian principles apply to a very wide range of organisms, situations, and events. KEY CONCEPTS ∙ conditioned emotional reaction (CER) ∙ conditioned response (CR) ∙ conditioned stimulus (CS) ∙ discrimination ∙ extinction ∙ flooding ∙ second-signal system ∙ spontaneous recovery ∙ stimulus generalization ∙ systematic desensitization ∙ unconditioned response (UR) ∙ unconditioned stimulus (US) Pavlovian conditioning, also known as respondent conditioning and classical conditioning (to distinguish it from instrumental or operant conditioning), is an elementary learning process and has been of major interest to psychologists ever since the Russian physiologist Ivan P. Pavlov (1849-1936) discovered that a dog could learn to salivate to a neutral stimulus after the stimulus was paired repeatedly with food. Pavlov's early career focused on the study of heart circulation and digestion in animals (usually dogs), for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904. However, by that time Pavlov had already turned his attention to experiments on conditioned reflexes, from which flowed a new psychological nomenclature. CONDITIONING The core of Pavlovian conditioning is the pairing (association) of stimuli to elicit responses. Food (meat powder) placed in a dog's mouth naturally produces salivation. Pavlov called the food an unconditioned stimulus (US) and salivation, elicited by the food, the unconditioned response (UR). When a neutral stimulus-for example, a tone that does not naturally elicit salivation-is
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