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. Upon making the association with the light or bell with the food, the dogs would then begin to salivate when the light turned on or when the bell was rung. The dogs had been conditioned to salivate at the sight of the light being turned on, or at the sound of a bell being rung. Pavlov’s discovery of conditioned reflexes led to the modern day theory of classical conditioning. Classical conditioning considers stimuli and response: unconditioned stimuli, unconditioned response, conditioned stimuli, and conditioned
One of the major differences involves the types of behaviours that are conditioned. While classical conditioning is centred on involuntary, automatic behaviours, operant conditioning is focused on voluntary behaviours. It is important we view each conditioning technique in greater detail to gain a complete understanding of it. The first conditioning type we are to analyse is classical conditioning. 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.
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. Pavlov also discovered that repeatedly pairing the CS and US (also called trials) can create a “building phase” which can strengthen the desired response. A phenomenon called acquisition. But when Pavlov's dogs hear a bell but no food is presented, the conditioned response will start to decrease and eventually stop altogether. The decrease in strength or frequency of a CR because of the failure of pairing the US and CS is a phenomenon known as extinction.
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
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.
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.
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
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.