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Classical Conditioning
Pavlovian conditioning , also called Classical Conditioning , a type of conditioned learning which occurs because of the subject’s instinctive responses, as opposed to operant conditioning, which is contingent on the wilful actions of the subject. It was developed by the Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov
In simple terms, two stimuli are linked together to produce a new learned response in a person or animal. The most famous example of classical conditioning was Pavlov's experiment with dogs, who salivated in response to a bell tone. Pavlov showed that when a bell was sounded each time the dog was fed, the dog learned to associate the sound with the presentation of the food.
Pavlov's Experiment on Dogs
Like many great scientific advances, Pavlovian conditioning (aka classical conditioning) was discovered accidentally. During the 1890s, Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov was researching salivation in dogs in response to being fed. He inserted a small test tube into the cheek of each dog to measure saliva when the dogs were fed (with a powder made from meat). Pavlov predicted the dogs would salivate in response to the food placed in front of them, but he noticed that his dogs would begin to salivate whenever they heard the footsteps of his assistant who was bringing them the food.
When Pavlov discovered that any object or event which the dogs learned to associate with food (such as the lab assistant) would trigger the same response, he realized that he had made an important scientific discovery. Accordingly, he devoted the rest of his career to studying this type of learning.
Classical Conditioning Examples
There are three stages of classical conditioning. At each stage the stimuli and responses are given special scientific terms:
Stage 1: Before Conditioning :
In this stage, the unconditioned stimulus (UCS) produces an unconditioned response (UCR) in an organism. In basic terms, this means that a stimulus in the environment has produced a behavior / response which is unlearned (i.e., unconditioned) and therefore is a natural response which has not been taught. In this respect, no new behavior has been learned yet. For example, a stomach virus (UCS) would produce a response of nausea (UCR). In another example, a perfume (UCS) could create a response of happiness or desire (UCR). This stage also involves another stimulus which has no effect on a person and is called the neutral stimulus (NS). The NS could be a person, object, place, etc. The neutral stimulus in classical conditioning does not produce a response until it is paired with the unconditioned stimulus.
Stage 2: During Conditioning:
During this stage, a stimulus which produces no response (i.e., neutral) is associated with the unconditioned stimulus at which point it now becomes known as the conditioned stimulus (CS). For example, a stomach virus (UCS) might be associated with eating a certain food such as chocolate (CS). Also, perfume (UCS) might be associated with a specific person (CS). For classical conditioning to be effective, the conditioned stimulus should occur before the unconditioned stimulus, rather than after it, or during the same time. Thus, the
Classical conditioning occurs with a variety of significant events. If an experimenter sounds a tone just before applying a mild shock to a rat’s feet, the tone will elicit fear or anxiety after one or two pairings. Similar fear conditioning plays a role in creating many anxiety disorders in humans, such as phobias and panic disorders, where people associate cues (such as closed spaces, or a shopping mall) with panic or other emotional trauma (see Mineka & Zinbarg, 2006). Here, rather than a physical response (like drooling), the CS triggers an emotion.
Another interesting effect of classical conditioning can occur when we ingest drugs. That is, when a drug is taken, it can be associated with the cues that are present at the same time (e.g., rooms, odours, drug paraphernalia). In this regard, if someone associates a particular smell with the sensation induced by the drug, whenever that person smells the same odour afterward, it may cue responses (physical and/or emotional) related to taking the drug itself. But drug cues have an even more interesting property: They elicit responses that often “compensate” for the upcoming effect of the drug (see Siegel, 1989). For example, morphine itself suppresses pain; however, if someone is used to taking morphine, a cue that signals the “drug is coming soon” can actually make the person more sensitive to pain. Because the person knows a pain suppressant will soon be administered, the body becomes more sensitive, anticipating that “the drug will soon take care of it.” Remarkably, such conditioned compensatory responses in turn decrease the impact of the drug on the body—because the body has become more sensitive to pain.
This conditioned compensatory response has many implications. For instance, a drug user will be most “tolerant” to the drug in the presence of cues that have been associated with it (because such cues elicit compensatory responses). As a result, overdose is usually not due to an increase in dosage, but to taking the drug in a new place without the familiar cues—which would have otherwise allowed the user to tolerate the drug (see Siegel, Hinson, Krank, & McCully, 1982). Conditioned compensatory responses (which include heightened pain sensitivity and decreased body temperature, among others) might also cause discomfort, thus motivating the drug user to continue usage of the drug to reduce them. This is one of several ways classical conditioning might be a factor in drug addiction and dependence.
A final effect of classical cues is that they motivate on-going operant behaviour (see Balleine, 2005). For example, if a rat has learned via operant conditioning that pressing a lever will give it a drug, in the presence of cues that signal the “drug is coming soon” (like the sound of the lever squeaking), the rat will work harder to press the lever than if those cues weren’t present (i.e., there is no squeaking lever sound). Similarly, in the presence of food-associated cues (e.g., smells), a rat (or an overeater) will work harder for food. And finally, even in the presence of negative cues (like something that signals fear), a rat, a human, or any other organism will work harder to avoid those situations that might lead to trauma. Classical CSs thus have many effects that can contribute to significant behavioural phenomena.
The Learning Process
As mentioned earlier, classical conditioning provides a method for studying basic learning processes. Somewhat counterintuitively, though, studies show that pairing a CS and a US together is not sufficient for an association to be learned between them. Consider an effect called blocking (see Kamin, 1969). In this effect, an animal first learns to associate one CS— call it stimulus A—with a US. The sound of a bell (stimulus A) is paired with the presentation of food. Once this association is learned, in a second phase, a second stimulus— stimulus B—is presented alongside stimulus A, such that the two stimuli are paired with the US together. In the illustration, a light is added and turned on at the same time the bell is rung. However, because the animal has already learned the association between stimulus A (the bell) and the food, the animal doesn’t learn an association between stimulus B (the light) and the food. That is, the conditioned response only occurs during the presentation of stimulus A, because the earlier conditioning of A “blocks” the conditioning of B when B is added to A. The reason is that Stimulus A already predicts the US, so the US is not surprising when it occurs with Stimulus B.
Learning depends on such a surprise, or a discrepancy between what occurs on a conditioning trial and what is already predicted by cues that are present on the trial. To learn something through classical conditioning, there must first be some prediction error , or the chance that a conditioned stimulus won’t lead to the expected outcome. With the example of the bell and the light, because the bell always leads to the reward of food, there’s no “prediction error” that the addition of the light helps to correct. However, if the researcher suddenly requires that the bell and the light both occur in order to receive the food, the bell alone will produce a prediction error that the animal has to learn.
Blocking and other related effects indicate that the learning process tends to take in the most valid predictors of significant events and ignore the less useful ones. This is common in the real world. For example, imagine that your supermarket puts big star-shaped stickers on products that are on sale. Quickly, you learn that items with the big star-shaped stickers are cheaper. However, imagine you go into a similar supermarket that not only uses these stickers, but also uses bright orange price tags to denote a discount. Because of blocking (i.e., you already know that the star-shaped stickers indicate a discount), you don’t have to learn the color system, too. The star-shaped stickers tell you everything you need to know (i.e. there’s no prediction error for the discount), and thus the colour system is irrelevant.
Classical conditioning is strongest if the CS and US are intense or salient. It is also best if the CS and US are relatively new and the organism hasn’t been frequently exposed to them before. And it is especially strong if the organism’s biology has prepared it to associate a particular CS and US. For example, rats and humans are naturally inclined to associate an illness with a flavor, rather than with a light or tone. Because foods are most commonly experienced by taste, if there is a particular food that makes us ill, associating the flavor (rather than the appearance—which may be similar to other foods) with the illness will more greatly ensure we avoid that food in the future, and thus avoid getting sick. This sorting tendency, which is set up by evolution, is called preparedness.
contexts where patients might be most vulnerable to relapsing (e.g., at work), might be a good strategy for enhancing the therapy’s success.
Classical Conditioning in the Classroom
The implications of classical conditioning in the classroom are important as there is a need for teachers to try to make sure that students associate positive emotional experiences with learning. If a student associates negative emotional experiences with school, then this can obviously have bad results, such as creating a school phobia. For example, if a student is bullied at school they may learn to associate the school with fear. It could also explain why some students show a particular dislike of certain subjects that continue throughout their academic career. This could happen if a student is humiliated or punished in class by a teacher.
Use of classical conditioning in clinical fields
The influence of classical conditioning can be seen in responses such as phobias, disgust, nausea, anger, and sexual arousal. A familiar example is conditioned nausea, in which the sight or smell of a particular food causes nausea because it caused stomach upset in the past. Similarly, when the sight of a dog has been associated with a memory of being bitten, the result may be a conditioned fear of dogs.
As an adaptive mechanism, conditioning helps shield an individual from harm or prepare them for important biological events, such as sexual activity. Thus, a stimulus that has occurred before sexual interaction comes to cause sexual arousal, which prepares the individual for sexual contact. For example, sexual arousal has been conditioned in human subjects by pairing a stimulus like a picture of a jar of pennies with views of an erotic film clip. Similar experiments involving blue gourami fish and domesticated quail have shown that such conditioning can increase the number of offspring. These results suggest that conditioning techniques might help to increase fertility rates in infertile individuals and endangered species.
Behavioural Therapies
Classical conditioning has been used as a successful form of treatment in changing or modifying behaviours, such as substance abuse and smoking. Some therapies associated with classical conditioning include aversion therapy, systematic desensitization, and flooding. Aversion therapy is a type of behaviour therapy designed to encourage individuals to give up undesirable habits by causing them to associate the habit with an unpleasant effect. Systematic desensitization is a treatment for phobias in which the individual is trained to relax while being exposed to progressively more anxiety -provoking stimuli. Flooding is a form of desensitization that uses repeated exposure to highly distressing stimuli until the lack of reinforcement of the anxiety response causes its extinction.
Classical Conditioning in Everyday Life
Classical conditioning is used not only in therapeutic interventions, but in everyday life as well. Advertising executives, for example, are adept at applying the principles of associative learning. Think about the car commercials you have seen on television: many of them feature an attractive model. By associating the model with the car being advertised, you come to see the car as being desirable (Cialdini, 2008). You may be asking yourself, does this advertising technique actually work? According to Cialdini (2008), men who viewed a car commercial that included an attractive model later rated the car as being faster, more appealing, and better designed than did men who viewed an advertisement for the same car without the model.
