Psychology Classical Conditioning Overview

Classical Conditioning Overview

• Learning is adapting to the environment, acquiring information and behaviors through experience.
• Learning involves associating events that occur in sequence.
• Classical conditioning involves associating two stimuli presented close together, allowing anticipation of an event.
• Operant conditioning associates behavior with its consequence, changing voluntary behaviors.
• Pavlov's work founded behaviorism, focusing on observable behavior instead of mental processes.

Pavlov's Experiment

• Pavlov, studying digestion, discovered classical conditioning accidentally.
• Dogs naturally salivated (unconditioned response) to food (unconditioned stimulus).
• Pavlov paired a neutral stimulus (e.g., a tone) with the food.
• Repeated pairings led dogs to salivate (conditioned response) to the tone (conditioned stimulus) alone.
• The tone became associated with the food, anticipating its arrival.

Acquisition and Higher-Order Conditioning

• Acquisition is the initial learning of the association.
• Optimal acquisition involves a half-second delay between the neutral stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus.
• Higher-order conditioning involves associating a new neutral stimulus with a conditioned stimulus, creating a weaker conditioned response. This happens naturally (e.g., fear of a dog's bark and sight).

Extinction and Spontaneous Recovery

• Extinction occurs when the conditioned stimulus is presented without the unconditioned stimulus.
• The conditioned response weakens and eventually disappears.
• Extinction suppresses, but does not eliminate, the conditioned response.
• Spontaneous recovery shows a temporary reappearance of the conditioned response after a pause.

Generalization and Discrimination

• Stimulus generalization is responding similarly to similar stimuli.
• For example, fearing all moving vehicles after fearing a car.
• Stimulus discrimination is distinguishing between similar but distinct stimuli.
• This allows us to ignore irrelevant stimuli.

Importance of Pavlov's Work

• Pavlov's work established the basis for studying learning objectively.
• Classical conditioning is found in many species.
• Neuroscience has identified neural pathways involving conditioned stimuli and unconditioned stimuli.
• Classical conditioning is adaptive, enhancing survival.

Classical Conditioning in Human Health

• Classical conditioning is used to treat substance use disorders by reducing associations between cues (e.g., situations) and drug use cravings.
• Similar principles apply to food cravings (associated with pleasant experiences).
• The taste of a drug can initiate an immune response without presence of the drug (conditioned association of taste and immune response).

Little Albert and Watson

• Watson's Little Albert experiment demonstrated emotion conditioning.
• A neutral stimulus (a rat) was paired with a frightening stimulus (loud noise), causing the child to fear the rat.
• This experiment highlighted an importance of understanding emotions as learned responses.
• Inspired counterconditioning techniques for fear reduction.

Biological Constraints on Conditioning

• Classical conditioning is not universal; biological factors limit which associations are easily learned.
• Some associations are learned faster than others. Different species learn differently to stimuli.