What kind of responses can be classically conditioned

While the whistle is unrelated to the smell of the food, if the sound of the whistle was paired multiple times with the smell, the whistle sound would eventually trigger the conditioned response. In this case, the sound of the whistle is the conditioned stimulus. The during conditioning phase involves pairing a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus.

Eventually, the neutral stimulus becomes the conditioned stimulus. Once the association has been made between the UCS and the CS, presenting the conditioned stimulus alone will come to evoke a response even without the unconditioned stimulus. The resulting response is known as the conditioned response CR. The conditioned response is the learned response to the previously neutral stimulus.

In our example, the conditioned response would be feeling hungry when you heard the sound of the whistle. In the after conditioning phase, the conditioned stimulus alone triggers the conditioned response. Behaviorists have described a number of different phenomena associated with classical conditioning. Some of these elements involve the initial establishment of the response while others describe the disappearance of a response. These elements are important in understanding the classical conditioning process.

Let's take a closer look at five key principles of classical conditioning. Acquisition is the initial stage of learning when a response is first established and gradually strengthened. As you may recall, an unconditioned stimulus is something that naturally and automatically triggers a response without any learning.

After an association is made, the subject will begin to emit a behavior in response to the previously neutral stimulus, which is now known as a conditioned stimulus.

It is at this point that we can say that the response has been acquired. For example, imagine that you are conditioning a dog to salivate in response to the sound of a bell. You repeatedly pair the presentation of food with the sound of the bell.

You can say the response has been acquired as soon as the dog begins to salivate in response to the bell tone. Once the response has been established, you can gradually reinforce the salivation response to make sure the behavior is well learned.

Extinction is when the occurrences of a conditioned response decrease or disappear. In classical conditioning, this happens when a conditioned stimulus is no longer paired with an unconditioned stimulus.

For example, if the smell of food the unconditioned stimulus had been paired with the sound of a whistle the conditioned stimulus , it would eventually come to evoke the conditioned response of hunger.

However, if the unconditioned stimulus the smell of food were no longer paired with the conditioned stimulus the whistle , eventually the conditioned response hunger would disappear. Sometimes a learned response can suddenly reemerge even after a period of extinction. Spontaneous recovery is the reappearance of the conditioned response after a rest period or period of lessened response.

For example, imagine that after training a dog to salivate to the sound of a bell, you stop reinforcing the behavior and the response eventually becomes extinct. After a rest period during which the conditioned stimulus is not presented, you suddenly ring the bell and the animal spontaneously recovers the previously learned response. If the conditioned stimulus and unconditioned stimulus are no longer associated, extinction will occur very rapidly after a spontaneous recovery.

Stimulus generalization is the tendency for the conditioned stimulus to evoke similar responses after the response has been conditioned. In John B. Watson's famous Little Albert Experiment , for example, a small child was conditioned to fear a white rat.

The child demonstrated stimulus generalization by also exhibiting fear in response to other fuzzy white objects including stuffed toys and Watson's own hair. Discrimination is the ability to differentiate between a conditioned stimulus and other stimuli that have not been paired with an unconditioned stimulus.

For example, if a bell tone were the conditioned stimulus, discrimination would involve being able to tell the difference between the bell tone and other similar sounds. Because the subject is able to distinguish between these stimuli, they will only respond when the conditioned stimulus is presented. It can be helpful to look at a few examples of how the classical conditioning process operates both in experimental and real-world settings.

John B. Watson's experiment with Little Albert is a perfect example of the fear response. The child's fear also generalized to other fuzzy white objects. Prior to the conditioning, the white rat was a neutral stimulus. The unconditioned stimulus was the loud, clanging sounds, and the unconditioned response was the fear response created by the noise. By repeatedly pairing the rat with the unconditioned stimulus, the white rat now the conditioned stimulus came to evoke the fear response now the conditioned response.

This experiment illustrates how phobias can form through classical conditioning. In many cases, a single pairing of a neutral stimulus a dog, for example and a frightening experience being bitten by the dog can lead to a lasting phobia being afraid of dogs. Another example of classical conditioning can be seen in the development of conditioned taste aversions. Researchers John Garcia and Bob Koelling first noticed this phenomenon when they observed how rats that had been exposed to a nausea-causing radiation developed an aversion to flavored water after the radiation and the water were presented together.

In this example, the radiation represents the unconditioned stimulus and the nausea represents the unconditioned response. After the pairing of the two, the flavored water is the conditioned stimulus, while the nausea that formed when exposed to the water alone is the conditioned response. Later research demonstrated that such classically conditioned aversions could be produced through a single pairing of the conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus.

Researchers also found that such aversions can even develop if the conditioned stimulus the taste of the food is presented several hours before the unconditioned stimulus the nausea-causing stimulus.

Why do such associations develop so quickly? Obviously, forming such associations can have survival benefits for the organism. If an animal eats something that makes it ill, it needs to avoid eating the same food in the future to avoid sickness or even death. This is a great example of what is known as biological preparedness. In turn, that helps prevent us from getting sick in the future. In our day to day, advertisers often use it to push their products. For example, beauty commercials use actors with clear, smooth skin to lead consumers to associate their product with healthy skin.

Before conditioning is when the unconditioned stimulus and unconditioned response come into play. At this point, the conditioned stimulus is still called the neutral stimulus because it currently has no effect. For instance, you may associate a specific type of food with a stomach virus, or the bell ringing before getting food may be associated with receiving food. There are many ways you can experiment with conditioning in your daily life.

Here are some tips to consider:. There are many different examples of classical conditioning and how we can learn in our daily lives. For the last few years, you receive your paycheck every Friday. Even though you have a new job where you receive your paycheck on different days, you still feel good on Fridays. You used to smoke in a certain outside area at work but have recently quit smoking.

Every time you go to this outside break area, your body craves a cigarette. During a thunderstorm, a tree breaks and falls onto your house, causing major damage.

Now whenever you hear thunder, you feel anxiety. While classical conditioning has to do with automatic, learned responses, operant conditioning is a different type of learning. In operant conditioning, you learn a behavior by the consequence of that behavior, which in turn affects your future behavior.

So, when a behavior has a satisfying result, you learn to associate it with that result and work to have it repeated. On the flip side, a negative result will cause you to avoid that behavior to avoid that result. In dog training, good behavior is rewarded with treats, making it more likely for your dog to be a good boy or girl in order to get the treat. On the other hand, bad behavior may not be rewarded, or it may receive punishment. That will make your dog less likely to do it in the future.

While classical conditioning is considered unconscious learning, operant conditioning is what most people would consider a habit. Classical conditioning is considered more of a reflex.

Classical conditioning is used both in understanding and treating phobias. A phobia is an excessive, irrational fear to something specific, like an object or situation. For example, if you have a panic attack in a certain place — like an elevator — you may begin to associate elevators with panic and begin avoiding or fearing all elevator rides. Experiencing a negative stimulus can affect your response. In other words, they learned that the bell was a reliable predictor of meat powder.

In this way, Pavlov was able to elicit an involuntary, automatic, reflexive response to a previously neutral stimulus. Note that most English-language textbooks use the terms "unconditioned stimulus," "unconditioned response," and so on.

This is due to a translation error from Pavlov's Russian to English. The better translation would be "conditional. Classical conditioning can help us understand how some forms of addiction , or drug dependence, work.

For example, the repeated use of a drug could cause the body to compensate for it, in an effort to counterbalance the effects of the drug. This causes the user to require more of the substance in order to get the equivalent effect this is called tolerance.

However, the development of tolerance also takes into account other environmental variables the conditional variables - this is called the situational specificity of tolerance. For example, alcohol tends to taste a certain way, and when alcohol is consumed in the usual way, the body responds in an effort to counteract the effect.

But, if the alcohol is delivered in a novel way such as in Four Loko , the individual could overdose. This effect has also been observed among those who have become tolerant to otherwise lethal amounts of opiates: they may experience an overdose if they take their typical dose in an atypical setting. These results have been found in species ranging from rats and mice to humans.

In these examples, it's the environmental context conditional stimuli that prompts the body to prepare for the drug the conditional response. But if the conditional stimuli are absent, the body is not able to adequately prepare itself for the drug, and bad things could happen. Another example of classical conditioning is known as the appetizer effect.

If there are otherwise neutral stimuli that consistently predict a meal, they could cause people to become hungry, because those stimuli induce involuntary changes in the body, as a preparation for digestion.

There's a reason it's called the "dinner bell," after all. Classical conditioning is also being used in wildlife conservation efforts! At Extinction Countdown, John Platt pointed out last month that taste aversion, which is a form of classical conditioning, is being used to keep lions from preying on cattle. This should, in turn, prevent farmers from killing the lions. Given and his team of researchers gave eight of the cats meals of beef treated with the deworming agent thiabendazole in doses large enough to make them temporarily sick to their stomachs.

After a few meals of treated beef, the lions were once again offered untreated meat. Seven of the eight refused to eat it, while an eighth actually refused to eat at all for a short period. In this example, the meat is actually the neutral stimulus, when paired with the deworming agent UCS.