Psychology : Semester I : Learning and Memory |
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| Sections: |
Introduction | Section 1 | Section 2 | Section 3 | Section 4 | Section 5 |
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Psychology : Learning and Memory : Section One
Look at the picture. Does it make you feel hungry or make your mouth water? If you answered yes, you are experiencing a type of learning called classical conditioning. The picture is the stimulus and the hunger and/or the watering mouth is the response that you have associated with the memory of something good to eat.
In the 1920’s a Russian physiologist (not a psychologist) named Ivan Pavlov was conducting tests on animal digestion. While Pavlov was doing experiments with dogs and digestive juices he noticed that just seeing the food dish would cause the dogs to salivate (produce saliva, drool). He wondered why the dogs responded to the dish before they had seen the food. Pavlov hypothesized that the dogs associated the dish with the food. You may have observed something similar if you have a dog or cat. Around dinner time all you have to do is go to the kitchen or open a cabinet or refrigerator and your pet runs in and is ready to get fed. Pavlov’s scientific mind wondered if he could take something neutral and pair it with the food to get a response. Pavlov set up an experiment and gave the dog meat powder and then would immediately ring a bell. He repeated this several times and then just rang the bell…..what do you think happened? 
THE DOG SALIVATED!!!!
He then explained his work in more scientific terms: This is classical conditioning
Other important classical conditioning terms:
Now let’s apply these to Pavlov’s experiment. Let's say that the doorbell rang and the dogs started salivating. This is generalization because the dogs responded to a similar stimulus. If the dogs did not respond to the door bell it is discrimination or being able to tell the difference between two stimuli. If Pavlov would ring the bell and never give the dogs any food, extinction or unlearning would occur. The dogs would stop responding to the bell. If you again introduced the food with the bell, the dogs would relearn the association and that is called spontaneous recovery. John Watson (the founder of behaviorism) worked with Pavlov and then brought classical conditioning to the United States. He wanted to see if he could classically condition emotions in people. He worked with an infant child known as baby Albert. He showed Albert a white rat which is a neutral stimulus and Albert showed interest in it and wanted to play with it. Then he sounded a loud noise and realized that it naturally frightened the child and made him cry. He then would make loud noises behind the child every time, the child made any attempt to reach for the rat. After time the child would cry just at the sight of a rat and even at the sight of a man with a white beard!
Generalization would be responding to the bearded man A final example is taste aversion. You love spaghetti and your mom made a large pot of it. You were not feeling well but ate three full plates of it because it tasted so good. Later that night, you felt really nauseated and got sick. What happens the next time you see spaghetti? The spaghetti is the unconditioned stimulus and the unconditioned response is the nausea that you felt. You associate the thought of eating spaghetti (CS) with getting sick (CR). There are many applications of classical conditioning in our lives. People that experience intense fears called phobias have associated extreme fear with certain situation. Flooding is a method used to help these phobic people by exposing them to what they are afraid of until the fear response is broken. Another method of dealing with phobias is called systematic desensitization. A person is taught relaxation techniques and then gradually faced with what they are afraid of. A third technique is counterconditioning. Mary Covert- Jones, a female psychologist, worked with a child named Peter. He was afraid of rabbits. She gradually got Peter to hold the rabbit while feeding him candy and getting him to relax. She associated something pleasant (in Peter’s case, candy) with what a person is afraid of (in Peter’s case, the rabbit). After enough exposures of the rabbit and candy, Peter was able to associate pleasant thoughts with the rabbit instead of negative, anxiety producing ones. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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REMEMBER!!! Unconditioned means happens naturally. Conditioned means learned. 
Self Check See if you can identify the following items based on the example above.
