Think of everything you are doing right now. Listening, reading, talking, writing and reasoning. You weren’t born with the ability to read, talk or write a specific language, it was learnt.
Learning is the process of acquiring, through experience, new and relatively enduring information or behaviours.
Conditioning
&
Learning
Think about your actions in daily life. How do you react in specific social situations. How do you talk to people in authority compared to your friends.
All these actions where never in built. These behaviours are learned. From past experiences you’ve learned, you should talk to authority figures differently to your friends. Possible from a mistake you made, or someone telling you how to act.
We already know a reflex is an unconscious response to a stimulus, but in 1904, a Russian Scientist called Ivan Pavlov discovered that we can condition reflexes.
He won the noble prize, not for his discovery of conditioned reflexes, but for his work on the digestive system.
When you present a dog, or even a human with food they being to salivate. This is a basic stimulus and response model.
The stimulus is the food, while the salivating is the response.
Pavlov rang a bell every time the dog began eating, eventually, the dog paired the bell ringing with food, and began salivating.
This is an example of Classical Conditioning.
Before conditioning, an unconditioned stimulus (food) should create a natural response (salivate) in the subject.
A Neutral stimulus is added (bell) and at first no reaction should happen (no salivation).
During conditioning, the unconditioned stimulus (food) is paired with the neutral stimulus (bell), resulting is a natural response (salivation). This is repeated many times.
After conditioning, the neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus and produces a conditioned response (salivation).
Have you ever been driving or walking, and heard a song which invokes emotions in you?
Maybe you heard this song when something sad happened. Or maybe you where singing this song when something happy happened. Even having a special ring tone for you best friend or partner can create a conditioned response
Originally
Partner (unconditioned stimulus) = Happy and Smiling (natural response)
Song (neutral stimulus) = No Emotions
Pair the two
Partner + Song = Happy and Smiling
Repeat over and over, and eventually
Song = Happy and Smiling
Short Answer Questions
1. Define Classical Conditioning
2. Explain the steps involved in classical conditioning
3. Draw a flow diagram to explain how a cat can become conditioned to expect food when it hears a bathroom shower being run
4. Research an instance where advertising companies have used classical conditioning to sell their product.
5. When thinking about the ‘golden arches’ of McDonalds you may get hungry. Explain how their ads have used classical conditioning to make us hungry at the site of the golden arches? (Mention: unconditioned stimulus, natural response, neutral stimulus, Conditioned stimulus and Conditioned response)
6. Design an ad to sell a new hamburger using classical conditioning
7. Design your own classical conditioning experiment. State the unconditioned stimulus, natural response, Neutral stimulus, Conditioned stimulus and Conditioned response. Explain how you would conduct this experiment and what the expected results would be.
