6.1: Classical Conditioning

The story of habituation is easy to understand.

We respond to a stimuli and then stop responding after exposure.
We haven't learned how to connect two stimuli.
A lot of learning is dependent on being associated with another thing.
Our everyday life would be a world of disconnected sensory experiences if we never learned to connect one stimuli, like the appearance of an apple, with another, like its taste.

Once we form these links, like the connection between our mothers' voices with their faces, we need only recall one element of the pair to The rock band Barenaked Ladies.

The British Associationists believed that the mental building blocks of our more complex ideas were provided by accurately described classical conditioning simple connections.
They were to be confirmed by a Russian scientist who demonstrated how a bell sound comes from the laboratory.

Ivan Pavlov was a physiologist.

His discoveries concerning digestion, not classical conditioning, earned him the Nobel Prize in 1904.
A dog was put in a harness and given a neutral stimulation that would cause it to excrete meat powder into its salivary glands.
The dog salivated to the sound of the assistants footsteps as they approached the laboratory.
The dog was anticipating the meat powder and the stimuli that did not need to be responded to.

Like any good scientist, he immediately put his informal observations to a more rigorous test, since that stimulates an automatic Pavlov's initial observations.

The video shows how Pavlov demonstrated classical conditioning.

He started with a neutral stimulation.

The unconditioned response was salivation.

The key point is that the animal doesn't need to learn to respond to the unconditioned stimuli with the unconditioned response.
The unconditioned response is a product of nature, not nurture, and the animal does not have any training.

There was something remarkable that he observed when Pavlov pairs the neutral and unconditioned stimuli.

Learning has taken place.
A previously neutralStimulus that comes to elicit a con conditioning ditioned response as a result of its association with an unconditionedStimulus The dog salivates when it hears the metronome, which it did nothing to before.

The CR is similar to the UCR in most cases.

The meat powder is combined with a neutral stimulation to produce UCR.

CR occurs when the metronome is presented alone.

Classical conditioning doesn't require the animal to be conscious.

People who are in a vegetative state can experience classical conditioning.

In one study, researchers repeatedly delivered a musical note followed by a puff of air to the eyes of 22 patients in a minimally conscious state.
The eye blinks even in largely or entirely unconscious individuals when the musical note becomes a CS.

We don't need to worry about classical conditioning because of the recent questions about replicability.

Classical conditioning is one of the most replicable findings in psychology.

Classical conditioning to a stimuli often extends to a host of related stimuli, making its everyday life influence surprisingly powerful.

If we look at Figure 6.3a, we can see that the CR increases in strength when the UCS and the CS are together.

The curve is steep depending on how close we are to the UCS.

The best way to learn is by having a half-second delay in the time it takes to pair UCS and CS.

The speed and strength of the response can be decreased by longer delays.

Like many people, this girl found her first ride terrifying because it was preceded by a second stimulation.

She needs to do something different than aStimulus that came a long time before it.

If we repeatedly show a dog with meat power, and then rol er coaster is aCS, then the metronome won't respond to this photograph because it's a CR.

The UCS must be forecast for conditioning to work efficiently.

The CR's strength is increased by the acquisition results of UCS and conditioned response.

In extinction, the CS is the most important thing.

After a number of sentations of the metronome with no meat powder, the dogs stopped drooling.

The process of extinction is active.

The CR doesn't disappear completely, but it is replaced by a new behavior.
This is different from traditional forgetting, in which the memory itself disappears.
Although few people believed him at the time, Pavlov had proposed this hypothesis in his writings.

The renewal effect had a person hiking the background waiting to emerge after another presentation.

In a classic through the woods, she may experience fear when she approaches an area, but she has previously spotted a dangerous and extinguished the CR because there was no UCS.

The CR came back two hours later.

The animal had suppressed the CR.

The extinguished response reappears after a delay in restoring the animal to the original setting.

The renewal effect is often adaptive and can sometimes lead to a return of phobias.
If we've been bitten by a snake in a forest, it makes sense to experience fear when an animal is returned there again, even years later.
The environment in which the lying in wait in the same spot may be the same as that of the snake or his descendants.

The dogs showed their largest amount of salivation to the original sound, with less salivation to sounds that were less similar to it in pitch.

We can borrow a friend's car without having to learn how to drive it, if we learn the process by which organisms display a to drive our own car.

Stimulus discrimination helps us figure out a generalization.

While watching television footage of a ferocious tornado tearing through the stronger the CR will be, the new CS is a bit more similar to the original.

If the tornado were headed close to the original tone's pitch, we would respond much more strongly.

Thankfully, we've learned to modify our response when we see a real-world version of theStimulus.

Stimulus discrimination is usually adaptive because it allows us to distinguish between stimuli that are similar but different.
If we were bitten by a similar-looking dog, we'd be scared to pet a new dog.

A dog learns 207 of a circle and salivates to it as well as to the tone.

With higher-order conditioning, each progressive level association with another conditioned results in weaker conditioning, just as a verbal message becomes less accurate as it is passed from one person to another.
The second-order conditioning and the third-order conditioning are even weaker than classical conditioning.
It is difficult or impossible to achieve fourth-order conditioning.

Classical conditioning can be extended to a host of new stimuli.

It helps explain why we might suddenly feel hungry after seeing a photograph of a mouth-watering food, whether it be a steak, a fruit, or dessert on a roadside billboard.
We have come to associate the sight, sound, and smell of our favorite foods with satisfying our hunger, and we eventually came to associate a visual image of them with these CSs.

Many addictions are shaped by higher-order conditioning and the setting in which people take the drugs.

The research team looked at Vietnam veterans who returned to the United States with serious heroin addictions.

Many mental health experts predicted that addicted veterans would stay hooked upon returning to America.

After returning to the United States, 86 percent of them lost their addiction.
The veterans' responses to heroin were extinguished because the context had changed from Vietnam to the United States.

Without classical conditioning, we couldn't develop associations to stimuli that signal important events, such as things we want to eat or that want to eat us.

Classical conditioning contributes to our survival.
It helps us to digest food.
Davis found that sticky fingers and toes came in handy for grasping tree the seemingly mysterious "power of limbs while fleeing from predators."

Classical conditioning is applicable to daily life as well.

One of our favorite examples is that words that start with the letter "z" are funnier than words that start with the letter "k".
Classical conditioning may be the explanation.
These letters make us contort our faces so that we smile a bit, and these smiling expressions may become conditioned stimuli for positive moods.
We'll look at four everyday applications of classical conditioning: advertising, the acquisition of fears and phobias, the acquisition of fetishes, and disgust reactions.

Most people don't understand the principles of classical conditioning, which is better than advertisers do.

Marketing whizzes aim to establish classically conditioned connections between their brands and positive emotions by repeatedly linking the sights and sounds of products with photographs of handsome hunks and scantily clad models.
Research shows that it works.
Advertisers love to use pictures of products with pictures of our favorite celebrities.
Companies that market drugs to consumers on television often pair their information with pleasurable stimuli, such as sunsets, music, and images of attractive individuals.

One researcher pairs slides of either blue or beige pens with music that participants rated as either enjoyable or not enjoyable.

After leaving the lab, he gave participants the chance to pick a pen.
Only 30 percent of people who heard music they disliked picked the pen that had been used with music, whereas 81 percent of people who heard music they liked picked the pen that had been used with music.

Not all researchers who've combined products, like familiar brands of cereals, with plea Replicability surable stimuli have succeeded in replicating classical conditioning effects.

Some investigators who failed to get classical conditioning effects for products relied on brands that participants were familiar with.

Classical conditioning effects have been shown when researchers have used novel brands.

The founder of behaviorism answered this question in 1920 when he and his graduate student performed a study that is often considered to be one of the most ethically questionable studies in the history of psychology.

They recruited a nine-month-old baby who will be known as Little Albert.

They were going to change that.

But only seconds after, he snuck up behind Little Albert and hit him with a steel hammer, startling him out of his wits, experienced alone, that is, without and making him cry.

Little Albert displayed a CR to the rat alone, showing that the rat had become a CS.
When Rayner exposed Little Albert to the rat five days later, the conditioned response was still present.
Little Albert displayed their products with a generalization of the stimuli, crying in response to rats, a rabbit, and a dog.

Fortunately for him, Little Albert did not show any fear towards cotton balls or the research assistants.

The Little Albert study would never get past a modern-day college or university institutional review board because it raises a host of troubling ethical questions.

No one knows what happened to Little Albert.

His mother withdrew him from the study about a month after it began.
A group of psychologists claim that Little Albert was actually Douglas Merritte, who died at age six due to a build-up of fluid in his brain, because he was born to a nurse in 1919.
William Barger's childhood nickname was Albert, according to several other psychologists.
Barger lived to the ripe old age of 87.
The debate continues.

Stimulus generalization, like that experienced by Little Albert, allows our learning to be remarkably flexible.

We can develop fears of many stimuli.

As Table 6.1 illustrates, some are downright strange.

V is involved in overcoming them.

Little Peter had a fear of rabbits and was treated by Mary Cover Jones.
Peter was introduced to a white rabbit by Jones, who gave him a piece of his favorite candy.
As she moved closer to him, the sight of the rabbit made her feel pleasure rather than fear.
Psycho therapists use similar practices to eliminate phobias.
They may pair feared stimuli with relaxation.

Like phobias, fetishes come in a variety of forms: shoes, stockings, dolls, stuffed animals, automobile engines, and just about anything else.

Michael Domjan and his colleagues conditioned fetishes in male Japanese quails.

They presented male quails with a cylindrical object made of terrycloth, followed by a female quail with which they happily ovulate.
Half of the male quails attempted to mate with the cylindrical object when it appeared alone after 30 such pairs.
Although the generalizability of these findings to humans is unclear, at least some people appear to develop fetishes by the repeated pairs of neutral objects with sexual activity.

This sampling shows just how varied people's fears can be.

Classical conditioning may be the cause of many of these phobias.

Males are more likely to have sexual preferences than females, perhaps because males tend to be more visually oriented than females.

They are more likely to develop classically conditioned reactions to them.

A researcher would like you to eat a piece of fudge.

Imagine the fudge was shaped like dog feces.
If you're like most subjects in the studies of Paul Rozin and his colleagues, you would hesitate.

The nickname "Dr. Rozin" was earned by him.

He and his colleagues have found that we get disgust reactions with ease.
Most of the time, these reactions are a result of classical conditioning.
The smell and taste of rotten eggs in our mouths are associated with the image of a photograph of rotten eggs.
In many cases, disgust reactions are tied to stimuli that are biologically important to us, like animals or objects that are dirty or potentially poisonous.

In one study, participants were asked to drink from two glasses of water, both of which contained sugar.

The investigators said that the bottles were safe.
The subjects were asked to choose which label went with which glass.
The subjects were hesitant to drink from the glass that was labeled poisonous.

Even if it goes too far, classical conditioning helps keep us safe.

James McConnell used to say that "we are what we eat" in the 1950s.

McConnell thought he'd found a way to transfer learning from one animal to another.

For a long time psychology textbooks told undergraduates that scientists could transfer learning across animals.

The planaria is a flatworm that is no more than a few inches long.

James McConnell and his colleagues used classical conditioning to expose planaria to a light and then shock it with an electric shock.
When planaria receive an electric shock, they light up with light.

McConnell wanted to find out if he could transfer the memory of a classical conditioning experience to another medium.

His approach was very simple.
He chopped up the psychological knowledge you'd need to get an A, trained planaria and fed them to their fellow because of the fact that many planaria are miniature cannibals.
McConnell McConnell reported that planaria who'd gobbled up classi went directly to the general public with his findings, and that Time, Newsweek, and other popular magazines that scientists were to the light more quickly than planaria who hadn't.