Behaviorism and Classical Conditioning Essay

For example, when you hear the music that the ice cream truck plays you associate that to ice cream and you run to find money to go purchase ice cream. Phase 3 deals with the after effect to the association between unconditioned stimulus and conditioned stimulus. In result the there is a conditioned response. In phase 3 when you hear the music that the ice cream truck plays it would make you crave ice cream. There five key principles of classical conditioning; acquisition, extinction, spontaneous, stimulus generalization and discrimination. Ivan Pavlov, A Russian physiologist, discovered Classical Conditioning. While Pavolv was studying the digestion in dogs he noticed that the dogs would drool when an assistant would come into the room. Pavlov and his assistants would put different items in front of the dogs and measure the amount of drooling that would happen. He got the idea that this was a reflexive process and it takes place with specific stimulus. With this, Pavlov focused on finding out how these conditioned

He tried to connect he conditioning stimulus with the unconditioned response was the ringing of a bell. At the beginning of this experiment, Pavlov show food to the dog and of course evoke the response of salivation of the dog. Then he gave a bell was sounded in subsequent time with food being presented to the dog in consecutive sequences, This was repeated during several trials. After some time, the dog learned to associate the ringing of the bell with food and to respond by salivating. After the conditioning period was finished, the dog would respond by salivating when the bell was rung, even when the unconditioned stimulus (the food) was

Many ideas were shared between Watson, Tolman, and Skinner who all played a role in the forming of behaviorism. They did, however, differ on some of their beliefs as well as their methods of study. At this time, methods of studying psychology as well as psychology in general were in the developing stages. Watson was largely credited with the foundation of behaviorism, however, he was by no means the only one to make contributions. There has been some debate as to whether Watson’s contributions were enough to make him the “founder of behaviorism.” It is important to examine contributions from several of the early

Pavlov started out his experiment from his firm belief that there are certain actions a dog does not need to learn to perform. He described the phenomenon in which dogs salivate as soon as they see food as a reflex that is “hard wired” into the dogs. He called this naturally occurring response the unconditioned response because there was a clear connection between a certain stimulus and a response in the behavior of the dogs that did not require learning. Similarly, Pavlov called the food the unconditioned stimulus because it naturally and automatically triggered a response, like salivating. In short, he succeeded in proving that any object or event which the dogs learn to associate with food would more likely to trigger the same response -- he discovered the general principle of the classical conditioning.

“The assistant’s footsteps, for example, seemed to act like a trigger (the stimulus) for the dog to start salivating (the response). Pavlov had discovered how associations develop through the process of learning, which he referred to as conditioning (Licht, 2016) The dog was correlating the sound of footsteps with the coming of food; it had been conditioned to subordinate certain sights and sounds with eating. Intrigued by his discovery, Pavlov decided to focus his research of dogs’ salivation (which he termed “psychic secretions”) in these types of scenarios (Fancher & Rutherford, 2012, p. 248; Watson, 1968). Pavlov’s examinations led to the development of classical conditioning.

Pavlov’s discovery of classical conditioning was a complete accident (Hock, 2009, p. 66). Pavlov was doing physiology research with salvation’s role with digestion when he discovered classical conditioning. In his research, he had dogs with their salvation glands redirected to their cheek in order to test the amount of saliva produced when presented with different foods. Pavlov then noticed that the dogs would salivate before they even got the food. He then discovered that the dogs had associated the worker’s footsteps with the food. So, when the dogs hear the footsteps they know that food is on the way so they begin to salivate.

Behaviorism has been a topic of many controversies in the early stages of developing. This paper will present a synthesis of several articles discussing behaviorisms and its development through various schools of theories, in addition known researchers and conclusions. The first article that illustrates behaviorism is, “Behaviorism at 100” by Ledoux (2012), which details the last 50 years of the study of behaviorism. The next article is “Behaviorism” by Moore (2011), maps the beginning of behaviorism with B.F.Skinner and addressing functionalism and structuralism. The article named “Psychology as the behaviorist views it”, written by Watson (1913) put his emphasis the aspects of psychology and how behaviorist view introspection. Green (2009) article “Darwinian Theory functionalism and the First American psychological revolution”, is very adamant to have is readers to know that functionalism was the foundation that behaviorism was built. Clark (2004) article “The classical origins of Pavlov’s conditioning”, give insight into classical conditioning abroad and in the United States. The last article named “Little Albert’s alleged neurological impairment” written by Digdon , Powell and Harris (2014), focus on ethical concerns and that may have been overlooked. The synthesis paper will provide behaviorism and conclusions that can draw overall messages from the articles mentioned above.

Behaviorism on learning and memory occupies an important position in the history of psychology. John B. Watson is the father of behaviorism while B.F. Skinner is the most famous behaviorist of the twentieth century. Watson’s methodological behaviorism means that it is only the behaviors of an individual that can be objectively observed. Skinner’s radical behaviorism emphasized that behaviors of human and animals are blindly influenced by environment. In this case, Watson and Skinner share similar views of behaviorism. For instance, they believe that the proper objectives of behavioral research include prediction and control (Staddon and Bueno, 1991). However, there are remarkable discrepancies in their views of human equality and freedom. Watson promoted the progressive process of human equality by maintaining concept of “tabula rasa”, whereas Skinner insisted that freedom is an illusion, so that he provided the adverse effect to the dictatorial institution. The fact is that the potential ambiguity produces a strong influence on people’s thinking and has a practical significance on society.

Classical Conditioning is a type of learning process of an individual when they come in contact with certain stimuli. According to Pavlov, a Russian psychologist, he developed several experiments on learning and he discovered that classical condition is the basic form of learning for an individual. However, according to Pavlov, behaviorism is the view that psychology should be the main objective science that studies behavior without including mental processes of an individual in the investigation. Behaviorism is more about the person’s behavior and how they were influenced to act a certain why, including their surroundings. Thus, from this learning process many behaviorist believes that the basic laws of learning are similar for all different species, including humans. Furthermore, the two major characteristics that distinguish classical conditioning from operant conditioning is that in classical conditioning, an unconditioned response is an event that happens naturally in response to some stimuli such as salivation. Another characteristic is an unconditioned stimuli, which is a process where an individual naturally discovers something without learning the process and reacts to the unlearned response, For instance, when someone put food in there mouth this causes salivation. A conditioned stimuli in classical

Classical conditioning is learning that occurs trough association can be defined as a type of learning in which a conditioned stimulus (sound of a bell, Pavlov) is paired with an unconditioned stimulus (food) to evoke a response. In the early twentieth century Pavlov’s research included dogs that would start to salivate when food was presented. Pavlov suggested that salivation was a learned response. During the research a bell was rang when the food was presented, the dog salivated

Classical conditioning is a type of associative learning which occurs when two stimuli are paired together repetitively and therefore become associated with each other eventually producing the same response. Classical conditioning was developed from the findings of Ivan Pavlov to account for associations between neutral stimuli and reflexive behavior such as salivation. Pavlov (1927) accidently discovered that dogs began to salivate before they had tasted their food. To support his theory, he carried out experiments using dogs which involved measuring the amount of saliva they produced. In his experiments, food started off as an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) which produced salivation, an unconditioned response (UCR). They are both unconditioned as they occur naturally without being learned. The dogs were presented with a bell (NS), this provided no salivation. The bell and food were presented together and after many trails an

Classical conditioning is learning which has been acquired by experience (Terry, 2009).  Pavlov was the first one to experiment classical conditioning by training dogs how to salivate when they heard a bell ring.  In order for Pavlov to be able to do this, the first step was to show the dogs food.  The showing of food would cause the dogs to salivate.  Afterward, Pavlov would ring a bell whenever he brought food out. The experimenter continued to this many times.  Eventually, by the time the

The founder and main contributor in the development of classical conditioning is Russian psychologists Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov, is an acclaimed man of science, who is prominently known for his investigations and experimental findings known as Pavlov’s dogs. While further exploring the canine digestive system, he

Ivan Pavlov was a psychologist in Russia in the early twentieth century. He was doing research on the salivation in dogs in response to being fed. He noticed that his dogs would begin to salivate whenever he entered the room, even when he was not bringing them food. At first he did not think much of this, but he decided to look more into this. He did more experiments with the dogs and different stimuli. Through his new experiments he came up with the theory of classical conditioning. Classical conditioning is learning that occurs when a neutral stimulus is repeatedly paired with an unconditioned stimulus; because of this pairing, the neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus with the same power as the unconditioned stimulus to elicit

In the most famous behaviorism experiment done by Watson and Rayner (1920) showed that the overall theory of behaviorism is in fact true. The subject of the experiment was Little Albert, a 9 month old little boy. He was tested and observed on his reactions to different stimuli. Little Albert was presented with a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey and other objects. In the beginning Watson and Rayner noted that the little boy showed no fear or emotion when presented with