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Pavlovian Classical Conditioning Analysis

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Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov was the first to describe classical conditioning or Pavlovian conditioning. It has a textbook meaning which is the learning process in which a neutral stimulus (e.g., a tone) becomes associated with an innately meaningful stimulus (e.g., food) and acquires the capacity to elicit a similar or a conditioned response (e.g., salivation).
Pavlov’s contribution to learning began with his study of dogs. He conducted a study with his dogs which are the subjects in his experiment. He routinely placed meat powder in a dog’s mouth, causing the dog to salivate. It is natural for a dog to salivate when seeing foods since it is a biological effect and this behavior can be monitored using classical conditioning. Pavlov noticed that the meat powder wasn’t the only stimulus that cause the dog to salivate. There are many other things like the sight of the food dish, the sight of the individual who brought the food into the room, and the sound of the door closing when the food arrived. So, Pavlov questioned himself why the dog salivated in reaction to various sights and sounds before eating the meat powder. Then he noticed that if he sounded a tone every time he fed them, in his case he used the bell as a neutral stimulus which by itself will not produce a response like salivation. The dogs soon started to drool at the sound of the tone, even if no food followed it. Later, the dogs had come to associate the tone, a neutral stimulus, with food, a nonneutral
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