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Research Paper On Ivan Pavlov

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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 …show more content…

The sound of the buzzer is a neutral stimulus. After repeatedly sounding the buzzer before giving the dog food, it began to learn, or become conditioned to, that when the buzzer was pressed it was going to get fed. Then he pressed the buzzer and the dog started to salivate even without the presentation of food. The sound of the buzzer has become a conditioned stimulus and the dog’s salivation is a neutral response. I am going to test this theory with my dog. Using small pieces of food and me snapping my finger, I will try and teach her how to lay down. The snapping of my finger is the neutral stimulus in this experiment. The small pieces of food is an unconditioned …show more content…

One example of a conditioned response is common for everyone. When it gets dark outside I get tired and eventually go to sleep. I think this is the reason that babies do not sleep well at night. If a baby is awake all night crying, it does not matter if it is dark or light out. As we get older we learn that when it is dark outside it is night time so we know it is getting closer to the time we need to go to sleep. The same thing happens in the morning. When my alarm clock goes off in the morning at 5:30, I wake up. I have been waking up at 5:30 for most of my life because of school. Now, I have trouble sleeping past 5:30 on the weekends because my brain is just set to wake up at 5:30. I do not even need an alarm clock on the weekends but I am so used to getting up at 5:30, I will wake up that early even when I do not have to. Another example of classical conditioning in my life is putting on sunscreen. When I was about nine years old, we went out for a boat ride on my grandfather’s boat, and it was a really fun day until we got back home. I realized that I had forgotten to put on sunscreen that morning. I got so sunburned that I had to take pain medicine and I was very sick because of the sunburn. Now, Everytime we go out on the boat, I remember to put on sunscreen because I think about the time I forgot to. Now I have gotten sunburned since then, but never as bad as that time

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