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Essay about classical conditioning

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When ever the bell rings in any school in any nationyou are guaranteed to see students and teachers file into the hallway. This automatic response comes from somethingthat has been around for a long time called classical conditioning. Classicalconditioning was discovered and researched by Ivan Pavlov, a Russianphysiologist. His famous experimentwith his dog is known to nearly everyone who has had a middle school or highereducation. He fed his dog in a pattern,every time he fed his dog he rang a bell. Eventually the dog associated the bell with food and would begin tosalivate just on hearing the bell. Thatis the original experiment proving classical conditioning.
What is aconditioned stimulus? “A neutralstimulus that, after repeated …show more content…

When Pavlovdiscovered classical conditioning it was, like most major discoveries, byaccident. Pavlov’s original purpose wasto collect the saliva of dogs to study. Pavlov made a small cut on the inside of the dog’s mouth and attached atube that connected to a container for the collection and measurement ofsaliva. One day he noticed that therewas saliva starting to collect in the container when the dog heard theassistant coming to feed him. The dog hadalready been conditioned to the sound of the footsteps as a conditionedstimulus. And although completely byaccident Pavlov had just proved his classical conditioning theory. He had made a discovery, now was his chance to research it, and hedid so in his lab of his own design. His laboratory was in St. Petersburg, Russia more than a centuryago. He was extremely meticulous aboutnothing getting in and influencing his test subjects at all. “The windows were covered in extra thicksheets of glass; each room had double steel doors which sealed hermeticallywhen closed; and the steel girders which supported the floors were embedded insand. A deep moat filled with strawencircled the building. Thus vibration,noise, temperature extremes, odors, even drafts were eliminated. Nothing could influence the animals exceptthe conditioning stimulus to which they were exposed. (Schultz 1975pp187-188)” (World of Psychology pg166)Pavlov went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1904

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