Conditioning Of The Dog example essay topic

When ever the bell rings in any school in any nation you are guaranteed to see students and teachers file into the hallway. This automatic response comes from something that has been around for a long time called classical conditioning. Classicalconditioning was discovered and researched by Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist. His famous experiment with his dog is known to nearly everyone who has had a middle school or higher education.

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 to salivate just on hearing the bell. Thats the original experiment proving classical conditioning. What is a conditioned stimulus? "A neutral stimulus that, after repeated pairings with an unconditioned stimulus, becomes associated with it and elicits a conditioned response". (World of Psychology pg 167) In English it is something that is used to train someone or something through repetition.

Pavlov made use of this in his experiment to show classical conditioning. Where a san unconditioned stimulus is something that is unlearned but is just responded to out of instinct. Pavlov's dog, for example had one unconditioned stimulus and one conditioned stimulus. Both the conditioned and unconditioned stimuli were to an unconditioned response, the dog salivating. The unconditioned stimulus was the dog food that started the dog salivating. The conditioned stimulus or new stimulus was the bell being rung every time the dog was fed.

After awhile the unconditioned stimulus wasn't even needed, because the dog was now conditioned to respond to the bell and salivate whenever he heard the bell. Things like this happened all the time, for example; when I put on running shoes and running clothes my dog will become extremely hyper because she knows we are going outside and she will get to run around. Probably the strongest application of classical conditioning is emotions. Human emotions are condition extremely easily to things that provoke strong reaction, things such as Adolf Hitler, theIRS, the American Flag and chemistry class because of their associations with our emotions. If something like that provoked a strong emotion before in your life when brought up in conversation the strong emotion that was conditioned comes up also. For example when a person meets someone with the same name as someone they previously liked, that person automatically likes the new person, because of association to the previous friend.

You become conditioned to associate one thing with the other. When Pavlov discovered classical conditioning it was, like most major discoveries, by accident. Pavlov's original purpose was to collect the saliva of dogs to study. Pavlov made a small cut on the inside of the dog's mouth and attached a tube that connected to a container for the collection and measurement of saliva. One day he noticed that there was saliva starting to collect in the container when the dog heard the assistant coming to feed him. The dog had already been conditioned to the sound of the footsteps as a conditioned stimulus.

And although completely by accident Pavlov had just proved his classical conditioning theory. He had made a discovery, now was his chance to research it, and he did so in his lab of his own design. His laboratory was in St. Petersburg, Russia more than a century ago. He was extremely meticulous about nothing getting in and influencing his test subjects at all. "The windows were covered in extra thick sheets of glass; each room had double steel doors which sealed hermetically when closed; and the steel girders which supported the floors were embedded ins and.

A deep moat filled with straw encircled the building. Thus vibration, noise, temperature extremes, odors, even drafts were eliminated. Nothing could influence the animals except the conditioning stimulus to which they were exposed. (Schultz 1975 pp 187-188) " (World of Psychology pg 166) Pavlov went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1904 for his research in the physiology of digestion. He was the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize. What happens if Pavlov just ran the bell and didn't give the dog any food?

Other than being cruel to animals he would have started to disassemble the conditioning of the dog. When the dog can hear the bell ring and not salivate that is called extinction. Extinction is by definition "The weakening and often eventual disappearance of a learned response. (In classical conditioning the conditioned response is weakened by repeated presentation of the conditioned response without the unconditioned stimulus" (World of Psychology pg 168) Meaning that Pavlov's dogs would stop salivating after a while of only hearing the bell and not receiving any food. Just because the conditioned response leaves the dog it's not gone forever. Pavlov discovered that if he brought the dog home for a while and let it rest then brought it back to the lab the conditioned response would reappear.

He named this spontaneous recovery. Although it did come back without actual food to back up ringing the bell the conditioned response disappeared in less time than the before. The next thing that Pavlov wondered about classical conditioning is it generalized or specific? Meaning will the dog salivate to any bell now or just the one in "C"tone? This is called generalization. He discovered that the dog was conditioned to salivate to other tones than the "C" tone but the farther it got from the "C" the less the dog salivated.

To further test generalization Pavlov conducted his experiment another way. He conditioned a dog to salivate to a vibrating device was set off attached to the dog's thigh. He then wondered would the dog still salivate if he attached the device to the dogs pelvis, then hind paw, then shoulder, then foreleg and finally the front paw. He discovered that the farther he got from the rear thigh, or the original conditioning, the less of a salivating response. Other examples of this are things such as someone who was attacked by a dog when he or she was young and therefore grew up hating and fearing all dogs. On the other side of generalization there must be discrimination.

Pavlov decided he didn't want his dogs to salivate to any other tones but "C". This was not very hard all that was need was to cause extinction in any other type of tone. The "C" tone was reinforced by continuously giving food after the tone was rung. On the other hand whenever any other tone was sounded it was not reinforced by food. Thus the dog became more conditioned to "C" and the conditioned responses for the other tones became extinct. Classicalconditioning has and will continue to be around forever.

It is part of human nature and many people take advantage of it daily. It can be used to dispel fears or as training for a job, it doesn't matter what it is for it will just be there..