Week 4-Welcome.... to the world of conditioning....

Associative learning is of two types, classical conditioning, and operant conditioning. So this week, let's understand classical conditioning. What first thought came to your mind while hearing the word conditioning? Yeah, the great Pavlov's dog. The experiment planned to study something else but ended up with the theory of classical conditioning. We can see that conditioning affects almost every aspect of life. have you heard teachers complaining about how they get alert to the sound of

the bell even though they are not at school? Some even set out to class (which is unnecessary at home). This effect is what, in short, Pavlov explained using his experiments.

Pavlov started his experiment with a dog measuring its salivation while presenting food. Classical conditioning mainly has four factors, unconditioned and conditioned stimulus, and unconditioned and conditioned response. Here he mentioned food as an unconditioned stimulus (US) and salivation as the unconditioned response (UR). Later he paired this unconditioned stimulus with the sound of a bell and trained the dog by providing food along with the sound. Here the bell is the conditioned stimulus (CS), and later on, he observed that just the bell sound without food produces salivation in the dog. The process of salivation while hearing the bell without presenting food is termed a conditioned response (CR). So now we can understand the stimulus and response in the case of the teacher's example we mentioned earlier. The time to start the class is the unconditioned stimulus (US), whereas going to class is the unconditioned response (UR). Next, the time for class is always paired with the sound of the bell, and without class, if they set out for it, the bell is the conditioned stimulus (CS), and going to class is the conditioned response (CR).

Classical conditioning is divided into appetitive conditioning and aversive conditioning. Appetitive conditioning, where the US is a positive event, and aversive conditioning, the US is a negative event(Gluck et al., 2008). During appetitive conditioning, we learn to predict a pleasant stimulus, such as food, and approach it, whereas, in aversive conditioning, we learn to predict a negative stimulus and avoid that. This mechanism of conditioning helps us predict the outcome of certain circumstances to decide whether to approach or avoid that, which helps in survival.

References

Gluck, M. A., Mercado, E., & Myers, C. E. (2008). Learning and memory: From brain to behavior. Worth Publishers.