A S L 3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Drug Tolerance, Precocial, Indelibly Stamped
Document Summary
A reflex is a simple, relatively automatic, stimulus response sequence mediated by the nervous system. A stimulus is a particular well-defined event in the environment, which will results in a particular well-defined behavior, a response. Habituation is the decline in the magnitude of a reflexive response when the stimulus is repeated several times in succession. Pavlov referred to the stimulus (the bell sound, in this case) as a conditioned stimulus, and he referred to the response to that stimulus (salivation) as a conditioned response. Likewise, the original stimulus (food placed in the mouth) and response (salivation) are referred to as an unconditioned stimulus and unconditioned response, respectively. This theory is now called classical conditioning or pavlovian conditioning. Then pavlov"s group found that without food, the bell elicited less and less salivation on each trial and eventually none at all, a phenomenon they labeled extinction. But they also found that extinction does not return the animal fully to the unconditioned state.
