PS102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Reward System, Operant Conditioning, Little Albert Experiment
Document Summary
It involves learning connections between events that occur in an organisms environment. Example: the connection between eating chicken and successfully hitting a baseball: classical conditioning. A type of learning in which the stimulus acquires the capacity to evoke a response that was originally evoked by another stimulus. This process is also referred to as pavlovian conditioning, after its developer ivan pavlov. Pavlov was studying the role of saliva in the digestive process of dogs. Intrigued by this discovery, pavlov began pairing the meat powder with various stimuli to trigger salivation. Unconditioned stimulus (us): stimulus that evokes a response without previous conditioning. Unconditioned response (ur): an unlearned reaction to an unconditioned stimulus that occurs without previous conditioning. Example: the bond between the meat powder and salivation: it was a natural, unlearned association, not created through conditioning. Conditioned stimulus (cs): a previously neutral stimulus, but through conditioning, acquired the capacity to elicit a response.
